Keystone Pipeline to resume operations Saturday, company says

FREEMAN — The Keystone pipeline will restart Saturday morning, just under a week after passersby noticed a sheen of oil on the surface in a ditch near Freeman.

The ensuing excavation and cleanup operation brought more than 100 contractors and TransCanada employees to the site, where backhoes pulled masses of oil-soaked soil away to expose 275 feet of pipe and search it for the source of the leak.

That source was found Friday morning, and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration gave the company the go-ahead for a conditional re-start that afternoon.

TransCanada spokesman Mark Cooper wrote in a news release that the pipeline will operate at reduced pressure initially as aerial and ground crews monitor the situation.

“We expect to be at full operation by end of day tomorrow,” Cooper said.

Along the way to the restart of the 590,000 barrel-a-day pipeline, the estimate for the size of the spill grew from an initial report of 187 gallons to nearly 17,000. The initial estimate reported to the Coast Guard’s National Response Center was based on the amount observed upon initial inspection, said Doug Harvey, VP of liquid field operations.

“There was some product that we could see on the ground, so that’s what the estimate was based on,” Harvey said. “There’s a requirement that we have to report that immediately, and we have to report on facts.”

The estimate increased as the excavation moved forward. Mark Yeomans, the company’s VP of pipeline integrity, said soils were tested for the presence of oil, with saturated soils separated from clean soils. Modeling based on the amount of extracted dirt led to the updated figure of 400 barrels, which amounts to 16,800 gallons.

Piles of soil were placed on plastic on the ground at the site for the saturated soils. Some of it was hauled to Freeman and stored on the site of a construction contractor on the south edge of town.

“We have limited space, so we are trucking it to away to other facilities,” Yeomans said.

Large metal above-ground storage tanks were filled throughout the excavation process with oil and contaminated water for future disposal. The cleanup process has begun and will continue until regulators are satisfied that all the oil has been removed from the affected area.

“At this time, we’re not sure how long it will take. It will really depend upon the extent of the contamination,” Harvey said.

Bryan Walsh of the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources said there were no shallow acquifers immediately near the spill site. Yeomans said Friday that crews haven’t run into any wells during cleanup.

Groups opposed to the initial Keystone pipeline and the yet-unbuilt KeystoneXL pipeline have called the spill a sign of the ongoing dangers posed by underground oil transfer.

The Rosebud Sioux Tribe intervened in the Public Utilities Commission’s permitting hearings for both pipelines.

On Friday, the tribe released a statement saying the leak was proof that pipelines – even modern pipelines – are more dangerous than advertised.

Most concerning to the tribe, the letter says, is that the spill was detected by a citizen and not the pipeline’s alert system.

“Detection methods were not adequate,” the statement said. “Any amount of contamination in the land is too great and unacceptable.”