Several major pipelines have made headlines for shutting down in recent years. The most recent is the Keystone oil pipeline, which ruptured in North Dakota in April 2025 and halted hundreds of thousands of barrels of Canadian crude from reaching U.S. refineries. Before that, the Colonial Pipeline shutdown in May 2021 caused fuel shortages across the eastern United States after a ransomware attack, and the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea were destroyed by underwater explosions in September 2022.
Keystone Pipeline Rupture in April 2025
On April 8, 2025, a section of the Keystone oil pipeline ruptured near Fort Ransom, North Dakota, spilling roughly 147,000 gallons of crude oil into an agricultural field. A worker manually shut down the affected segment within two minutes, and response crews from South Bow, the pipeline’s operator, were mobilized immediately. The shutdown halted the flow of Canadian crude to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, raising concerns about fuel prices and supply chain disruptions.
The Keystone system stretches more than 2,600 miles from Alberta’s oil sands to refineries along the Gulf Coast. In 2024, it transported an average of 624,000 barrels per day, making any extended outage significant for North American fuel markets. This is a separate project from the canceled Keystone XL expansion (more on that below).
Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack in 2021
On May 7, 2021, Colonial Pipeline Company shut down its entire pipeline system after a ransomware attack compromised its computer networks. The pipeline carries up to 2.5 million barrels of refined fuel per day from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, supplying roughly 45% of the region’s gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Losing that supply for nearly a week triggered panic buying, long gas station lines, and localized fuel shortages from Georgia to Virginia.
The FBI confirmed that a hacking group called DarkSide was responsible. Colonial Pipeline paid a ransom of approximately 75 bitcoins to regain access to its systems. The company restarted operations on May 13, six days after the initial shutdown. The Department of Justice later recovered about 63.7 of those bitcoins (valued at roughly $2.3 million at the time) by tracing the payments through the public Bitcoin ledger and seizing funds from a wallet the FBI had the private key to access.
The Colonial Pipeline attack became a turning point for how the U.S. government and private industry approach cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. It demonstrated that a single cyberattack on one company could cascade into a regional energy crisis within days.
Nord Stream Pipelines Destroyed in 2022
On September 26, 2022, a series of underwater explosions damaged three of the four Nord Stream pipeline segments running beneath the Baltic Sea between Russia and Germany. The blasts rendered both lines of Nord Stream 1 and one line of Nord Stream 2 inoperable. German authorities said that unless the damaged sections were rapidly repaired, saltwater corrosion would make them permanently unusable.
Neither pipeline was actively delivering gas at the time of the explosions. Russia’s Gazprom had halted deliveries through Nord Stream 1 indefinitely starting August 31, 2022, citing maintenance issues, though the move was widely seen as economic pressure related to the war in Ukraine. Nord Stream 2 had been completed in 2021 but never entered commercial service because Germany suspended its certification on February 22, 2022, just days before Russia’s full-scale invasion. The sabotage effectively ended both projects for good.
Keystone XL Cancellation
If you searched for a pipeline that was “shut down” in a political sense, you may be thinking of Keystone XL. This was a proposed 1,200-mile extension of the existing Keystone system, designed to create a more direct route for Canadian crude to reach Gulf Coast refineries. It became one of the most politically charged infrastructure projects in U.S. history.
On his first day in office, January 20, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order revoking the presidential permit that had been granted for the project in 2019. TC Energy, the pipeline’s developer, officially terminated the Keystone XL project on June 9, 2021, and all related domestic litigation was later dismissed. The existing Keystone pipeline system continues to operate separately, as the April 2025 rupture demonstrated.