Keystone pipeline shut down after oil leak in rural North Dakota

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — The Keystone oil pipeline was shut down Tuesday morning after it ruptured in North Dakota, halting the flow of thousands of gallons of crude oil from Canada to refineries in the U.S.

South Bow, a liquid pipeline business that manages the pipeline, said it shut down the pipeline after control center leak detection systems detected a pressure drop in the system. The spill is confined to an agricultural field.

“The affected segment has been isolated, and operations and containment resources have been mobilized to site,” the company said. “Our primary focus right now is the safety of onsite personnel and mitigating risk to the environment.”

The cause of the rupture and the volume of crude oil spilled were not immediately clear. An employee working at the site near Fort Ransom heard a “mechanical bang” and shut down the pipeline within about two minutes, said Bill Suess, spill investigation program manager with the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality.

Oil was reported surfacing 300 yards (274 meters) south of the pump station in a field and emergency personnel responded, Suess said.

No people or structures were affected by the spill, he said. A nearby stream that only flows during part of the year was not impacted but was blocked off and isolated as a precaution, he said.

It’s unclear at what rate the 30-inch (0.8-meter) pipeline was flowing, but even at two minutes “it’s going to have a fairly good volume,” Suess said. “But … we’ve had much, much bigger spills,” including one involving the same pipeline a few years ago in Walsh County, North Dakota, he said.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that huge,” Suess said.

The Keystone Pipeline was constructed in 2010 at a cost of $5.2 billion and carries crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma. Though the pipeline was constructed by TC Energy, it is now managed by South Bow as of 2024.

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A proposed extension to the pipeline called Keystone XL would have transported crude oil to refineries on the Gulf Coast, but it was ultimately abandoned by the company in 2021 after years of protests from environmental activists and Indigenous communities over environmental concerns.