Alberta-BC Pipeline Proposal

The $20 Billion Gamble Nobody Wants to Take

Here's what should alarm you most about the proposed Alberta-to-BC pipeline: despite the federal government offering "expedited approval" and declaring it a project of "national interest," not a single private company has stepped forward to build it. In the cutthroat world of energy infrastructure where companies regularly bet billions on projects, this silence is deafening.

The reason becomes clear when you examine the financial reality. Building the pipeline itself would cost somewhere between $10 and $15 billion. Add the marine terminal and associated infrastructure—another $3 to $5 billion. Factor in the legal defense fund you'll inevitably need to fight challenges in court for the next decade—$1 to $2 billion more. You're looking at a $20+ billion investment that would need to operate profitably for 30 years just to break even.

Now here's the problem: this pipeline would take seven to ten years to build, accounting for the inevitable legal delays. Peak global oil demand is projected to hit within the next 10 to 15 years as electric vehicles proliferate and countries accelerate their climate commitments. So you'd be building an asset that requires 30 years of profitable operation, taking a decade to construct, entering a market that peaks in 15 years. The math simply doesn't work.

Consider what happened with Trans Mountain, the last major pipeline built to the BC coast. Initially estimated at $5.4 billion in 2013, it ended up costing $30.9 billion and took a decade to complete. And it only got built at all because the federal government nationalized it after Kinder Morgan walked away—no private company would touch it. The new Alberta pipeline faces identical risks but with an even more contentious route through more challenging terrain.

Then there's the insurance question that nobody wants to answer publicly. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster cost $65 billion in damages, insurance markets became extremely conservative about catastrophic environmental risk. A full tanker spill in BC's northern waters could generate $50 to $100 billion in liability when you account for cleanup costs, economic damages to fisheries and tourism, and compensation to Indigenous communities. No private insurer has demonstrated willingness to cover this risk at premiums that wouldn't destroy the project's economics. If insurance costs even five percent of potential liability per year, you're adding $2.5 to $5 billion annually to operating expenses. The project becomes economically absurd.

This explains why the proposal remains deliberately vague. There's no finalized route, no identified port, no specified tanker class, and no private proponent. What exists is a memorandum of understanding between the federal government and Alberta that essentially says "we agree this would be nice to have" while leaving all the impossible details to be sorted out later.

Understanding the Scale: What 300 Million Gallons of Oil Looks Like

To understand what's actually being proposed, you need to grasp the scale of the tankers required to make this economically viable. The document mentions VLCCs—Very Large Crude Carriers—but those initials don't convey the staggering size of these vessels.

A VLCC is roughly 330 meters long. To put that in perspective, that's longer than three football fields laid end to end, or about the height of the Eiffel Tower if you stood it on its side. These ships are 60 meters wide—picture a six-lane highway with room to spare on either side. They displace between 200,000 and 320,000 tonnes when fully loaded and draw (sit) about 20 meters deep in the water—deeper than a six-story building is tall.

Each VLCC carries between 1.9 and 2.2 million barrels of oil. In gallons, that's between 80 and 92 million gallons per ship. To make that tangible: it would take more than five days of the entire proposed pipeline's output to fill just one of these tankers. The Exxon Valdez spilled 260,000 barrels in 1989, creating a disaster we're still talking about 35 years later. A fully loaded VLCC carries nearly eight times that amount.

These aren't the only tankers that move oil around the world, but they're the only ones that make economic sense for shipping bitumen from northern BC to Asian markets. Smaller tankers mean more trips, higher per-barrel transportation costs, and worse economics for a project already struggling to pencil out. The whole proposal is predicated on VLCCs making regular runs through some of the most treacherous and ecologically sensitive waters in the world.

The channels these ships would need to navigate weren't designed for vessels of this scale. Douglas Channel, the most likely route out of Kitimat, is a narrow fjord with strong currents, frequent fog, and complex navigation. Wright Sound and the passages around Haida Gwaii present similar challenges. These aren't open ocean shipping lanes—they're confined waterways where a single navigation error or mechanical failure could ground a vessel carrying what amounts to 300 million gallons of crude oil in an ecosystem with no capacity to absorb that kind of contamination.

