Download
Oil pipeline spill in U.S. Midwest among largest in nearly a decade
CGTN
Emergency crews work to clean up the leak at the Keystone pipeline in rural Washington County, Kansas, U.S., December 9, 2022. /Reuters
Emergency crews work to clean up the leak at the Keystone pipeline in rural Washington County, Kansas, U.S., December 9, 2022. /Reuters

Emergency crews work to clean up the leak at the Keystone pipeline in rural Washington County, Kansas, U.S., December 9, 2022. /Reuters

Pipeline operator TC Energy shut its Keystone pipeline in the United States after more than 14,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into a creek in Kansas, making it one of the country's largest crude spills in nearly a decade.

Keystone shut the line at about 8 p.m. Wednesday. The company on Friday said it was evaluating plans to restart the line, which carries 622,000 barrels of oil per day to U.S. refineries and export hubs from the western Canadian province of Alberta. It did not provide details of the breach or when a restart could begin.

Oil prices temporarily rose Thursday after the leak was announced but fell again.

This would be the largest crude oil leak since a Tesoro pipeline leaked more than 20,000 barrels of oil in North Dakota in October 2013, data from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration showed.

The outage could affect oil inventories at the Cushing, Oklahoma, storage hub and cut crude supplies to refining centers in the Central U.S. and Gulf Coast, analysts said.

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

(With input from Reuters, AFP)

Search Trends