(Reuters) – An estimated 9,120 barrels of oil have spilled from TC Energy Corp’s Keystone crude pipeline in North Dakota, state authorities said on Thursday, a major leak at a time of increased regulatory scrutiny of oil pipeline expansions.
The cause of the leak has not yet been disclosed. But its size makes it one of the biggest onshore crude spills in the past decade and the largest for Keystone, according to U.S. Pipeline Hazardous Materials and Safety Administration (PHMSA) data back to 2010.
Pipeline operator TC Energy has been seeking to expand its pipelines linking Western Canadian oil fields to U.S. refineries with its proposed Keystone XL project. The more-than $6 billion project has faced regulatory and environmental hurdles despite backing by U.S. President Donald Trump.
A nearly 10-year legal fight between TC Energy, formerly called TransCanada, and environmental activists has delayed development of the line that would run from Alberta, Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. A Nebraska court in August affirmed an alternative route through the state, raising hopes the project might proceed and provide badly needed transport capacity for Alberta’s crude.
On Wednesday, TC Energy said its 590,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) Keystone pipeline system to the U.S. was shut after a drop in pressure was detected. It said there was no injuries and it was investigating the cause of the breach near Edinburg, North Dakota.
The company did not say when pipeline operations would restart, but told shippers that service on lines serving U.S. Midwest refiners would remain shut during the outage. The line could remain shut for at least a week, according to market sources on Thursday.
In 2017, a Keystone crude pipeline leak in rural South Dakota spilled nearly 6,600 barrels, the PHMSA data showed. Earlier this year, Keystone was partially shut after leaking 43 barrels of crude in Missouri.
The latest release also affected a wetland area, a statement from the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality said.
“It (Keystone) went in during the 1990s. They’ve had a few spills … more than you would hope to have on a line that’s still fairly new,” said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust in Bellingham, Washington, a nonprofit promoting pipeline safety.
Keystone has leaked substantially more oil, and more often, in the United States than the company indicated to regulators in risk assessments before operations began in 2010, according to a Reuters review in 2017.
The Keystone outage also disrupted flows on the Marketlink pipeline out of the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub, roiling oil prices at the delivery point for U.S. crude futures.
Reporting by Devika Krishna Kumar in New York, Additional reporting by Eileen Soreng in Bengaluru, Laila Kearney and Scott DiSavino in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Diane Craft
