The Canadian midstream giant, TC Energy, released a statement last week (5/13) that is has completed the recovery of oil spilled into a Kansas creek following a record volume spill on the Keystone Pipeline. The company said it will continue to remediate the shoreline of Mill Creek in Washington county Kansas as well as adjacent areas affected when the high-pressure, 36-inch pipeline ruptured in early December 2022, releasing more than 12 Mbbl of crude oil. It was the largest oil pipeline spill in the U.S. in nine years and the largest spill on the 12-year-old Keystone pipeline. The company said it expects to continue its work at the spill site until the 3Q of this year.
According to the statement, TC Energy employed “sophisticated recovery and water filtration techniques” to collect the oil; the work was done under the oversight of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Kansas Department of Health and Environment. The company has said that a flaw in a weld combined with “inadvertent bending stresses” on an elbow fitting during installation in 2011, combined with the high pressures employed to transport the oil, eventually led to the pipeline failure. Environmental groups have called for Keystone to be shut down because of its design flaws claiming another rupture event is imminent.
