The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion: Who wins, who loses and how did we get here?

financialpost.com:

The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project may still be months away from completion, but industry insiders have already started speculating on how it will impact the oil sector, from a potential increase in the price of Canadian oil to the opening of new export markets.

The expansion project will twin the existing 1,150-kilometre Trans Mountain pipeline between Alberta and British Columbia and enhance the system’s export facilities. The original pipeline was built in 1953 and has the capacity to transfer about 300,000 barrels per day. The new pipeline will be able to deliver an additional 590,000 barrels per day.

But as we near the end of construction on the government-owned project that has been more than a decade in the making, plenty of questions remain about what lies ahead.

Houston-based Kinder Morgan Inc. first proposed expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline in 2012. Its goal was to begin construction in 2017 and start a new flow of oil in 2019.

But the move was opposed by environmentalists who pointed out the existing pipeline had a history of spills. There have been 84 spills reported since 1961. While 70 per cent of them occurred at pump stations or terminals, 30 per cent occurred along the pipeline, with 20 incidents linked to the release of crude oil from the pipeline.

Kinder Morgan in 2017 threatened to cancel the project due to opposition from the British Columbia’s NDP government. Shortly after, the company sold the pipeline and the expansion project to the Government of Canada for $4.5 billion. The cost of the project has since increased to about $30.9 billion.

It is ridiculous to have this pipeline costing $31 billion — that is obscene

Trans Mountain Corp., the government-owned company that’s expanding