The Keystone Oil Pipeline was closed Tuesday morning after it burst in North Dakota, with the spill being limited to farm sites.
The cause of the rupture and the amount of crude oil spilled was not immediately clear. Employees working at a site near Fort Ransom heard the “mechanical bang” and closed the pipeline within about two minutes, said Bill Seuss, Spil Research Program Manager for the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality.
The oil surfaced 300 yards south of the field pump station, and paramedics reportedly responded, Suess said.
No one or the structure was affected by the spill, he said. The nearby streams, which only flowed in part of the year, were unaffected, but as a precaution, he said, were blocked and quarantined.
It’s unclear how fast the 30-inch pipeline is flowing, but even two minutes “has a pretty good volume,” Suess said. “But… we had a lot of big spills.” He said that includes the same pipeline in Walsh County, North Carolina several years ago.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that huge,” Seuss said.
The $5.2 billion pipeline, built in 2011, carries crude oil-powered refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma, across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri. The pipeline was built by TC Energy, but is now managed by the current liquid pipeline business Southbow in 2024.
The Associated Press contacted Southbow for comment.
The proposed extension to the pipeline, called Keystone XL, would have transported crude oil to refineries along the Gulf Coast, but was ultimately abandoned by the company after years of protests from environmental activists and indigenous communities in 2021 over environmental concerns.
Dura and Raza write for the Associated Press.
