He Last leak in the Keystone oil pipeline In North Dakota, on Tuesday the problematic history of the 15 -year -old pipeline continues.
The 2,700 mile pipe (4,350 kilometers long) originates in Alberta, Canada, and transports crude oil of heavy tareny sands to the south through the Dakotas and Nebraska before dividing to transport oil to the refineries in Illinois and South to Oklahoma and Texas.
The Keystone pipe was built in 2010 at a cost of $ 5.2 billion. It was built by TC Energy, but is now operated by South Bow from 2024.
There has been 23 spills Along the Keystone oil pipe, including four in North Dakota.
A leak in 2022 in Kansas was The greatest spill of oil on land in nine years. That rupture in the pipe threw around 14,000 barrels of crude oil into a stream that crosses rural grasslands in Washington County, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City.
The leaks have varied in size, but in total the Keystone pipe has spilled more than 1 million gallons of crude oil over the years.
South Bow estimated that 3,500 barrels spilled in this last leak in North Dakota.
The pipe security confidence defense group saying That a 2021 report from the government’s responsibility office concluded that preventable construction problems contributed to more spills in the Keystone pipe than in similar pipes. The report also said that the largest spills of the pipe were “caused by problems related to the original design, the manufacture of the pipe or the construction of the pipe.”
An example of that is Kansas’s escape. The pipes and the administration of safety of hazardous materials determined that the escape was due to the rupture of a weld that came from a manufacturing installation.
“Keystone’s incident history illustrates the systemic problems of the problematic pipe,” said Executive Director of Pipeline Safety Trust, Bill Caram.
When the original Keystone pipe was proposed and built, there was little controversy about the project, but it was a different story a few years later when TC Energy proposed to build a second pipe called Keystone XL Pipeline.
That pipe attracted years of protests of environmental activists and landowners who worried that a spill could dirty his land and water. Keystone XL was ultimately Abandoned by the company in 2021 After President Joe Biden refused to approve a permission to do so. President Donald Trump had tried to revive him during his first term, but Biden’s decision finally killed the project.
Climate change activists saw the expansion of the development of oil sands as an environmental disaster that could accelerate global warming as the fuel burns. That made Keystone a point of inflammation in the climate debate, and became the focus of manifestations and protests in Washington, DC and other cities.
