Face to Face
Dan Roberts
Engineering Manager
Published January 2005

Dan Roberts moved to Alaska from Houston, Texas in 2000 when he joined Alyeska Pipeline Service Company as its Fairbanks Business Unit maintenance engineering supervisor. Before Alyeska, Roberts worked for ExxonMobil Chemical and Solvay Chemicals at petrochemical plants on the Gulf Coast and in Washington State. He was promoted to Fairbanks engineering manager in 2001 and Alyeska’s engineering manager in July 2002.

Roberts grew up in a Navy family and lived in a variety of places in the United States and abroad until his father retired and settled his family in Murrells Inlet, S.C. Roberts worked summers and several years after graduating from high school on local charter and commercial fishing boats. He enrolled at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. and earned his mechanical engineering degree in 1985. Roberts loves living in Alaska and spends his spare time boating, taking photos and biking with his wife Paige and two dogs, though he says their dogs aren’t very good bikers.

Q: What are your responsibilities?

My main responsibility is to lead a team of seven engineering supervisors to manage all of Alyeska’s engineering resources. We constantly assess our engineering service needs and determine the best allocation of resources to meet them. Requirements range from design services to operations and maintenance support, corrosion monitoring, surveying and integrity management. We outsource some engineering tasks when we don’t have in-house capability available.

My other responsibilities include keeping business processes in order to ensure efficient use of resources. I also work with other Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) managers and planners to anticipate and prepare to meet TAPS’ future engineering needs.

Q: How do you decide what engineering to outsource?

My team constantly evaluates Alyeska’s capabilities and in-house resources. We then prioritize projects and work assignments in accordance with Alyeska’s resource strategies to keep workloads manageable and determine which engineering projects should be outsourced.

Most of our outsourced engineering work involves design services, corrosion monitoring and surveying.

Q: How large is Alyeska’s engineering staff?

Alyeska’s engineering department currently has some 70 employees who have a variety of expertise and experience. We have experts in every major engineering discipline, project engineering, program support, integrity management and operations and maintenance. Our staff is based in Anchorage, Valdez and Fairbanks and we supplement its capabilities with contract personnel who provide engineering services to support a variety of TAPS operations, maintenance and projects.