The 40-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem You've Never Heard Of

In 1987, marine biologists made one of the most astonishing discoveries in modern oceanography. Using submersibles to explore the seafloor of Hecate Strait, between Haida Gwaii and the mainland coast, they found massive structures that shouldn't exist: glass sponge reefs.

These reefs were thought to have gone extinct 40 million years ago. The only fossil evidence we had suggested they thrived during the Jurassic period and then vanished from Earth. Yet here they were, alive and thriving off the coast of British Columbia, representing a direct biological link to an ancient world that predates the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Glass sponges are profoundly different from the coral reefs most people know. Their skeletons are made of silica—essentially glass—and they build massive reef structures that can reach 19 meters high and extend for kilometers. The reefs in Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound now form a Marine Protected Area covering 2,410 square kilometers. They grow slowly, sometimes taking decades to add a single meter to their structure, and they provide critical habitat for rockfish, shrimp, and countless other species while filtering enormous volumes of seawater.

The tanker route required for this pipeline would run directly through or immediately adjacent to these reefs. The danger isn't just from a catastrophic spill, though that would be devastating. The physical impact of a grounding, the noise from regular tanker traffic, and even the wake turbulence from massive ships passing overhead can damage these structures. And because they grow so slowly and are so fragile—their glass skeletons shatter on impact—damage is effectively permanent on any human timescale. Recovery takes tens to hundreds of years.

There is no other place on Earth where these reefs exist. None. If we destroy the glass sponge reefs of the Great Bear Sea, we don't just lose one population of an endangered species. We lose an entire ecosystem type that survived from the Jurassic period to the present day, and we lose it forever.

The Great Bear Sea: Where Land and Ocean Meet

The term "Great Bear Sea" might sound poetic, but it's the formal name for the Northern Shelf Bioregion covering two-thirds of British Columbia's coast. This region encompasses Haida Gwaii, the North and Central Coast, and the waters around northern Vancouver Island. To understand why this area is so ecologically significant, you need to understand how it functions as a system.

The Great Bear Sea doesn't exist in isolation from the Great Bear Rainforest—they're parts of the same interconnected ecosystem. Salmon spawn in coastal streams, spend years feeding in the ocean, and return to their natal rivers to spawn and die. Their bodies, carried inland by bears, wolves, and eagles, fertilize the rainforest with marine-derived nutrients.

Those nutrients support the massive trees of the coastal forest, which in turn produce the woody debris and leaf litter that creates critical habitat in salmon streams. The kelp forests that fringe the coast provide nursery habitat for juvenile fish, which feed the salmon, which feed the forest. It's a cycle that has sustained itself for thousands of years.

Humpback whales, which were hunted nearly to extinction in these waters by the 1960s, have staged a remarkable recovery over the past 50 years. The Great Bear Sea now hosts one of the most important feeding areas for humpbacks on the Pacific coast. These whales, along with orcas, sea lions, and harbor seals, depend on the same herring, eulachon, and salmon runs that sustain the human communities of the coast.

Herring spawning in the region represents one of the largest biomass events in the world's oceans. Every spring, massive schools of herring return to shallow bays and estuaries to spawn, turning the water milky white with their eggs. This event feeds everything: seabirds descend in flocks numbering in the tens of thousands, whales time their migration to coincide with the spawn, salmon smolts feed on herring eggs to fuel their journey to sea, and Indigenous communities harvest herring roe on kelp as they have for millennia.

The cold, nutrient-rich waters of the region support this productivity, but they also create catastrophic conditions for oil spills. When crude oil hits cold water, particularly the heavy bitumen that would be shipped through these waters, it behaves in unexpected and dangerous ways. Instead of floating in a slick that can be contained with booms, cold bitumen emulsifies—it mixes with water and sediment, becomes negatively buoyant, and sinks. Once it sinks into seafloor sediments or settles into rocky intertidal zones, it becomes essentially impossible to remove.

We know this from long-term studies of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound, where conditions are similar to the Great Bear Sea. More than three decades after that spill, beaches that appear clean on the surface still have oil contamination inches below the surface. Dig into the sediment, and you'll find liquid oil that's been preserved by cold temperatures and lack of oxygen, still toxic to organisms that contact it.

