TransCanada Corporation’s Keystone pipeline in rural South Dakota spilled nearly twice as much crude oil as the company originally admitted when the incident occurred in mid-November 2017, local media reported Saturday.
TransCanada spokesperson Robynn Tysver now says the pipeline released 9,700 barrels of oil, not the 5,000 the company originally acknowledged. The revised total makes the breach one of the worst inland spills in the United States since 2010.
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“Keystone has leaked substantially more oil, and more often, in the United States than the company indicated to regulators in risk assessments before operations began in 2010,” Reuters reports. “The spill gave further ammunition to environmental groups and other U.S. opponents of another pipeline the company has proposed, the long-delayed Keystone XL.”
Tysver told the Aberdeen American News the existing pipeline has been repaired and cleanup operations are complete. “We have replaced the last of the topsoil and have seeded the impacted area,” she said in an email.
