Colonial Shuts Key Fuel Pipeline to New York Harbor After Spill

Colonial Pipeline Co. halted operations on a critical conduit that supplies fuel to the US Northeast, the latest disruption to energy flows following an outage to the Keystone oil pipeline last month.

Some product was released at Colonial’s Witt delivery station near Danville, Virginia, prompting the shutdown of its Line 3, spokeswoman Meredith Stone said in an email. The company is planning a restart at around 12 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, according to a notice shared with users of the pipeline.

Colonial’s Line 3 transports refined products such as distillates and gasoline to the New York Harbor market from Greensboro, North Carolina, and is part of a broader system that supplies fuels to the eastern US. The system’s key gasoline conduit was shut for nearly a week in 2021 after a cyberattack.

The incident follows the outage to TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone pipeline after the biggest onshore oil spill since 2010. The conduit, which can deliver as much as 600,000 barrels a day of Canadian crude into the US Midwest, only fully returned to service last week.

Colonial didn’t provide the cause of the leak or the volume that was discharged from Line 3, although it did say the impact had been contained within its property.