Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said on Wednesday the province is working to present Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney with a proponent and route for a potential new crude pipeline from Alberta to the Port of Prince Rupert in British Columbia.
Smith told reporters at an energy conference in Calgary that her government is in talks with Canada’s major pipeline companies in the hope that a private sector proponent will take the lead on Alberta’s vision of a new, 1-million-barrel-per-day crude oil conduit to B.C.’s northwest coast.
She said Alberta aims to gauge private companies’ interest in coming together as a consortium to build the pipeline.
“Or if one (company) emerges as being a principal proponent, then we’ll be interested in talking to them too,” Smith said.
Canada currently sends approximately 90 per cent of its oil exports to the U.S., but has been seeking to diversify due to trade tensions and tariff threats from President Donald Trump.
Alberta, Canada’s main oil-producing province, is keen to see construction of a new export pipeline, to give Canada’s oil industry the ability to boost production long-term.
No private company has publicly expressed interest in building such a project.
Smith said she hopes Carney, who won a minority government in April, will make good on his pledge to speed permitting times for major infrastructure projects.
Companies will not commit to building a pipeline, Smith said, without confidence in the federal government’s intent to bring about regulatory reform.
Alberta is proposing that a new oil pipeline be built in tandem with the Pathways Alliance’s carbon capture and storage project, which has been proposed by a consortium of oil sands companies to reduce emissions from Canada’s energy sector. The companies have not been successful in negotiating an agreement with both levels of government over funding support for the project.
Smith said the Pathways project, which could cost between $10 billion and $20 billion to build, would be more likely to be green-lit by oil companies if they had the assurance of revenue growth that a new crude export pipeline would bring.
Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. The country achieved record oil production last year as the opening of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion in May 2024 tripled the country’s oil export capacity off the B.C. west coast to 890,000 barrels per day.
However, construction of that project was marred by regulatory delays and costs soaring to more than four times the pipeline’s original budget.
(Reporting by Amanda Stephenson in Calgary; Editing by David Gregorio)