The US Oil Pipeline With the Worst Spill Record

Enterprise Products Partners is a major Houston-based natural gas and crude oil pipeline company. According to preliminary data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration, the company has spilled more than 12,000 barrels of oil since 2010. In one 2011 incident, several thousands of barrels of crude oil spilled out of a tank at an Enterprise gathering station near Chico, Texas. That spill was contained by a dike. Later that year, Enterprise Products reported a spill from one of its discharge pipes at one of its facilities in Cushing, Oklahoma.

Earlier this year, the United States and North Dakota filed a complaint against two Truecos pipeline concerns, including Belle Fourche Pipeline Company, which owns and operates the Bicentennial Pipeline. The lawsuit blames the company for being negligent and causing the Ash Coulee Spill that dumped 14,400 barrels of crude in Billing County in 2016. Belle Fourche Pipeline Company is a subsidiary of Casper, Wyoming-based Truecos.

Pipeline giant Enbridge of Calgary, Alberta, Canada claims it transports about 30% of crude oil produced in North America, at more than 3 million barrels of crude and other petroleum liquids every day. Its Enbridge Line 6B is one of the leakiest in the country, however. In the summer of 2010, the line ruptured in Marshall, Michigan, regurgitating more than 3 million liters (792,516 gallons) of oil sands into the Kalamazoo River and surrounding wetlands over 17 hours.

The National Transportation Safety Board said the prolonged release caused “pervasive organizational failures at Enbridge.” The company reported CDN $6.3 billion in profit last year or about $4.6 billion in U.S. dollars.

The Tesoro High Plains pipeline system in North Dakota and Montana gathers oil from the massive Bakken formation and delivers it to a Tesoro refinery and to another pipeline owned by Enbridge Inc. In 2013, the pipeline spilled thousands of barrels of crude into a Dakota wheat field. At the time it was considered the biggest spill in the state since it became a major U.S. producer, according to Reuters. Marathon Petroleum Corp., the Ohio-based major petroleum refining and oil transportation company, has owned the pipeline since its 2018 acquisition of Andeavor (formerly Tesoro Corp.)

Canadian energy company TC Energy owns the 2,600-mile North American oil pipeline system that has experienced 22 accidents since it went online in 2010. Six of these accidents met the U.S. government’s criteria for spills “impacting people of the environment,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office report from last year, including major spills in North and South Dakota in 2011 and 2016, respectively. The Kansas spill in early December 2022 is the third significant Keystone pipeline rupture in the past five years, according to CBS News.