DULUTH - A fire at a pipeline from Canada that feeds oil to the United States killed two people and sent oil prices soaring before burning out this morning, officials said.
Two workers from a Superior-based maintenance firm fixing the underground pipeline were killed when fumes apparently escaped and ignited the blaze in Clearbrook, about 215 miles northwest of Minneapolis, said Kristine Chapin, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
An official at Murphy Oil Corp. in Superior said the pipeline shutdown has had no impact on the operations at their refinery.
"We have quite a bit of crude oil in the plant right now, and we're operating at full capacity," said Refinery Manager Dave Podratz.
He said the refinery has several days' supply of crude on hand and shouldn't be affected unless there's a lengthy pipeline outage.
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"We've not heard anything definitive from Enbridge yet," Podratz said.
The fire along the Enbridge Energy pipeline in northern Minnesota was reported shortly before 4 p.m. Wednesday, the Sheriff's Department said. The fire was out by Thursday morning.
"It looks like it's out now. They're just mopping up and making sure," said Blake Olson, a terminal supervisor at the pipeline.
The 34-inch pipeline carries crude oil from Saskatchewan to the Chicago area, Chapin said. The pipe had leaked a few weeks ago and was being repaired, she said.
"It appears as though one of those fittings may have failed and caused fumes to leak, and it caught fire," Chapin said. She said there wasn't an explosion and described it as a "big fire."
Nearby residents were evacuated because of the thick black smoke in the sparsely populated area.
Denise Hamsher, a spokeswoman for Enbridge Energy in Houston, confirmed late Wednesday that the workers who died were employed by the company. Their names were not immediately released.
The crude oil is used to make several kinds of fuel, such as gasoline and heating oil for homes. An average of 1.5 million barrels of oil passes through the pipeline each day, said another Enbridge spokesman, Larry Springer.
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The pipeline that leaked and three others were shut down, Enbridge said. Two of the lines were re-started Thursday morning, Springer said. Another line will be inspected to see if it is safe to come back online, but the line with the leak will likely be out for some time, Springer said.
"Nothing is going to be re-started until we're absolutely sure it's safe to be operated," Springer said.
Light, sweet crude for January delivery jumped $3.78 to $94.40 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange by late afternoon in Singapore. It climbed as much as $4.55 to $95.17 in the electronic session before slipping back.
The contract had plunged $3.80 to $90.62 a barrel Wednesday in New York, adding to the previous session's drop of $3.28. That was a front-month contract's second largest two-day price decline since the Nymex introduced futures trading in 1983.
In London, January Brent crude rose $2.61 Thursday to $92.42 a barrel on the ICE Futures exchange.
