Careless Keystone Pipeline Installation Cracked Girth Weld, Caused 2022 Kansas Oil Spill

After admitting that shoddy work on a girth weld caused the Keystone pipeline to leak tar sands oil near Freeman in April 2016, Canadian pipeline operator Transcanada—now TC Energy—inspected nine similar girth welds on its pipeline and reported they were sound and required no repair.

They must not have checked the girth weld that blew out last December in Washington County, Kansas, very carefully:

A third-party review of a pipeline spill that released 500,000 gallons of crude oil onto Kansas farmland and a nearby stream was caused by a crack in the metal pipe that eventually ruptured under pressure.

…The "Root Cause Failure Analysis" for the so-called "Milepost 14 incident" reached the same conclusion as an independent analysis of the metal pipeline released in February.

"The primary cause of the rupture was a progressive fatigue crack that originated at a girth weld connecting a manufactured elbow fitting to the pipe constructed across Mill Creek (in Kansas)," the operator of the pipeline, TC Energy, said in a press release Friday.

The company said that during construction of this segment of the Keystone pipeline, which as completed in 2011, "inadvertent bending stresses sufficient to initiate a crack" occurred on the elbow fitting.

Over time, and under the high pressure needed to push the oil down the pipeline, the crack worsened, eventually resulting in the leak [Paul Hammel, "Massive Pipeline Spill Caused by Crack Created During Installation, Third-Party Review Concludes," Nebraska Examiner, 2023.04.21].

While the 2016 spill resulted from a bad weld, the 2022 spill resembles the 2017 spill in Marshall County, South Dakota, in that sloppy installation cracked the pipeline:

The RCFA revealed that a unique set of circumstances occurred at this location, which originated during the construction of the pipeline segment, and led to the failure at Milepost 14.

Note that last line: even operating well below capacity, the poorly constructed northern Kansas segment of the Keystone pipeline couldn't hold its liquor and upchucked into Mill Creek.

Last month the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration ordered Transcanada/TC Energy to inspect its girth welds again. Maybe they’ll take a closer look this time than they did after the 2016 Freeman spill.

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