Manchin’s Permitting Reform Could Lead to More Oil Pipeline Spills – By Kristoffer Tigue & Bob Berwyn (Mother Jones) / Dec 16, 2022
Tuesday’s Keystone rupture released some
This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Crews continued to clean up the blackened banks of a northern Kansas creek Tuesday morning after a rupture in the Keystone pipeline last week released an estimated 588,000 gallons of Canadian crude—enough oil to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Translating to about 14,000 barrels, the incident is now the nation’s biggest onshore oil spill in nine years and the largest ever in the pipeline’s history, according to the federal government.
The pipeline, owned by Canada-based TC Energy, had previously leaked about 12,000 barrels of oil in 22 separate incidents since it began operating in 2010, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report published last year.
In that sense, last week’s spill is historically significant in its own right. But pipeline safety experts and environmental advocates say the rupture is also an example of what’s at stake as federal lawmakers consider overhauling the environmental review process for energy infrastructure—a move that could fast track billions of dollars of new fossil fuel pipelines already in the process of being built across the nation.
