Colonial gasoline trunk line remains shut: UpdateOREANDA-NEWS. September 13, 2016. Colonial Pipeline's major gasoline pipeline connecting US Gulf coast refiners to the New York Harbor market may restart late this week following repairs of a leak.

Service on the Line 2 distillates pipeline connecting the Texas coast to Greensboro, North Carolina, resumed over the weekend. But the gasoline-bearing Line 1 remained offline after Colonial shut both lines on 9 September to investigate a leak in Alabama, closing a major route for US Gulf coast gasoline to the New York Harbor market.

Both products move on from Greensboro to a Colonial terminal in Linden, New Jersey, as part of the company's 5,500-mile (8,851km) pipeline network.

Staff at a mining operation west of a Colonial terminal in Pelham, Alabama, notified authorities of a strong gasoline smell late last week. Fuel seeped into tailing ponds at the mining site, creating thick vapors that complicated the response, based on local emergency and Colonial reports.

The closure shuts one of the largest and most economic US Gulf coast gasoline flows to the east coast. But the outage was unlikely to cause shortages on the Atlantic coast.

Gasoline inventories there at the end of August fell to 64.9mn bl — 11.5pc higher than the same week last year and almost 17pc higher than the ten-year average, according to the Energy Information Administration. The Atlantic coast has also begun a transition to winter-grade fuels, which allow lower, easier-to-meet blending specifications.