North Dakota Pipeline Company system North Dakota Pipeline Company system The North Dakota Pipeline Company (NDPL) system is a 950-mile (1530 km) crude oil pipeline system that collects oil from fields in the Williston Basin in Montana and North Dakota and transports it eastward to the Mandan Refinery in Mandan, North Dakota and to other pipeline systems that carry oil to other refineries in the Midwest. About 330 miles (530 km) of pipeline are used for collection from oil wells, and this connects to a 620-mile (1,000 km) main transportation line. In addition to collecting oil from wells in the United States, it also connects
Pipeline transport employee in Michigan. Although the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has standard baseline incident frequencies to estimate the number of spills, TransCanada altered these assumptions based on improved pipeline design, operation, and safety. Whether these adjustments are justified is debatable as these assumptions resulted in a nearly 10-fold decrease in spill estimates. Given that the pipeline crosses 247 miles of the Ogallala Aquifer, or 14.5% of the entire pipeline length, and the 50-year life of the entire pipeline is expected to have between 11 – 91 spills, approximately 1.6 – 13.2 spills can be expected to occur over