The Keystone oil pipeline is at it again. On Tuesday, after an employee heard a “mechanical bang,” the pipeline once again deposited thousands of barrels of crude oil in a place where the oil is not supposed to be.
This time that place was an agricultural field in rural North Dakota. The pipeline, which was completed in 2010, spilled 3,500 barrels (around 147,000 gallons) into the field. South Bow, the company that manages it, says the spill is “contained,” which surely must be great comfort to the nearby farmer who told the AP he could smell crude oil on the wind.
The cause of the spill isn’t yet clear, beyond the fact that thousands of miles of pipeline carrying billions of gallons of some of the dirtiest oil on the planet will occasionally just sort of do this. The pipeline carries upwards of 600,000 barrels of oil across its 2,700-mile span every day; it is currently shut down, and South Bow says that “return-to-service plans are being evaluated.”
The Keystone seems particularly susceptible to periodic failures, even among oil pipelines. “Throughout its history the Keystone pipeline has been plagued by a list of manufacturing and construction issues leading to failures,” according to the advocacy group Pipeline Safety Trust. They say the pipeline has spewed out more than a million gallons of crude in the past decade across a number of spills. A 2021 report from the Government Accountability Office said that Keystone’s spill record was similar to others early on, “but the severity of spills has worsened in recent years.”
The worst of those spills, in Amherst, South Dakota, in 2017, let loose more than 6,500 barrels of oil. According to the GAO report, that and several other major spills “were caused by issues related to the original design, manufacturing of the pipe, or construction of the pipeline.” Which sure sounds like we should expect more of the same as the pipeline ages.
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