FORT RANSOM, N.D. (KFGO KVRR) – A portion of the Keystone Pipeline, which carries crude oil from Canada to the U.S. ruptured Tuesday morning near Fort Ransom in southeastern North Dakota.
Bill Suess, Program Manager for the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality, says a pipeline employee reported hearing a “bang” and saw oil coming out of the 30-inch pipeline, south of a pumping station. Suess says the rupture was reported at 7:44 a.m.
Suess says the pipeline was shut down in about two minutes. The oil has been confined to a nearby field. The size and cause of the spill are under investigation.
Oil was reported surfacing 300 yards south of the pump station in a field and emergency personnel responded, Suess said.
No people or structures were affected by the spill, he said. A nearby stream that only flows during part of the year was not impacted but was blocked off and isolated as a precaution, he said.
It’s unclear at what rate the pipeline was flowing, but even at two minutes “it’s going to have a fairly good volume,” Suess said. “But we’ve had much, much bigger spills,” including one involving the same pipeline a few years ago in Walsh County, North Dakota, he said.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that huge,” Suess said.
The pipeline’s shutdown could quickly lead to higher gasoline prices in the Midwest, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president for energy and innovation at the University of Houston.
It could raise prices at the pump within one or two days, but will have a greater impact on diesel and jet fuel, Krishnamoorti said. The Keystone pipeline transports a large amount of a unique, heavy crude that only is available from limited sources, he said.
“The refineries run on blends of crude so that they can get the product line that they want to deliver, whether it is gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, etc., and not having the supply of heavy crude is going to tilt their ability to make diesel and jet fuel,” he said. “They will make less of diesel and jet fuel when they have less of the heavy crude.”
Higher diesel costs could lead to grocery price increases because diesel trucks transport those products, he said.
The $5.2 billion pipeline constructed in 2011 Keystone Pipeline carries crude oil across Saskatchewan and Manitoba through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri to refineries in Illinois and Oklahoma. Though the pipeline was constructed by TC Energy, it is now managed by a liquid pipelines business South Bow as of 2024.
(The Associated Press contributed to this report)
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