Big Inch
The Big Inch and Little Big Inch, collectively known as the Inch pipelines, are petroleum pipelines extending from Texas to New Jersey, built between 1942 and 1944 as emergency war measures in the United States. Before World War II, petroleum products were transported from the oil fields of Texas to the north-eastern states by sea by oil tankers. After the U.S. entered the war on 1 January 1942, this vital link was attacked by German submarines in Operation Paukenschlag, threatening both the oil supplies to the north-east and its onward transshipment to Great Britain. The Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, championed the pipeline project as a way of transporting petroleum by the more-secure, interior route.
The pipelines were government financed and owned, but were built and operated by the War Emergency Pipelines company, a non-profit corporation backed by a consortium of the largest American oil companies. It was the longest, biggest and heaviest project of its type then undertaken; the Big and Little Big Inch pipelines were long respectively, with 35 pumping stations along their routes. The project required 16,000 people and of materials. It was praised as an example of private-public sector cooperation and featured extensively in US government propaganda.
After the end of the war there were extended arguments over how the pipelines should be used. In 1947, the Texas East Transmission Corporation purchased the pipelines for $143,127,000, the largest post-war disposal of war-surplus property. The corporation converted them to transport natural gas, transforming the energy market in the north-east. The Little Big Inch was returned to carry oil in 1957. The pipelines are owned by Enbridge and Enterprise Products and remain in use.
Background
By the time that the United States entered World War II in 1941, oil was a vital part of military operations around the world. The United States produced 60 percent of the world's crude oil, with the state of Texas in the south-west leading this production, producing more than twice as much crude as any other state. The industry comprised a handful of very large producers and more than 3,500 smaller operators.The north-east coast of the United States depended on these supplies of oil, importing both crude and refined products. Across most of Texas, there had been little interest in building pipelines to transport oil, and petroleum was typically moved from the south-west to the north-east coast using a mixture of sea freight and railroad transport. In early 1941, 70,000 barrels of oil were moved on the railroads each day, but this method was expensive, and the bulk of the oil was moved using barges, some with a capacity of up to 15,000 barrels, operating up and down rivers and the Atlantic Coast.
With the outbreak of war, the eastern sea routes of the country were attacked by German U-boat submarines. United States naval defence was very limited and largely obsolete; between January and April 1942, among other naval losses, 46 oil tankers were sunk and 16 damaged. The problem was made worse as 50 tankers had been sent to help the UK earlier in 1941. Insurers began to refuse to underwrite the remaining vessels and the volume of crude oil reaching the north-east from the Texas Gulf dropped.
In response, steps were taken to better protect the tankers from attack, but losses continued to mount until, in April 1942, they were banned by the Navy from operating the north-east sea routes. The government and industry took steps to maximise the use of the railroads, increasing the amount of oil carried on them more than ten-fold, but there were shortages of rail tank cars, and the existing fleet of cars was in poor condition. Instead, the United States government began to examine options for the use of pipelines to fulfil the demand for petroleum in the north-east.
Concept
Transporting petroleum by pipeline from the south-west to the north-east was a potentially attractive option for the government as it would be safe from submarine attack and could operate efficiently regardless of the weather. Pipelines had been in use in the industry since 1862, but by the 1930s they were usually only wide, able to deliver 20,000 barrels of oil a day; larger pipes could be built, but due to structural weaknesses they could not operate at the regular pressures. Technologies to build high-pressure pipes at sizes larger than began to emerge during the two decades before the war, but their adoption was not commercially viable.The concept of constructing such a pipeline was first proposed in 1940 by the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, who argued that "the building of a crude oil pipeline from Texas to the East might not be economically sound; but that in the event of an emergency it might be absolutely necessary". A consortium led by Standard Oil put forward a bid to build one in spring 1941, but the plan failed, due to concerns over the amount of steel that would be required for such a project. In May 1941, Ickes was appointed as the Petroleum Coordinator for National Defense, and in December 1942 became the administrator of the Petroleum Administration for War. New laws were passed to enable the building of pipelines necessary for the war effort, including the compulsory purchasing of land under the right of eminent domain.
