New hurdle signals more cost overruns for Trans Mountain’s controversial pipeline

The costly implications of an 11th-hour change in construction plans by Trans Mountain for the controversial Trans Mountain bitumen pipeline expansion project.

There is a new and significant hurdle facing the massively over-budget and contentious Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project running through Alberta and British Columbia.

The Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc, a First Nation in the Interior of B.C., near Kamloops, is disputing a proposed change by Trans Mountain to the pipeline route through an area known as Pípsell.

The Nation, known by its acronym SSN, says the change in construction methodology and routing of the pipeline will severely jeopardize what it considers a “cultural keystone place.”

The pipeline project’s cost has already soared from an initial purchase price of $4.7 billion by the federal government in 2018, to a whopping $30.9 billion – and it is still not complete. This latest hurdle poses yet another potential cost overrun, and delay, for Trans Mountain, whose debt is backstopped by the federal government and could very well be borne by Canadian taxpayers.

Canada’s energy regulator has agreed to listen to SSN’s case against Trans Mountain’s 11th-hour change in plans. Those hearings will begin on Monday in Calgary. If the regulator rules against Trans Mountain, the pipeline giant may very well have to dig deep into its pocketbooks and find millions of dollars of extra cash to complete the line according to the construction method it had initially agreed to.

In its negotiations with SSN, Trans Mountain had agreed to employ a technique known as ‘micro-tunneling’ to traverse Pípsell, which is also known as Jacko Lake. This method entails digging a shaft and meticulously pushing the pipeline under the lake in a process that would create the least amount of surface disruption and pose the smallest degree of risk along a four kilometre stretch of the Indigenous territory.

Instead, Trans Mountain is proposing to change the construction method – employing a less costly, yet more disruptive technique that SSN fears will pose undue risk to a sacred lake.