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Worries of water contamination

A viscous type of oil called diluted bitumen, or tar sands oil, flows through the Keystone Pipeline. Because it’s so thick, leaks can be difficult to detect. If the oil does spill, it’s often far more detrimental to sensitive water resources. Bitumen is also one of the dirtiest fuels in the world. Unlike conventional crude which can be pumped directly from the ground, water is required to separate the heavy, tar-like substance from the sand it’s found in — a process that depletes and pollutes freshwater resources.

Thursday’s spill happened on a section of pipe along a small road approximately 35 miles south of the Ludden pump station in Marshall County, South Dakota, three miles southeast of the town of Amherst. In a statement, TransCanada said the oil “was completely isolated within 15 minutes and emergency response procedures were activated.” The company did not respond to a request for further comment.

Kent Moeckly, a nearby land owner and member of the Dakota Rural Action Group, told VICE News he’s concerned that the spill could be much larger though, in large part because the computers used to detect oil pressure drops don’t always detect small leaks. “TransCanada thought it was 200,000 gallons. What we found out working with TransCanada, it could very well be 600,000 gallons,” Moeckly said.

His concerns aren’t unfounded. After the last major Keystone oil spill in South Dakota, in April 2016, TransCanada revised its initial estimate of the spill from 187 gallons to 16,800 gallons after the company started digging up the field where the spill occurred. Because diluted bitumen is so dense, it seeps into the soil and river beds rather than rising like conventional, lighter crude, potentially masking the full spill.

In 2010, when over 800,000 gallons of tar-sands oil spilled into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, the cleanup took nearly three years and cost the company in charge, Enbridge, over $1 billion, making it one of the most expensive clean-ups in history. Enbridge also had to pay over $60 million in civil penalties for violating of the Clean Water Act, which the Trump administration wants to dismantle. That could make spills less costly for oil companies like TransCanada but more expensive for landowners and communities.

Another concern for Moeckly is the proximity of the spill to the Crow Creek drainage ditch, a small tributary to a major water supply for South Dakota, which flows just a few dozen feet from where the spill happened. “What this ditch does is that it takes the snowmelt to the east and escorts it to the James River about 40 miles east of here,” Kent said.