It's opening day for the $34B Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion

Well, from a lot of fanfare to very little about a significant project in Alberta and the rest of Canada, the Trans Mountain pipeline is now shipping oil from Edmonton to the West Coast. It is a major milestone, but there’s no ribbon cutting or public celebration. Our Kendall Sakowski joins us live from The Newsroom with more and Kendra. The TMX expansion face years of delays and cost overruns. How significant is a day like today? Well, it’s huge. This expansion nearly triples capacity, the ability to ship about 900,000 barrels of crude oil to the coast per day. But you’re right, the hurdles. Controversy surrounding this project, Those are hard to ignore. The project price tag, $34 billion, and it took more than four years to complete the twinning of the pipeline. Kinder Morgan backed out, leaving the federal government to step in and buy the pipeline in 2018 to salvage that construction. And in a rare move, Premier Smith is thanking the Trudeau government. She says getting oil exports to tidewater is a game changer for our province. Pipeline constraints have forced Canadian oil producers to sell oil at a discount, but TMX opens up new markets. Japan, China, Korea and India, a lot of customers that didn’t exist before today. There’s a real demand right now for the kind of oil that Alberta produces, the heavy oil. That’s why it’s going to places like China and India. And those US refiners are going to have to make sure they pay full price in order to get it, because they can’t get it from Venezuela or Mexico or other places. And so they don’t want to lose the supply from Canada. Trans Mountain Corporation says tankers will be receiving oil by mid-May. Now Ottawa bought the pipeline for $4.5 billion but says it does not want to be the long term owner and will launch a divestment process in due course. And again the cost balloon to 34 billion. So the question now is who is going to buy it and for how much? Back to you. It continues. Thanks, Kendra. Thank you.