The most than 4,300 kilometers Keystone oil pipeline was closed Tuesday morning after breaking North DakotaInterrupting the flow of millions of raw oil gallons from Canada to refineries in the United States and potentially causing higher petrol prices.
South Bow, a liquid pipeline company that manages the pipeline, said it had closed the pipeline after the control center leak detection systems detected pressure drop in the system. The spill is limited to an agricultural field in a rural area, about 60 miles southwest of Fargo.
“The affected segment has been isolated and operating and containment resources have been mobilized on the site,” said the company. “Our main objective at the moment is the security of the personnel on site and the attenuation of the risks for the environment.”
The pipeline transported an average of 624,000 barrels – or more than 26 million gallons – per day in 2024, according to Canadian regulators. It extends to 2,689 miles (4,327 kilometers) from Alberta, Canada, Texas.
Pump prices could increase in the coming days
Pipeline stops could quickly lead to an increase in petrol prices in the Midwest, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice-president of energy and innovation at the University of Houston.
It could increase prices at the pump in one or two days, but will have a greater impact on diesel and jet fuel, said Krishnamoorti. The Keystone pipeline carries a large amount of a single heavy crude that is only available from limited sources, he said.
“The refineries work on crude mixtures so that they can obtain the product range they want to provide, whether petrol, diesel, throwing fuel, etc., and that not having heavy gross supply will include their ability to do diesel and jet fuel,” he said. “They will do less diesel and jet fuel when they are less heavy.”
Higher diesel costs could result in price increases in the grocery store because diesel trucks transport these products, he said.
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The main analyst of Petroleum by Gasoline Price Tracker Gasbuddy, Patrick de Haan, said that refineries generally have at least a few days of the supply of crude oil at hand that would insulate them from the immediate impacts of the closure. But if the closure continues more than a few days or a week, it could become problematic.
Mark Lacour, editor -in -chief of the world network Oil and Gas, said that he does not expect the gas prices immediately because the main refineries served by Keystone pipeline have millions of barrels in storage.
“Even if the pipeline is completely cut to, say, 2 or 3 weeks, they have enough crude to continue to refine the petrol,” said Lacour.
The pipeline was closed within two minutes of a “blow”
It was not clear, which caused the underground pipeline or the quantity of crude oil released on the ground. An employee working on the site near Fort Ransom heard a “mechanical blow” and closed the pipeline in approximately two minutes, said Bill Suess, head of the Disprocement Investigation Program of the Northern Dakota Ministry of Environment.
The oil has surfaced about 300 meters (274 meters) south of a pumping station in a field and the emergency staff replied, said Suess.
No person or structure has been affected by the spill, he said. A nearby stream that only flows during a part of the year has not been affected but was blocked and isolated as a precaution, he said. The administration of pipelines and the safety of dangerous materials sends a team to investigate the cause of the leak.
Fort Ransom, a city of less than 100 inhabitants, is in a hilly and wooded area in the south-east of the northern Dakota known for its picturesque views and its outdoor leisure. A state park and hiking trails are nearby.
We do not know at what rate the 30 -inch pipeline (0.8 meters) was flowing, but even two minutes, “it will have a fairly good volume,” said Suess. “But … we had a lot, much more important spills”, one of which involves the same pipeline a few years ago in the county of Walsh, Dakota of the North, he said.
“I don’t think it will be so huge,” said Suess.
The pipeline has a story of past breaks
Keystone pipeline was built in 2010 at a cost of $ 5.2 billion and transported crude oil through Saskatchewan and Manitoba through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri in Illinois, Oklahoma and Texas refineries. Although the pipeline was built by TC Energy, it is now managed by South Bow from 2024.
A proposal to extend the pipeline called Keystone XL would have transported crude oil to refineries on the Gulf coast, but it was finally abandoned by society in 2021 after years of demonstrations against environmental activists and indigenous communities on environmental concerns.
After a spill, the pipeline and the administration of the safety of dangerous materials are responsible for the study of the deep cause of the question and for any lack of conformity. The agency, which regulates the pipelines of liquid and natural gas, lost several senior executives earlier this year as part of President Donald Trump’s federal cuts.
The pHMSA did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
Bill Caram, executive director of the Watchdog Pipeline Safety Trust in the industry, said that the organization was already “an agency under-strength and sub-financed”.
“Losing someone will have an impact on security,” he said.
After the last spill of the major Keystone pipeline in Kansas in December 2022, the pipeline sections were offline for a little more than three weeks before resuming the operation at a lower pressure.
This overflowing of nearly 13,000 barrels of petroleum flowed into a stream crossing a pasture. An engineering consulting company said that the shift in the site’s pipeline had been “came on” since its installation in 2010, probably due to the construction activity modifying the land around the pipe. TC Energy said that a defective welding in the line turn caused a crack that exacerbated over time.
The Safety Trust pipeline said that the latter leak adds to the history in difficulty of the Keystone pipeline, which has had 13 important incidents during the 15 years it operates.