Valdez Marine Terminal is located on the southern shore of Port Valdez, about 124 miles (200 km) east of Anchorage and 3.5 miles (5.6 km) south of the community of Valdez, Alaska. Port Valdez is a fjord in north-eastern Prince William Sound that is about 13 miles (21 km) long and trends west-east from Valdez Narrows at the head of Valdez Arm to the mouth of the Lowe River. The fjord was named on June 16th 1790 by Salvador Fidalgo for the celebrated Spanish naval officer Antonio Valdes y Basan. The name was adopted by Captain George Vancouver and came into local use. The modern marine terminal was constructed at Swanport, which was named in 1898 by Captain Edwin F. Glenn. Swanport was a historical anchorage at Fort Liscum, a US Army post that operated from 1900 to 1922.

The facility is the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, which starts on Alaska North Slope in Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea. The oil-transportation system is one of the world’s largest and includes the crude-oil pipeline, 11 pump stations, feeder pipelines and the Valdez Marine Terminal. The main pipeline is privately owned by the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company and is 800 miles (1,287 km) long with a diameter of 48 inches (1.22 m). The pipeline was built between 1975 and 1977, following the 1973 oil crisis, which caused a sharp rise in oil prices in America and made exploration of the Prudhoe Bay oil field economically feasible.

The marine terminal was designed for storing and loading crude oil onto tanker ships. There are 18 storage tanks but only 13 are in service. Other facilities include a station to measure the incoming oil, two functional loading berths, a power generator and a ballast-water treatment facility. Tanker ships are owned by companies that contract with the oil producers to transport the crude oil, and about 20 tanker ships a month load and transit from the terminal to refineries in Washington and California. The entire berthing, deballasting and loading process takes about a day to complete, and the largest tankers carry up to 2 million barrels of oil. Read more here and here. Explore more of the Valdez Marine Terminal and Port Valdez here: