After South Dakota farmer Loern Schulz reported a leak at a remote underground segment of TransCanada’s Keystone I oil pipeline last Saturday, the Calgary-based company reported that it estimated the spill at 187 gallons. On Thursday, the company reported that the spill at 90 times as much, 16,800 gallons. A spokesperson told CNN that TransCanada has "yet to pinpoint the source" of the leak. The pipeline will remain shut down all the way from Alberta to Illinois until that source is found and patched. Around 100 people are working to make that happen.
The 30-inch Keystone I usually carries half-a-million barrels of crude oil each day, 21 million gallons. It was built with advanced leak-detection technology that TransCanada touted when promoting construction of the 36-inch Keystone XL pipeline. The leak detectors would make the KXL very safe, the pipeline’s advocates claimed. In fact, since Keystone I opened its valves to the flow of oil in 2010, it has leaked 35 times, once spilling 21,000 gallons. Phil McKenna reports:
This leak comes as TransCanada seeks to build the Energy East Pipeline, which would carry 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day 2,800 miles from Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in eastern Canada.
"Just last month hearings began in the province of Quebec on TransCanada's proposed Energy East Pipeline and TransCanada was making a lot of very big claims about how in near minutes they would detect any leak and be able to shut down the pipeline in event of a spill," said Keith Stewart, who leads the energy campaign for Greenpeace Canada.
Four years ago the Pulitzer-winning InsideClimate News dug into a decade’s worth of federal data and revealed that only five percent of pipeline leaks had been detected by state-of-the-art technology. Twenty-two percent of the spills were discovered the same way as the latest South Dakota leak, by a passerby. One reason for that is that pipeline pressure must drop two percent before the detection equipment works, Evan Vokes, a former TransCanada materials engineer-turned-whistleblower, told DeSmogBlog earlier this week. Vokes said the likely culprit is a bad weld, adding that “bad welds are inevitable when welding is not done to code.”
Keystone I almost exclusively carries dilbit, diluted bitumen, a mixture of tar sands petroleum and light liquid chemicals. It’s a combination that the industry includes under the category of “heavy crude.” Dilbit contains more toxic material than regular crude, including benzene. Dilbit spills have proved more difficult to clean up than regular oil spills, particularly when the spill occurs in bodies of water. In July 2010, a break in a pipeline operated by Enbridge sent 843,000 to 1.1 million gallons of dilbit into Talmadge Creek, a tributary of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Thirty-five miles of the river was closed for nearly two years during the four-year cleanup. Enbridge originally estimated the cleanup cost at $5 million. By 2014, that had risen to $1.2 billion.
On the five-year anniversary of the spill last summer, when the cleanup crews had all gone home, Anthony Swift, director of NRDC’s Canada Project, said there was little cause for celebration. “The Kalamazoo River still isn’t clean. The EPA reached a point where additional cleanup might do more harm than good. Much of the river is still contaminated.”