The Keystone Pipeline was shut down after a “bang” was reported Tuesday morning, according to Bill Suess, spill investigation program manager with the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality.
“An employee on a pump station heard what was described as a mechanical bang” at 7:44 a.m., Suess told CBS News, adding that the employee immediately shut down the pipeline and notified emergency personnel. The pipeline was shut down within two minutes, The Associated Press reported.
A release of product from the pipeline was confined to an agricultural field south of the pump station, Suess said. He told the Associated Press that oil was reported surfacing 300 yards south of the pump station. Emergency personnel responded to the site, he said.
The cause of the rupture and the volume of crude oil spilled was not immediately available.
Suess told the AP that no people or structures were affected by the spill, and a nearby stream that only flows during part of the year was not impacted but was blocked off and isolated as a precaution.
The pipeline, which went online in 2011, carries crude oil from Canada to the United States. The pipeline runs through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri to reach refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma. A proposed extension to the pipeline that would have carried crude oil to Gulf Coast refineries was shut down in 2021 after years of protests.
The pipeline has had at least three significant spills since 2017, CBS News previously reported. The largest spill was in 2022, when an estimated 14,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into a creek in Kansas.
