Thirty-nine months after it occurred, a 20,000-barrel (Bbl) oil spill in North Dakota still isn’t fully cleaned up – and the company responsible for the accident has yet to set a date for completion.
Though crews have been working 24/7 to deal with the Tesoro pipeline break, which happened in in September 2013, less than 33% of the 20,000 Bbls that spilled has been recovered — or ever will be — North Dakota Health Department environmental scientist Bill Suess told The Associated Press.
The Tesoro spill was not far from where oil was first discovered in North Dakota in 1951, Kallanish Energy learns.The Texas-based company and federal regulators have said a lightning strike may have caused the 2013 rupture in the pipeline, which runs from Tioga, North Dakota, to a rail facility outside Columbus, North Dakota, near the Canadian border.
North Dakota regulators initially thought just 750 Bbls of crude spilled, but later updated the amount exponentially. They also expanded the affected acreage from about seven acres — the size of seven football fields — to about 13 acres, Suess said. The cleanup has cost Tesoro more than $49 million to date and is expected to top $60 million, according to recent filings with the state.
Tesoro spokeswoman Destin Singleton told AP she couldn’t immediately confirm the numbers, and noted the cleanup completion date remains unknown. The pipeline was monitored remotely, but the company has said the spill wasn’t detected.
Crews have had to dig as deep as 50 feet to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of oil-tainted soil, Suess said. The company has now switched to special equipment that cooks hydrocarbons from crude-soaked soil in a process called thermal desorption before putting it back in place.
