Pulse Of The Heartland Slows

TransCanada Corp.’s Heartland Pipeline project is being dialed back from its previous expected in-service date, the company said during a recent earnings call. The project was originally expected to enter service during the second half but construction has been slowed to account for crude production cuts in Alberta and other pipeline delays.

“On our Heartland Pipeline, we continue to enjoy solid commercial support, and we’ve elected to proceed with the project at a time when the committed volumes require transportation,” Paul Miller, TransCanada’s president for liquids pipelines, said. “We continue to contract up Heartland, but we are aligning the in-service date with Heartland when we need to move those volumes to the marketplace.”

When those volumes will need to be moved to market is unclear, and the company did not disclose a new expected in-service date for the pipeline.

“A lot of the commercial underpinning for Heartland is tied to Energy East and Keystone XL,” Miller explained. Both Energy East and Keystone XL have faced a variety of project delays—including a change of scope for Energy East when its original design called for a Québec marine terminal near a Beluga habitat, and an extensive legal battle in the U.S. over Keystone XL’s route.

TransCanada will revisit setting a new in-service date for Heartland once it becomes clearer to company leadership when the two projects will enter service, “or as we contract independent volumes on Heartland,” Miller said.

The company filed a permit application for Heartland’s terminal facility in May 2013 and for the pipeline in October 2013 with the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). In February 2014, the application for the terminal facility was approved. In May 2015, the entire project was approved by the AER.

When the Heartland project enters service, it could transport up to 900,000 barrels per day (bbl/d) of crude oil on a 125-mile pipeline connecting the Edmonton, Alberta, region to facilities in Hardisty, Alberta. The associated terminal will have a storage capacity of up to 1.9 million bbl of crude oil.