The Animals Along the Route

Understanding what lives in these waters helps explain what would be lost. The proposed tanker route would traverse habitat used by five species of Pacific salmon—chinook, coho, chum, pink, and sockeye—each following genetically distinct migration patterns to and from their natal streams. These aren't just important fish; they're the engine that drives the entire coastal ecosystem.

Eulachon, small silvery fish that spawn in coastal rivers, represent a critical cultural species for Indigenous nations of the coast. So laden with oil that they can be dried and burned like candles—hence their nickname "candlefish"—eulachon provided both nutrition and light for coastal peoples for thousands of years. Their spawning runs have already declined dramatically in many rivers due to climate change and habitat disruption. Regular tanker traffic through their marine habitat would add another stressor to populations already struggling.

The resident orcas of the BC coast, already endangered with fewer than 75 individuals remaining, depend on chinook salmon as their primary prey. These orcas don't hunt a variety of prey like their transient relatives; they're specialized salmon hunters, and chinook are their preferred target. The noise from large tankers interferes with their echolocation, making hunting more difficult in areas with heavy ship traffic. Oil spills that damage salmon populations directly threaten orcas by reducing their food supply.

Humpback whales, as mentioned, have rebounded remarkably in these waters. But this recovery remains fragile. Humpbacks are particularly vulnerable to ship strikes because they feed near the surface, often in areas with reduced visibility. A VLCC moving through their feeding grounds at typical cruising speed (around 15 knots) cannot stop or maneuver quickly enough to avoid a whale that surfaces unexpectedly. Collisions with large vessels are already a significant source of humpback mortality in BC waters.

Sea otters, once hunted to extinction in BC and gradually being reintroduced from Alaska, maintain kelp forest ecosystems by controlling sea urchin populations. Their fur, the densest of any mammal, traps air to provide insulation in cold water. Oil coating their fur destroys this insulation, causing hypothermia and death. Sea otters can't recover from oil exposure through grooming alone—they require extensive rehabilitation, and survival rates are low even with intensive care.

Marbled murrelets, small seabirds that nest in old-growth coastal forests but feed in near-shore waters, face a combination of threats from logging and marine disturbance. Already listed as threatened, they're particularly vulnerable to oil spills because they dive for food in the surface layers where floating oil concentrates. Even small amounts of oil damage their waterproofing, leading to hypothermia and drowning.

These species don't exist in isolation from each other or from the fish, invertebrates, and plants that form the foundation of the ecosystem. When you damage kelp forests, you don't just lose kelp—you lose the rockfish and herring that use them as nursery habitat, which in turn affects the salmon that feed on those herring, which affects the orcas and bears that depend on salmon, which affects the forests that are fertilized by salmon carcasses. The system is interconnected in ways that make simple "impact assessments" misleading. You can't damage one part without cascading effects throughout the entire web.

What It Means When We Say "Indigenous Waters"

When Coastal First Nations say they will "use every tool in our toolbox" to stop this pipeline, they're not engaging in political hyperbole. They're describing the defense of territories they've stewarded for thousands of years under their own legal systems, which predate Canadian law and have never been extinguished.

The nations of the Great Bear Sea—including the Haida, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo Xai'xais, Gitga'at, Gitxaała, Nuxalk, Metlakatla, and Wuikinuxv—never signed treaties ceding their territories to the Crown. In Canadian constitutional law, this means they retain Aboriginal title to their traditional territories, including marine areas. The Supreme Court of Canada has established that the government must obtain consent, not merely consult, for projects that would substantially interfere with these rights.

For these nations, the marine environment isn't a resource to be managed—it's a living system they're part of and responsible for. When Heiltsuk leaders talk about herring, they're not discussing a fisheries stock; they're talking about a relationship with a species their people have harvested and stewarded for 14,000 years of continuous occupation. When Haida leaders speak of the waters around Haida Gwaii, they're describing their home in the most fundamental sense—the place their ancestors emerged from according to their origin stories, the place they've defended and cared for across countless generations.

The past 25 years have seen extraordinary progress in recognizing these relationships through co-management agreements. The Great Bear Rainforest Agreement, signed in the mid-2000s, created one of the world's largest protected temperate rainforests through collaboration between First Nations, environmental groups, industry, and government. The marine equivalent—the Great Bear Sea Protected Area Network—represents a similar achievement, with 17 First Nations working alongside federal and provincial governments to protect critical marine ecosystems while building a conservation-based economy.

This conservation economy includes sustainable fisheries managed according to Indigenous principles, ecotourism that brings visitors to experience the region's wildness without damaging it, and guardian programs that employ Indigenous stewards to monitor and protect the coast. These aren't feel-good projects; they're sophisticated management systems that combine traditional ecological knowledge with contemporary science, creating employment and economic opportunity while maintaining the health of ecosystems that everything else depends on.

The pipeline and tanker traffic proposal doesn't just threaten to damage this economy—it fundamentally contradicts its premise. You can't build an economy on pristine wilderness and also turn that wilderness into an industrial oil export corridor. The two visions are mutually exclusive.

When Indigenous leaders say they'll never allow crude tankers in their waters, they're also expressing a legal position grounded in Canadian constitutional law. The duty to consult and accommodate Aboriginal rights, established through decades of Supreme Court decisions, means the government can't simply impose this pipeline over Indigenous objections. Previous attempts to do so—including the Northern Gateway pipeline that this proposal closely resembles—failed in court precisely because the government didn't adequately fulfill its constitutional obligations.

The Thirty-Year Illusion

Return to the fundamental economic problem: this pipeline needs three decades of profitable operation to justify the investment, but it's entering a world where that thirty-year timeline is fantasy.

China, the primary target market for this oil, has committed to reaching peak carbon emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. These aren't vague aspirations; they're driving massive industrial policy shifts. China is already the world's largest market for electric vehicles, with EVs accounting for more than a third of new car sales. The country is building renewable energy capacity at a pace that dwarfs the rest of the world combined. Their need for imported crude oil is expected to peak within this decade and then begin declining.

India, the other major Asian growth market, is following a similar trajectory, albeit a few years behind China. While Indian oil demand continues growing in the short term, their National Electric Mobility Mission and commitments under the Paris Agreement point toward a future of declining petroleum consumption starting in the 2030s.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency's Net Zero by 2050 scenario—which represents the pathway necessary to meet Paris Agreement goals—shows global oil demand falling by 75% by mid-century. Even their more conservative "Stated Policies" scenario, which only accounts for commitments countries have already made, shows demand declining 30-40% by 2050.

For a pipeline that wouldn't begin operations until the early 2030s and needs to run profitably until the 2060s, these demand projections are catastrophic. The asset would be reaching its revenue peak just as global demand enters structural decline. This is the textbook definition of a stranded asset—infrastructure built for a future that won't materialize.

The Trans Mountain experience offers a preview of what happens when pipeline economics don't work. The federal government ended up owning that pipeline not because they wanted to be in the pipeline business, but because the private sector walked away and the political commitment was too strong to abandon the project. The new Alberta pipeline faces identical risk of becoming a taxpayer-owned white elephant, absorbing billions in public funds while never generating the returns that would justify its existence.

This explains why the memorandum of understanding is so vague. Creating a definite proposal with specific costs, routes, and financial projections would force an honest accounting that would kill the project immediately. By keeping everything conceptual—"we agree market access is important, details to be determined"—politicians can promise Alberta they're trying while avoiding the embarrassment of announcing a project that no rational investor would fund.

Why the Law Stands in the Way of BC Pipeline

The Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, passed in 2019, wasn't a spontaneous decision. It represented the legal codification of 50 years of Indigenous and environmental advocacy to keep crude oil tankers out of the Great Bear Sea. The law prohibits tankers carrying more than 12,500 metric tonnes of crude or persistent oils from loading or unloading at ports anywhere from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the Alaska border.

The MOU's language about "exploring options" to enable marine access is deliberately opaque. In practice, it means finding a way to either exempt this pipeline from the moratorium, create a special regulatory corridor that allows VLCC traffic, or repeal the Act entirely. Any of these approaches triggers immediate legal challenges.

Indigenous nations would challenge any weakening of the moratorium as a violation of their Aboriginal rights and title. The Crown's duty to consult meaningfully before making decisions that affect Indigenous rights is well-established in Canadian law. Previous attempts to approve pipelines without adequate Indigenous consultation have failed in court, most notably the Northern Gateway pipeline that was rejected precisely on these grounds.

Environmental groups would challenge under federal environmental assessment requirements, arguing that the government failed to adequately consider the risks to endangered species, critical habitat, and marine ecosystems. The Species at Risk Act requires the government to ensure that projects don't jeopardize the survival or recovery of listed species—a difficult standard to meet when the project involves VLCC traffic through habitat used by endangered orcas and other protected species.

British Columbia would likely launch its own legal challenge based on constitutional division of powers. While the federal government has jurisdiction over interprovincial pipelines, provinces have authority over natural resources and environmental management within their boundaries. The tension between federal and provincial jurisdiction has already created legal battles over other pipelines, and BC under Premier David Eby has shown willingness to fight.

Even if the federal government prevailed in court on all these challenges—far from certain—the legal process would take five to ten years. During this time, no construction occurs while costs accumulate and market conditions evolve. By the time legal challenges resolved, the economic case might have deteriorated to the point where even the government couldn't justify proceeding.

The Political Theatre Explained

Understanding this proposal requires recognizing it as political signaling rather than serious infrastructure planning. The federal government, particularly under Prime Minister Mark Carney, faces impossible electoral mathematics. Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the Liberals hold almost no seats, demand action on market access for oil. British Columbia, where the Liberals hold many seats, demands protection of coastal ecosystems. These positions cannot be reconciled through actual policy—they require symbolic gestures that satisfy everyone while committing to nothing.

The memorandum of understanding accomplishes this perfectly. For Alberta, it demonstrates the federal government is listening and trying to help. Premier Danielle Smith can point to the agreement as evidence that her advocacy is working. For the oil industry, it signals that lobbying and political pressure remain effective. For voters in Alberta who feel abandoned by federal climate policy, it offers hope that the industry they depend on has a future.

For British Columbia and Indigenous nations, the vagueness of the proposal offers reassurance. There's no specific project to oppose yet, no final route to mobilize against. The procedural requirements—Alberta must submit a proposal by July 2026, which then faces environmental review, which then requires changes to the Tanker Moratorium Act—create so many decision points where the project could die that immediate mobilization seems premature.

For the federal government, this ambiguity buys time. The next federal election will likely occur before any concrete decisions need to be made. If the Liberals lose, the next government inherits the problem. If they win, they can extend the timeline further, commissioning more studies and consultations. The political value lies in the promise, not the delivery.

This isn't necessarily cynical politics, though it may feel that way to people paying close attention. It might be the only approach that allows politicians to survive in a system where any concrete decision on energy infrastructure costs them millions of votes somewhere. Promise everything, deliver nothing, blame someone else when it doesn't work out.

What Should Happen Instead

The responsible path forward isn't building a pipeline that won't work economically, can't be built legally, and would cause irreparable environmental damage. It's honest conversation about economic transition.

Alberta's dependence on oil revenues is real and painful. Communities built around the oil sands face genuine economic anxiety as the world transitions away from fossil fuels. These concerns deserve serious policy responses, not symbolic gestures that pretend the transition isn't happening.

What would serious transition policy look like? Investment in skills training and education that prepares workers for industries that will grow rather than decline. Economic diversification that builds on Alberta's strengths in engineering, logistics, and resource management but applies those capabilities to renewable energy, carbon management, and sustainable industries. Infrastructure investment that builds future capacity rather than extending the life of sunset industries.

For Indigenous nations on the coast, the path forward means honoring the agreements already made. The Great Bear Sea Protected Area Network represents a model for how conservation and sustainable economic development can coexist. Expanding and properly funding these initiatives would provide more enduring prosperity than treating the coast as an oil export route.

For Canada as a country, it means choosing between competing visions of what we are and what we want to be. We can't simultaneously be a climate leader and an expanding fossil fuel exporter. We can't champion Indigenous rights and reconciliation while forcing pipelines through unceded territories over the objections of the people who hold title to them. We can't protect pristine ecosystems and also turn them into industrial corridors.

The Great Bear Sea, with its living fossil reefs and complex ecosystems, its Indigenous nations and their conservation economy, deserves better than being treated as a bargaining chip in political theater. The proposal to send supertankers through these waters should be abandoned not because it's politically difficult, but because it's wrong.