Cleanup underway of the Keystone oil pipeline spill

NORTH DAKOTA

A massive clean-up project has begun on a large spill from the Keystone oil pipeline that occurred Tuesday near Fort Ransom, N.D. An estimated 147,000 gallons of oil spilled. SOUTH BOW VIA AP

Image

By Jack Dura

The Associated Press

BISMARCK, N.D. >> Trucks and workers started cleaning up the Keystone oil pipeline spill in rural North Dakota, though its cause and the project timing is unclear.

The pipeline ruptured Tuesday morning in southeastern North Dakota and was shut down within two minutes by an employee who heard a mechanical bang. An aerial photo released Wednesday shows a black, pondlike pool of oil suspended in a partially snowy field that’s traversed by tire tracks.

A farmer told The Associated Press he could smell the scent of crude oil, carried by the wind.

South Bow, a liquid pipelines business that manages the pipeline, estimated the spill’s volume at 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons. Keystone’s entire system remains shut down.

The company is investigating what caused the spill and how long repairs might take, spokesperson Kristin Anderson said Wednesday.

The spill is not a minor one, said Paul Blackburn, a policy analyst with Bold Alliance, an environmental and landowners group that fought the pipeline’s extension, called Keystone XL.

The estimated volume of 3,500 barrels, or 147,000 gallons of crude oil, is equal to 16 tanker trucks of oil, he said. That estimate could increase over time, he added.

Blackburn said the bigger picture is what he called the Keystone Pipeline’s history of spills at a higher rate than other pipelines. He compared Keystone to the Dakota Access oil pipeline since the latter came online in June 2017. In that period, Keystone’s system has spilled nearly 1.2 million gallons of oil, while Dakota Access spilled 1,282 gallons, Blackburn said.

In its update, the company said the pipeline “was operating within its design and regulatory approval requirements at the time of the incident.”

Generally, underground oil pipelines can have a number of stressors, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at the University of Houston.

Those include corrosive elements from the liquid within the pipeline, changing temperatures, moving soil, movement from trains or construction equipment on the surface and stress to bends, turns and joints in the pipeline, he said.

The 2,700-mile pipeline originates in Alberta, Canada, and carries heavy tar sands crude oil south across the Dakotas and Nebraska before splitting to carry oil both to refineries in Illinois and south to Oklahoma and Texas.

The $5.2 billion Keystone Pipeline was built in 2010. TC Energy built the pipeline which is operated by South Bow as of last year.