Cleanup effort for Keystone pipeline spill to extend to next week: U.S. EPA

The effort to remove oil from the largest crude spill in the United States in nearly a decade will stretch into next week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday, making it likely that the Keystone pipeline shutdown will last several more days. duration.

TC Energy shut down the largest oil pipeline to the United States from Canada on Wednesday after it leaked 14,000 barrels of oil into a Kansas creek. He said on Friday that he is still determining when he will be able to put the line back into service.

The outage on the Keystone, which transports 622,000 barrels of Canadian crude per day (bpd) to various parts of the United States, could affect inventories at the key Cushing, Oklahoma, storage center and cut crude supplies to two oil refining centers, analysts said. Crews in Kansas continued cleanup efforts Friday from the breach, the cause of which remained unknown.

“We’re starting to get a better sense of the cleanup efforts that will need to be undertaken in the longer term,” said Kellen Ashford, spokesman for EPA Region 7, which includes Kansas.

TC Energy intends to restart a pipeline segment sending oil to Illinois on Saturday, and another section bringing oil to Cushing on Dec. 20, Bloomberg News reported, citing sources. Reuters has not verified these details.

This is the third spill of several thousand barrels of crude oil on the pipeline since it first opened in 2010. A previous Keystone spill caused the pipeline to remain shut down for about two weeks.

TC Energy remained on site with about 100 workers leading the cleanup and containment efforts, and the EPA provided oversight and monitoring, Ashford said. TC is responsible for determining the cause of the leak.

A US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHMSA) affirmative action order to TC on Thursday said the company shut down the pipeline seven minutes after receiving a leak detection alarm. The affected segment, 36 inches (91 cm) in diameter, was Keystone’s Phase 2 extension to Cushing built in 2011.

Washington County, a rural area of ​​about 5,500 people, is about 200 miles (320 km) northwest of Kansas City.

The oil spill did not threaten the local water supply or force local residents to evacuate, Washington County emergency management coordinator Randy Hubbard told Reuters. Workers quickly set up a containment area to prevent oil that spilled into a creek from flowing downstream.

“There’s no human drinking water that would come out of this,” Hubbard said.

Livestock producers in the area have been notified and have taken their own corrective measures to protect their animals, he added.

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The EPA is the main federal agency that oversees domestic oil spills. If the EPA finds TC Energy liable for the spill, the company will be responsible for the cost of cleanup and remediation of any damage to the environment, as well as possible civil and criminal penalties.

Kyle Bauer, owner and general manager of agricultural news radio station KFRM, went to see the cleanup efforts for himself after hearing how close the landfill was – only about 60 kilometers from him. He was impressed with how quickly the resources were gathered, especially at night and in harsh winter weather.

“EPA’s emergency truck was there and supervised. There were remediation crews from Missouri — which was about a three-hour drive — siphoning crude oil off the top of Mill Creek.

“The County of Washington County road crews were hauling dirt to make a dam on Mill Creek,” Bauer said.

“It was amazing to me to see how much mobilization could happen so quickly.”

He said many of the radio station’s audience are farmers who have mineral rights and are tenants for oil and gas extraction. He added pipeline companies that have a long history in Kansas and nearby Oklahoma.

“There are tens of thousands of miles of pipelines under Kansas, running in almost every direction, carrying everything from processed fuels to crude oil to natural gas. And so pipeline breaks happen from time to time,” Bauer said.

“It is a terrible accident that this happened near Mill Creek. If this had happened in the middle of a farm field, it would have been cleaned up very easily. But I understood it did happen in a farm field, but on a slope, and it ran into Mill Creek pretty quickly.”

Pipeline operators are typically held liable for violations by the EPA through, among other things, the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the related Oil Pollution Act, according to Zygmunt Plater, an environmental law professor at Boston College Law School.

Those federal laws limit the discharge of pollutants such as oil into waterways and hold pipeline operators responsible for the costs associated with containment, cleanup and damage from spills.

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Rough bottleneck

A prolonged shutdown of the pipeline could also result in a bottleneck for Canadian crude in Alberta, pushing prices lower at the Hardisty storage hub, although price reaction was muted on Friday.

Western Canada Select (WCS), the Canadian heavy-grade benchmark for December delivery, last traded at a discount of $27.70 a barrel to the U.S. crude futures benchmark, according to a Calgary-based broker. On Thursday, December WCS traded as low as $33.50 below U.S. crude, before settling at a discount of around $28.45.

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PHMSA must approve the restart of the line. Even once the pipeline resumes operation, the affected area will have to flow at reduced rates pending PHMSA approval.

“The real impact could come if Keystone faces any pressure restrictions from PHMSA, even after the pipeline is allowed to resume operations,” said Ryan Saxton, head of oil data at Wood Mackenzie.

-with files from Adam Toy, Global News