Mark Maki, Trans Mountain Corporation’s chief financial and chief strategy officer, expressed annoyance with a letter sent to the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) by oil shippers that raised concerns about the risk of delaying the move to full pipeline services.

Alberta oil and oilsands operators have increased production in anticipation of the 590,000 bbls/d in increased export capacity from the TMX coming into service on May 1, but are still sorting out where supply will come from to fill the line and what markets the increased production will reach.

In previous parts of this multi-part series, Paolo Bomben, director of Bitumen Beyond Combustion (BBC) at Alberta Innovates, identified asphalt binder as the BBC product having “the greatest potential of achieving commercial success” in the short and longer term, and energy carbons and carbon fibre as the two with the greatest potential in the longer term but with technological hurdles still to jump to achieve this potential.