Colonial Restarts New York Harbor-Bound Fuel Pipe

Colonial Pipeline Co. resumed service to a vital conduit that supplies fuel to the US Northeast, fixing a leak from last week that the company took more than a day longer than expected to repair.

The company had originally planned to restart Line 3 Saturday at noon Eastern time, but that was pushed back twice. The pipe returned to normal operations as of 5:51 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, after repairs were completed, the company said in an emailed statement.

Equipment failure caused a roughly 60-barrel leak of diesel fuel at the Witt facility near Danville, Virginia, prompting its shutdown on Jan. 3. The outage had a limited impact on gasoline prices in the critical New York Harbor market last week because stockpiles already were ample amid soft seasonal demand. 

Line 3 transports refined products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the New York Harbor region from Greensboro, North Carolina, and is part of a broader network that delivers supplies from Gulf Coast refineries to the eastern US.

The incident followed the shutdown of TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone pipeline after the biggest onshore oil spill since 2010. The pipe that can deliver as much as 600,000 barrels of Canadian crude daily to the US Midwest only fully returned to service last week.