In less than a year of full operation, Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline to the Pacific has opened and expanded oil markets into Asia while reducing Canadian crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The biggest buyer, China, is importing record amounts of Canadian crude after slashing its purchases of American oil by nearly 90 percent recently due to escalating trade and tariff tensions.
Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta, to Vancouver, British Columbia, which went into service less than a year ago, has presented China and other East Asian buyers with expanded access to large crude oil reserves in Alberta’s oilsands region.
Chinese oil purchases through the port terminus near Vancouver soared to more than seven million barrels in March and are on pace to exceed that figure in April. Meanwhile, Chinese imports of U.S. oil are down to three million barrels a month from 29 million barrels in June of last year.
Ian (EE-ahn) Anderson was in charge of the pipeline project’s expansion and completion for more than a ten-year period. Anderson said that Trans Mountain was, by far, the largest project he had ever overseen, laying pipe for nearly 650 miles from central Alberta to the Pacific Ocean…tape
Cut #1 :20 OC…”responsible project.”
“It’s a thousand kilometers of pipe, and everything from the prairie landscape in Alberta, through the Coquihalla (Koka-holla) terrain, through the Frasier Valley, into Vancouver and a large urban center. We tunneled through Burnaby Mountain from our terminal down to the dock. Burrowed it through a tunnel, but in the end, it’s safer, more sustainable, and a more responsible project.”
The Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project faced numerous legal, environmental, and financial hurdles before its completion last summer. However, Anderson believes the way that North American politics has played out over the past couple of months has more than vindicated the economic need for the project for Canadians…tape
Cut #2 :25 OC…”to come.”
“It will certainly be good for the Canadian economy. I think that will be an immediate benefit to Canada because that means higher royalties and higher investment opportunities. The cash flow from Trans Mountain goes from $200 million a year up close to $2 billion a year. The economic impact is estimated to be seven billion dollars a year. So, the cost will be a footnote to the value of this pipe, to Canada, and what it will prove to be over the decades to come.”
China’s appetite for Canadian crude began to grow when the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion began moving additional Alberta oil to British Columbia’s Pacific Coast in May of last year. That interest by China has only accelerated since Donald Trump declared his intent to impose tariffs on China and other countries.