British Petroleum (BP) has apparently figured out the not-so-secret way to make lots of money.  (They also insist that there's no substance to the charges currently under investigation of manipulating propane prices. But I digress...)

Hmmm. How could you drive the price of oil right through the roof? Wait. I'm thinking... Oh, here's a way! What if you could shut down the entire Alaska pipeline for a few months? You'd be swimming in money. And so it happens. They found a couple of rust spots on an oil pipe. So they're shutting down Prudhoe Bay. Completely.  Right. Normally you would do something like this in stages - fix one section while routing through another. After all, there's more than one pipe at Prudhoe. That's how you would keep the supply chain working under adverse conditions if that was what you wanted to do. But that's not how you make lots of money. No, to do that, you have to shut off Alaskan oil completely, indefinitely, with no advance warning.

So that's what they're doing.