Trans Mountain said Friday that line filling is expected to begin within the next quarter and the process is expected to take six to seven weeks.
Filling the line will require 4.5 million barrels of crude oil and will be the last step before the pipeline begins transporting crude oil.
“We expect commercial operations to begin near the end of the first quarter of 2024,” Trans Mountain said in a statement Friday. The timeline marks the company’s victory in a dispute with the Stk’emlupsemc Te Secwepemc Nation First Nation over Trans Mountain’s request to reroute the pipeline through a 1.8-mile section of Indigenous territory. It was accepted and published. In this case, Canadian regulator CER supported the pipeline, clearing the way for a new route and avoiding months of delays that could have occurred if the route change did not receive approval.
The $22.6 billion Trans Mountain expansion project will triple the pipeline’s production capacity to 890,000 barrels per day.
Initially, the pipeline expansion was set up to help Canada export heavy crude oil from Canada’s west coast to Asia via tankers. But while the expansion project took years to clear permitting, funding and construction hurdles, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine changed the flow of global oil.
Violent opposition to the project in British Columbia also led to a change in ownership and forced Kinder Morgan to reconsider its commitment to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, increasing the pipeline’s production capacity from 300,000 barrels per day to 89. It was decided to increase the amount to 10,000 barrels. In 2018, the Canadian government entered into an agreement with the company to purchase the Trans Mountain expansion project and related pipeline and terminal assets.
Currently, 130 different First Nations groups have expressed interest in purchasing a portion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline.
Written by Julianne Geiger, Oilprice.com
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