TMX crude line delayed to 2Q: Trans Mountain: Update

Adds heavy sour price movements.

Canada's 590,000 b/d Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) will now be completed in the second quarter at the earliest, as complications while pulling pipe through a tunnel this past week created additional delays, the company said today.

Technical issues encountered during pipeline pullback activity between 25-27 January in British Columbia "will result in additional time to determine the safest and most prudent actions for minimizing further delay," Trans Mountain said in a statement.

The section at the heart of the issue, known as Mountain 3 horizontal directional drill (HDD), is one of the last construction stages for the massive project first conceived more than a decade ago.

Heavy sour crude prices at Hardisty, Alberta, fell today on TMX's scheduling uncertainty, after narrowing its discount to the light sweet crude benchmark in Cushing, Oklahoma, in recent weeks.

March-delivered Western Canadian Select (WCS) at Hardisty, Alberta, was talked at near an $18/bl discount to the Nymex WTI calendar month today, about $2/bl wider than the session before. This still represents a $10/bl rise since early November as TMX's commissioning comes closer to reality.

While WCS does not price at Edmonton, other heavy sour grades like Cold Lake and Access Western Blend do and more volumes could be coaxed westward rather than to the US midcontinent or Gulf coast once TMX comes online.

The setback comes two weeks after Trans Mountain was given regulatory approval to use a 30-inch diameter pipe instead of 36-inches for this small section of the project about 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Vancouver, British Columbia. The 1,225 meter stretch has given construction crews repeated trouble, but a tunnel wide enough to hold the smaller pipe had been excavated, which was expected to keep the C$30.9bn ($23bn) project on track and avoid a lengthy delay.

Trans Mountain said last week that line fill could be completed in late March or early April, but that schedule now appears to be in jeopardy.

TMX will roughly triple the existing 300,000 b/d pipeline that stretches from Edmonton, Alberta, to the docks at Burnaby, British Columbia.

By Brett Holmes