I have long been a cynic about the chances of a second bitumen pipeline being built from Alberta to the West Coast.
After the events and announcements of Thursday, move me up into the category of skeptic.
There is some meat on the bones now. What Alberta Premier Danielle Smith submitted to Prime Minister Mark Carney could not be called a detailed proposal. There are few costs estimates, for instance, for what would be one of the most expensive capital projects in Canadian history.
There are no private investors for the pipeline itself.
Pembina Pipeline Corporation as signed on to help manage construction, should the pipeline get that far. And Trans Mountain Corp. and the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission are on for the oversight function, too. But both of the latter two are Crown entities, not private-sector corporations.
As yet, no investor or investors have stepped forward and offered to pay for the construction, which is estimated at upwards of $35 billion.
Nor is there yet any sign-on from oilsands companies for the Pathways carbon capture and storage scheme — a mandatory prerequisite from Ottawa. That could cost as much as an additional $30 billion (although a more realistic estimate is $20 billion).
There are still no First Nations who have leapt at the chance to become equity partners.
With Alberta changing the proposed route from B.C.’s north coast to a route that uses the existing Trans Mountain right-of-way, the chances of First Nations objections have been greatly reduced. Still, there will likely have to be guarantees of jobs for Indigenous workers (a good thing) and more annual payments to First Nations across whose territory the line will cross. That’s a cost not yet figured in.
RBC Capital Markets has made the first real attempt to calculate the cost per barrel per day of a completed pipeline and come to the conclusion it would cost about the same per kilometre as Trans Mountain.
But that estimate does not include all the side hustles, like Pathways. And it has to be remembered that Trans Mountain cost taxpayers at least three times as much ($30 billion) as was originally projected.
Yet I have to admit that Premier Smith has moved the project along farther than I had predicted at this point. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Carney has been more receptive and offered more concrete help than I thought likely.
On Thursday alone, Carney announced $17 billion in federal assistance for infrastructure construction in B.C., little of it related to the new pipeline. For instance, Carney agreed to kick in three billion federal dollars to complete the $4.2-billion George Massey Tunnel replacement, an eight-lane tunnel under the Fraser River between the Vancouver suburbs of Richmond and Delta that will replace a 67-year-old, four-lane tunnel that had begun to crumble.
And Ottawa will help B.C. build a $10-billion container port in south Delta, plus maintain a ban on tanker traffic off B.C.’s northern coast.
All of that was done at federal expense in return for B.C. Premier David Eby agreeing not to stand in the way or take the pipeline project to court.
Given that the B.C. government fought Trans Mountain kilometre by kilometre, Carney’s is a big (if expensive) achievement.
When asked on Thursday how many tax dollars would be needed to get this fill-in-the-blanks proposal up and running, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith replied, “That remains to be negotiated.”
So there is still a lot that could go wrong, a lot of slick patches where the protagonists could slip and fall.
To be fair, though, Smith has advanced a new pipeline farther than I would have predicted and Carney has been willing to do more to reduce obstacles than I would ever have imagined.
Perhaps the prime minister is truly serious about making Canada an energy superpower.
