Line fill will begin sometime in the next quarter and is expected to take six to seven weeks, Trans Mountain said Friday.
Line fill is the final step before crude oil deliveries from the pipeline can begin, and will require 4.5 million barrels of crude.
“We expect commercial operations to commence near the end of the first quarter of 2024,” Trans Mountain said in a statement Friday. The timeline was announced following the company’s victory in a dispute with the Stk’emlupsemc Te Secwepemc Nation First Nation over Trans Mountain’s request to reroute its pipeline through a 0.8-mile section of the indigenous group’s territory. In this case, the Canadian regulator CER sided with the pipeline, clearing the way for a new route and avoiding months of potential delays if the reroute was not approved.
The $22.6 billion Trans Mountain expansion project will triple the pipeline’s capacity to 890,000 barrels per day.
Originally, the pipeline expansion was intended to help Canada export its heavy crude oil by tanker from the Canadian west coast to Asia. But as the expansion project took years to clear permitting, financial and construction hurdles, global crude oil flows changed with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Fierce opposition to the project in British Columbia also led to a change in ownership, forcing Kinder Morgan to reconsider its commitment to the Trans Mountain expansion, which would have increased the pipeline’s daily capacity from 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 890,000 bpd. So, in 2018, the Canadian government reached an agreement with the company to purchase the Trans Mountain expansion project and related pipeline and terminal assets.
Now, 130 different Indigenous groups have expressed interest in purchasing a portion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline.