London-based BP, Europe's second-biggest oil company, has restarted output from the GC-2 gathering center in the western part of the field, where the leak had occurred, spokesman Daren Beaudo said in an e-mailed statement today.
``We restarted GC-2 early this morning after going through a thorough start-up procedure and checklist and as things currently look we expect to be back to full rates by the end of the weekend,'' he said in the e-mail.
BP on May 21 stopped about 100,000 barrels of daily oil output from Prudhoe Bay, which normally pumps about 400,000 barrels a day, after 20 barrels of water flowed from a hole in a pipe near GC-2. The water was contained in the facility.
The company has replaced the T-shaped 12-inch piece of pipe where the hole, which was about the size of the diameter of a pencil, occurred, Beaudo said yesterday.
Prudhoe Bay was partly shut August through October last year, sending oil prices higher, while BP made repairs to poorly maintained pipelines that had corroded and leaked oil.
Preliminary findings suggest corrosion may have damaged the inside coating of the pipe wall in this week's incident, according to Jonne Slemons, head of Alaska's Petroleum Systems Integrity Office. This may be an isolated case, not a systemic maintenance problem, she said in an interview yesterday.
Beaudo said in a separate e-mail today that the pipe may have suffered internal wall loss in an area near a weld that was about three inches long and a quarter inch wide.
An independent laboratory will conduct a ``comprehensive metallurgical analysis,'' Beaudo said yesterday.
