Company starting to recover oil from Kansas pipeline spill

The company operating a pipeline that leaked about 14,000 bathtubs' worth of crude oil into a northeastern Kansas creek is recovering at least a small part of it from what was the largest onshore crude oil spill in nine years.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that Canada-based TC Energy has recovered 2,163 barrels of oil mixed with water from the 14,000-barrel spill on a creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northwest of Kansas City.

The EPA also said the company has recovered 435 barrels from the ruptured pipeline, to bring the total amount of oil and water recovered to 2,598 barrels, a figure also released by the company. Each barrel is enough to fill a household bathtub, and the total spill was 588,000 gallons.

Last week's rupture in Kansas forced the company to shut down the Keystone system, and it hasn't said when it will come back online. It is using trucks with what essentially are large wet vacuums to suck out the oil. The company said Thursday evening that the trucks are operating around the clock.

“Our commitment to the community is that our response efforts will continue until we have fully remediated the site,” the company said in a statement.

The company used booms, or barriers, to contain the oil in the creek and also built an earthen dam to prevent it from moving into larger waterways. The EPA said the company built a second earthen dam to helps support the first.

It was the biggest onshore spill since a Tesoro Corp. pipeline rupture in North Dakota leaked 20,600 barrels in September 2013, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data. The agency's data also said it was the largest spill on the Keystone system since it began operating in 2010 and bigger than 22 previous spills on the system combined.

The spill prompted the U.S. Department of Transportation's pipeline safety arm to order TC Energy to take corrective action.

It said the company must reduce the operating pressure by 20% inside the 96-mile (155-kilometer) segment running from Steele City, Nebraska, south to Hope, Kansas. It also said the company cannot restart operations in that segment without the permission of the pipeline safety regulators.

The company also must identify the root cause of the spill and submit a plan for finding similar problems elsewhere and conducting additional tests by early March.

Bill Caram, executive director of the advocacy Pipeline Safety Trust, said much of the order is standard “boilerplate,” and it would be possible for TC Energy to get the 96-mile segment back online once it does a repair.

“They need to excavate the pipe in such a way that it's preserved just for the investigation, for that root-cause analysis, and that takes probably the most time,” Caram said. “But the actual repair can be pretty quick.”

Concerns that spills could pollute waterways spurred opposition to plans by TC Energy to build another crude oil pipeline in the Keystone system, the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) Keystone XL, which would have cut across Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska. Critics also argued that using crude from western Canada’s oil sands would worsen climate change, and President Joe Biden’s cancelation of a U.S. permit for the project led the company to pull the plug last year.

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