The restart quickly propped up Western Canadian Select heavy blend crude for May, which traded last at $14.35 a barrel below benchmark West Texas Intermediate, according to Shorcan Energy brokers, from an intraday high of $15.05 a barrel discount.
Advertisement
No pipeline damage had been found as of midmorning Tuesday, company spokesman Mark Cooper said. “We expect to be at full operation by end of day tomorrow”, it added. The Keystone pipeline carries about 23 million gallons of oil daily.
TransCanada has estimated 16,800 gallons of oil leaked.
The company has not released estimates on cleanup costs and repairs. “That’s the fact in terms of what we’ve been able to analyze through the modeling we’ve done”. The Keystone oil pipeline is shut down, and landowners are still concerned about contamination from the leak.
Piles of soil were placed on plastic on the ground at the site for the saturated soils. It lies approximately four miles from the company’s Freeman pump station in Hutchinson County, South Dakota. All the oil-saturated soil was removed and put into above-ground storage tanks to be hauled away and ultimately disposed of. Now, he really doesn’t want to estimate how long it will take. “It will really depend upon the extent of the contamination”, Harvey said. Still, environmentalists criticized TransCanada over the oil spill. It is also reprehensible that regulators are will to levy fines on TransCanada and yet have not shut down the pipeline until it meets each and every safety standard.
The Rosebud Sioux Tribe of Rosebud, S.D., intervened in the state Public Utilities Commission’s permitting hearings for both pipelines.
Advertisement
A leak in the Keystone pipeline is worse than first believed, spilling much more oil than first reported. Which raises the question: Why did so many think we needed the KXL pipeline (which would have essentially duplicated the route of the existing Keystone pipeline), anyway?
