Committee to be formed to devise plan for pipelines

Stephen Curran

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2005 | 8:58 a.m.

Clark County commissioners were expected to create a committee today to devise a plan for reversing the strain on key fuel pipelines they say could stifle growth in Southern Nevada.

The pipes responsible for bringing more than 122,000 barrels of fuel a day from the Colton Terminal in California to Las Vegas were built more than 40 years ago, when Las Vegas was home to about 65,000 people.

Left untended, the strain could create a crisis for McCarran International Airport, which relies on the pipelines for about 26,000 barrels a day for the thousands of aircraft that travel to the nation's sixth-busiest airport, county Aviation Director Randy Walker said Friday.

At its current pace, Walker has estimated that demand will climb to 29,000 barrels a day by 2007, just shy of the pipeline's 30,000-barrel capacity.

"We realized that there was a problem, not yet a crisis, but that there was a problem that needed to be addressed pretty quickly," he said.

Representatives from Houston-based Kinder Morgan Inc., which operates 35,000 miles of natural gas and petroleum pipelines worldwide, told Walker and county officials that the line will need an increase in capacity to keep up with growth in the region.

The answer to the problem could lie in an 11-person task force that would study the matter and recommend short, intermediate and long-term solutions, county Manager Thom Reilly said.

Commission Chairman Rory Reid said last month that he planned to request the committee be formed, later crafting a resolution that calls for a "thorough and detailed study" of the looming problem.

"We need to do something before it becomes a crisis," he said in a written statement. "I'm confident that we can solve this problem and protect our tourist-based economy and our quality of life for a long time to come."

The committee would meet regularly for the next year and would include representatives from the airline industry, Aviation Department, utilities, gaming, retail and government.

While Southern Nevada's fuel supply, which travels from Alaska, was not directly affected by Hurricane Katrina, the pipes leave it open to its own set of environmental concerns, Reilly said.

"It (the hurricane and subsequent devastation) just underscores how vulnerable we are," Reilly said.

The line has in the past fallen victim to mudslides, fires and unforeseen disasters, Walker said. And, while the airport keeps roughly three days of reserve fuel on hand, the disasters can jeopardize regularly planned outages like a two-day shutdown planned later this week.