Enbridge Inc restarted a major US Midwest channel for Canadian crude oil, the 600,000, barrel-per-day Flanagan South pipeline, also known as Line 59 at full rates on Wednesday evening, the company said in a notice to shippers. The company, however, did not give a timeline for the start up of the adjacent Line 55, the 193,300-bpd Spearhead pipeline.
The two pipelines, which run from Illinois to the oil storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, were closed on Tuesday after a crude spill of about one barrel was found in Shelby County, Missouri. The outages stemmed the flow of some 800,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude, causing cash prices to dive the furthest below the West Texas Intermediate benchmark in more than a year on Wednesday. The market had already fallen following an unrelated outage at BP Plc's Whiting refinery in Indiana, a major consumer of heavy Canada crude.