Olivia Woods
According to Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson, the Trans Mountain oil pipeline will be completed in the upcoming months.
Last September, the company was granted permission to modify the pipeline’s route by the Canada Energy Regulator. On Friday, Wilkinson addressed the situation in an interview with BNN Bloomberg.
“The expectation is that the project is going to be completed in the coming months,” said Wilkinson. “I don’t have the specific date in front of me in terms of when the corporation expects to complete it, but the project is over 90% complete.”
“And certainly we expect that it will come on stream over the course of the 2024 period.”
He explained that the project has taken “some time” due to several factors, one of which is the importance of involving Indigenous communities.
Canada’s crude capacity will be increased by 300,000 barrels per day due to the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, which involves doubling the existing pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby, British Columbia.
Overruns and delays have afflicted the pipeline project since the federal government purchased it from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion in 2018.
According to the most recent projections, the federal government could end up spending more than $30 billion on the project. Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has expressed concern that the government will never make a profit from the pipeline.
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