Alberta’s latest pipeline push dredges up ghosts of projects past

Protesters demonstrate against the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline in Vancouver, B.C., on Monday Jan. 14, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

CALGARY — Few are as acquainted with Canada’s graveyard of defunct oil pipelines as Alex Pourbaix, a former executive at the company behind the Keystone XL and Energy East proposals.

“You can see the scars on my back,” he quipped at a news conference earlier this month, twisting his body at the lectern for emphasis.

Pourbaix was on hand as the Alberta government announced plans to propose a new West Coast bitumen pipeline to the freshly created federal Major Projects Office, which aims to speed along projects deemed in the national interest.

The former chief operating officer at TransCanada Corp. — now known as TC Energy — and CEO of oilsands giant Cenovus Energy Inc. is co-chairing a panel tasked with developing Alberta’s pipeline application.

Industry players and the Alberta government have said the province’s intervention is necessary to get a project off the ground. As they see it, Canada’s convoluted regulatory system and onerous climate policy has made it near-impossible for private businesses to justify investing.

“No pipeline executive would go to his or her board of directors and ask for development money to build a pipeline in Canada,” Pourbaix told the news conference.

Industry advocates and several politicians have placed the blame for past derailed pipelines squarely at the feet of the federal Liberals. They say a major policy overhaul is needed if Canada is to capitalize on the new window of opportunity for projects reducing reliance on our tariff-happy southern neighbour.

Some of the reticence to invest in projects can be pinned on Ottawa, said University of Alberta economist Andrew Leach, citing the oil tanker ban on the northern B.C. coast as one example.

But it’s not the whole picture, he said.

“People seem to forget that there was this structural change in oil markets in 2014-15 from which we’ve never really recovered.”

Alberta’s pipeline push has been dredging up the ghosts of projects past. Here is a look at what happened with three ill-fated projects and what can be learned from their demise:

Keystone XL

First proposed in 2008, Keystone XL was to expand an existing pipeline delivering crude to refineries in the U.S. Midwest and provide a direct route to the Texas coast.

Canada’s energy regulator approved it in 2010. South of the border was another matter as activists made the project a proxy for the broader battle against climate change.

“Fundamental to all of it is, to some extent, a really implacable resistance from the environmental movement” to more oilsands crude being produced, said Dennis McConaghy, a former TransCanada executive who oversaw Keystone’s development and the early stages of Energy East.

The saga was marked by pipeline reroutes, lawsuits, political showdowns and high-profile protests that saw the likes of actors Margot Kidder and Daryl Hannah arrested outside the White House.

Former president Barack Obama nixed the pipeline — twice — only to have President Donald Trump reinstate its permit during his first term. Former president Joe Biden pulled the plug on the pipeline again on his first day in the White House in 2021.

In his second term, Trump has said he wants to revive Keystone XL, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has raised the prospect with the U.S. president. The existing system now has a new owner, South Bow Corp., which was spun off from TC Energy a year ago.

South Bow has said it has “moved on” from Keystone XL, but that it would “continue to explore opportunities that leverage our existing corridor with our customers and others in the industry.”

Reviving Keystone XL is “less problematic” than trying to go west, even though the second option has the benefit of providing a direct route to Asia, said McConaghy.

“You don’t have to confront a tanker ban,” he said. “You don’t have to confront unsettled land claims that you have in B.C.”

Energy East

Amid ongoing drama over Keystone XL’s future in 2013, TransCanada pitched an Alberta-to-New Brunswick pipeline that many thought would have a smoother ride.

It did not.

Energy East would have converted part of the company’s underused cross-Canada natural gas system to carry oil. It aimed to deliver Alberta crude to eastern refineries, and to export terminals in Cacouna, Que., and Saint John, N.B., that would have enabled shipments to Europe.

“It was created as an all-Canadian response to the failures or the challenges of Keystone XL,” said McConaghy.

The project attracted fervent opposition from environmentalists and the Quebec government. The Cacouna port was scrapped in part due to concern for beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River. Panel members from the National Energy Board were sidelined after conflict-of-interest accusations.

TransCanada eventually cancelled the project, citing “changed circumstances.”

“The regulatory regime in Canada became so difficult by 2017 that TransCanada couldn’t persist with getting that project completed,” said McConaghy, who had retired three years earlier.

But the cancellation also happened against the backdrop of weak crude prices and a temporary resurgence in Keystone XL’s fortunes after Donald Trump’s was elected U.S. president in 2016.

“One of the things that killed Energy East was the return of Keystone,” Leach said. “All of a sudden, you had another project come forward at a time when there weren’t enough barrels available to fill both of them.”

Northern Gateway

Pipeline giant Enbridge Inc. filed an application to the federal regulator in 2010 for a pipeline that would have connected Alberta oilsands crude to a tanker port in Kitimat, B.C., and to lucrative Asian markets from there.

The proposal drew fierce opposition from B.C. First Nations that have not signed treaties with the Crown, particularly those on the coast fearful of an oil spill. There was also staunch resistance from the B.C. government.

The federal government approved the project in 2014 and court challenges followed. Two years after Northern Gateway got the regulatory green light, the Federal Court of Appeal yanked its permit, saying Ottawa failed in its duty to consult with Indigenous communities. Enbridge said it would “re-engage” with First Nations.

Months later, the government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau officially killed Northern Gateway, while approving another Enbridge project to U.S. markets and the Trans Mountain pipeline to the Vancouver area, which Ottawa ended up purchasing from pipeline operator Kinder Morgan after its own legal and regulatory roller-coaster.

In announcing those decisions in November 2016, Trudeau also said he had directed the National Energy Board to dismiss Northern Gateway’s application and that a tanker traffic on the B.C. coast would become law.

The Alberta government’s renewed push has been described as a Northern Gateway reboot, and the idea’s backers have said they’d get the First Nations consultations right this time around.

But Leach said the recent federal legislation that created the Major Project Office may end up being problematic when it comes to ensuring First Nations are properly consulted.

“It commits the cabinet to getting to approval, getting to a yes,” said Leach. “Can you really say that you’re fully consulting in good faith if you’ve already determined the outcome?”

Leach said past efforts to shorten the regulatory process have led to legal action which ultimately led to bigger delays, and that’s a risk this time around.

“You’ve sort of set yourself up maybe for failure already.”

Moving forward

McConaghy said Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government finds itself in a dilemma. Allowing a million more barrels a day to flow from the oilsands would mean a much-needed boost to the Canadian economy, he said.

“And yet to achieve it means, in my judgment, a fundamental reversal of their climate policy,” McConaghy said.

“How is that going to be rationalized to a government that still contends that it’s serious about net zero in a world that isn’t?”

Meanwhile, Leach says none of the environmental and regulatory hurdles industry has complained about are “remotely comparable” to the impact of the long-run projections for the price of oil.

“We’re having a conversation about the pennies as though the dollars don’t matter at all.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 26, 2025.

Companies in this story: (TSX:TRP, TSX:ENB)

Lauren Krugel, The Canadian Press