Publications Details

Adding Alaska Petroleum Infrastructure to the National Transportation Fuel Model

Corbet, Thomas F.; Flanagan, Tatiana P.

Alaska oil fields provide an important, but diminishing, portion of the crude oil processed by Alaska and U.S. West Coast refineries. Production of crude oil in Alaska is being stressed by declining production in mature fields, high costs for developing and producing new fields, increasing competition from tight oil production in the Lower 48 states, and low global oil prices. The National Transportation Fuel Model is a network model of petroleum infrastructure in the Lower 48 states and portions of Canada developed at Sandia National Laboratories. It provides a simulation capability for analysis of system-wide responses to stressing events. Until now, however, this model did not explicitly include the petroleum infrastructure of Alaska and the transport of crude oil by marine shipments from Alaska to West Coast refineries. This paper describes the methods and information requirements for adding Alaska infrastructure to the National Transportation Fuel Model, provides an overview of the new Alaska portion of the model, and presents an example simulation of a closure of a large San Francisco refinery.