The Keystone Pipeline spilled lots of of hundreds of gallons of tar sands oil right into a creek in northern Kansas earlier this month. TC Energy, which operates the pipeline, says it has recovered a small quantity of that oil, however specialists say the complete cleanup will take a very long time.

On December 7, 14,000 barrels of oil spilled from the Keystone Pipeline into Mill Creek in Kansas. But it didn’t simply spill any oil—it spilled diluted bitumen, the Environmental Protection Agency said final week. Bitumen from tar sands is dense, and so it’s combined with different merchandise like lighter oils to create diluted bitumen, which might simply transfer by a pipeline. But when a spill occurs, it’s a cleanup nightmare, as a result of diluted bitumen sinks in water relatively than floating on the floor.

Photos of the spill present that there’s quite a bit to wash up. Oil has blackened the side of a hill and the banks of the creek. “It’s nasty,” Joshua Alexrod, a senior advocate on the Natural Resources Defense Council, instructed Earther.

Alexrod stated that, at first, diluted bitumen will float on the floor of the water like different oils do. During this part, conventional cleanup strategies like skimming the oil off the highest of the water will nonetheless work. But that doesn’t final lengthy. “The components start to separate fairly quickly,” Axelrod stated. “The lighter liquids that are added evaporate off into the air, and what’s left behind is that bitumen, which is tar sands oil, and it starts to sink.”

He referenced the damaging 2010 Kalamazoo, Michigan oil spill, by which about 42,000 barrels (1,764,000 gallons) of diluted bitumen spilled right into a tributary of the Kalamazoo River. It took 4 years and over a billion {dollars} to wash up, making it the worst tar sands oil spill in U.S. historical past, Grist reported. The oil unfold virtually 40 miles downriver. It coated animals with oil and contaminated greater than 4,400 acres of land close to the river, Inside Climate News reported in 2016.

Thus far, TC Energy has not given an estimate for a way lengthy it’s going to take to take away a lot of the oil from the creek. But in a tenth oil spill assertion dated December 19, TC Energy stated that, as of December 18, it had recovered “an estimated 7,233 barrels of oil” from the affected creek. “The affected segment of the Keystone Pipeline System remains safely isolated as investigation, recovery, repair and remediation continue to advance. This segment will not be restarted until it is safe to do so,” the assertion stated.

Workers from the Environmental Protection Agency have been on the scene that very same week to supervise the cleanup efforts. They have recovered oil from the creek, have eliminated “oil-impacted soil and vegetation,” and have carried out water and air monitoring, the EPA said in a statement.

Axelrod stated he hopes that TC Energy and others concerned within the cleanup get as a lot oil out of the creek as attainable earlier than the cleanup turns into extra difficult. “I think those people who use that water would want to see… at least five to 10 years of monitoring to see how much oil is left and whether it’s getting into their water supplies,” Axelrod stated.

Zack Pistoria, Kansas lobbyist for the native Sierra Club chapter, stated that this oil spill is a good instance as to why we have to shortly part out pipelines. He says that he and different environmental activists are pissed off that spills are sometimes linked to cracks launched through the development of the pipeline, and corporations like TC Energy can’t predict when the subsequent spill will occur. “Is it worth the risk?” he instructed Earther. “It’s always, ‘well, this [spill] is a possibility,’ but when that happens, it’s worse than you could ever expect.”

Pistoria is true: This is much from the primary time the Keystone Pipeline system has spewed oil into the atmosphere. In November 2017, a Keystone Pipeline in Amherst, South Dakota spilled about 210,000 gallons. Inspections discovered that the spill was brought on by a crack created through the pipeline’s development.