After years of delay and court battles, Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion is underway
Canada’s controversial and much delayed Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project, which will nearly triple the capacity of crude oil and refined products that can be transported between Alberta and British Columbia, officially got underway Tuesday.
Trans Mountain CEO Ian Anderson, who switched employers when the pipeline and its proposed expansion were sold to the Canadian federal government in 2018 for $4.5 billion, promised to have expansion project pipe in the ground by Christmas during a ceremony Tuesday near Edmonton, Alberta, to celebrate the start of the project, according to a story published by CBC.ca.
Despite delays, court battles and protests, Anderson vowed the project will produce the “best darn pipeline in the world” with improved leak detection and thicker pipe in key points along the line, CBC reported.
The Trans Mountain project and expanded capacity would mean a seven-fold increase in the number of oil tankers coming and going in the Salish Sea, according to an earlier story in the Globe and Mail.
Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage called Tuesday an “exciting step forward” on the project, according to Globalnews.ca.
Expansion work was already underway at both ends of the Trans Mountain Pipeline at the project’s Edmonton and Burnaby, B.C., terminals, according to a JW Energy website jwn.com. But it wasn’t until Tuesday that work began to actually build the pipe itself, though the Financial Post reported that large-diameter green pipes have been stockpiled at various sites along the path of the expansion in preparation for the project.
Anderson said the expansion would take between 30 and 36 months to complete and did not update the project’s estimated cost of $7.4 billion, JWN reported.
The expansion, which will create a second line between Edmonton and Burnaby following basically the same route as the line that already exists, will nearly triple the 300,000-barrel-a-day capacity of the current Trans Mountain Pipeline, Global News reported.
Construction on the expansion project has been held up by numerous legal, political and environmental concerns, according to a November story by the Financial Post, and there still may be more court battles even now that work has begun.
This story was originally published December 4, 2019 at 2:54 PM.
