Yesterday, a total of 210,000 gallons (795,000 liters) of oil leaked from the Keystone pipeline in South Dakota, the pipeline's operator, TransCanada, said.
Crews shut down the pipeline Thursday morning and officials are investigating the cause of the leak.
This is the largest Keystone oil spill to date in South Dakota. The leak comes just days before Nebraska officials announce a decision on whether the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, a sister project, can move forward.
A representative of the State environmental office said "It is a below-ground pipeline but some oil has surfaced above ground to the grass. It will be a few days until they can excavate and get in borings to see if there is groundwater contamination."
Environmental groups, Native American tribes and local farmers opposed the original pipeline and the proposed extension (Keystone XL). They have cited this spill as evidence of the risks.
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The pipeline has a minimum cover of four feet of soil, so the section in question will be at least that deep. Cleaning up these spills is expensive, time-consuming, and the environment is never quite the same again. I'm working on a similar oil release and cleanup in the US that is already 7 years old and won't be cleaned up until at least ten years, and that one was only 1/1000 of this one.
@windinhishair The length, severity and cost of such incidents often depends on where it occurs, the quantity of material released and its composition. The worst environmental incidents I've seen are those where releases have gone undetected for decades are those that are composed of chemicals that are particularly recalcitrant to remediation.
@sciguy18 Agreed. The release of PBCs by GE into the Upper Hudson River is one such situation, though in that case, they were knowingly released from two plants. You can to this day find PCBs all the way down to NYC, and GE just spend $500 million just to remediate the river upstream of the Troy dam. That leaves well over 100 miles still impacted.
We'll see what happens in this case, but my bet would be that the area of the spill will not be usable until well beyond our lifetimes, even following remediation.