Initial planning for the Inch pipelines began on May 15, 1941, when a meeting of Ickes and the oil industry commissioned an aerial survey of the possible route. A preliminary design was ready that September, and a consortium of major oil companies formed a new company, National Defense Pipelines, to build a pipeline along the route. The government Supply Priorities and Allocations Board, however, refused to approve the necessary steel, and the consortium's plan was dissolved shortly before the outbreak of war. After the outbreak of fighting, and the consequent deterioration of the sea routes for transporting oil, industry representatives met in March 1942 to produce a new pipeline strategy, called the Tulsa Plan. This included the construction of the Inch pipelines, backed by the slogan "longlines are lifelines", for which the steel was finally approved by the War Production Board on June 10.
Once steel supplies had been agreed, an initial tranche of $35 million in funding was provided by the government Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which owned and manage the operation of the pipelines through its subsidiary organizations, the Defense Plant Corporation and the Defense Supplies Corporation. In turn, the actual construction and operation of the pipelines would be carried out by the War Emergency Pipelines company, a non-profit corporation backed by a consortium of the largest oil companies in the United States: Atlantic Refining, Cities Service Oil, Consolidated Oil, Gulf Oil, Pan American Petroleum and Transport, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Tidewater Associated Oil, Shell Oil, Socony-Vacuum Oil, Sun Oil and the Texas Pipe Line Company. The WEP was led by Burt Hull and W. Alton Jones, both with extensive backgrounds in the industry, with Oscar Wolfe as its chief engineer. The company established its offices in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Construction
Design and management
The Inch pipelines comprised two systems, the Big Inch pipeline and the Little Big Inch pipeline. The Big Inch was a pipeline for crude oil; it ran from the East Texas Oil Field at Longview, Texas, to Norris City, Illinois, and on to Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, from where it branched into segments. One served New York and terminated at Linden, New Jersey, and the other served Philadelphia and terminated at Chester Junction, Pennsylvania. The Little Big Inch, a largely parallel line intended for refined products, ran from Beaumont, Texas, to Little Rock, Arkansas, where it joined the path of the Big Inch, making use of the same pumping stations. From there it ran along the same right-of-way as the Big Inch to New Jersey and Pennsylvania.The pipeline project was the longest, biggest and heaviest of its kind in the world. In total, the Big Inch pipeline was long, with of secondary distribution and feeder lines, and had 28 pumping stations along the route, approximately every. The Little Big Inch was long, with of secondary lines, and had seven unique pumping stations along its southern leg.
Charles Cathers of the DPC directed the engineering project, with much of the work undertaken by Oscar Wolfe and, on the Little Inch pipeline, F. E. Richardson and L. F. Scherer. A meeting of all of the contractors for the build was held at the start of the July to kickstart the project; overall, 82 different companies would take on the pipeline work on a "cost-plus" basis, employing over 16,000 staff. The construction required the government to acquire permission to build the pipeline across 7,500 parcels of land; of these, the right of eminent domain had to be exercised in 300 cases. Major Jubel Parten, a director in the Petroleum Administration for War, considered the Inch pipelines to be part of “the most amazing Government-industry cooperation ever achieved”.
The pipelines were soon given the names "Big Inch" and "Little Big Inch" by the construction teams, on account of their unprecedented diameters. The construction project was extensively advertised, as part of the US government's war-time propaganda effort. Newsreels ran clips such as Pipeline Goes Through! and Pipe Dream Comes True-Oil!, and short-films were made about the construction work, including Pipeline. The pipelines also appeared in the RKO Pathé film Oil is Blood.
The National Tube Company of Lorain, Ohio produced from 137,500 tons of steel the pipe for the 550-mile section between Long View and Norris City in 4 month, the last shipment left on November 10, 1942, all together a total 4,600 gondola carloads. A contract for the first 360 miles for the section between Illinois and Pennsylvania was let to the same company on October 30. The last shipment of the total 280,106 tons from Lorain left about June 25, 1943.