The biggest buyer of Canadian crude leaving this country by ship is no longer the United States. It is China.
A new TD Economics report puts the figure at more than 200,000 barrels each day flowing to Chinese refineries by late 2025. Two years ago that number was effectively a rounding error. The difference is one piece of steel in the ground, the Trans Mountain expansion, which only began moving barrels in 2024.
Every argument about diversification that Alberta made for twenty years, in hearings, in court, in op-ed pages, was a theory to the people blocking it. This is the theory with an invoice attached.
What One Pipeline Proved
The mechanics are worth spelling out. Before the expansion, nearly every exported barrel rode pipe south and priced against a single customer. Open one route to tidewater and Asian refiners started bidding on Alberta barrels within months. Buyers were never the missing ingredient. Access was.
That shift also changes the negotiating table nobody can avoid this summer. A country whose crude has two exits negotiates differently with Washington than a country whose crude has one. The 200,000 barrels heading west each day are doing diplomatic work no communique ever managed.
The Conservative Case Still Says Build
The same TD report examines the proposed new line to the coast, and here the detail matters. TD’s volume assumptions run more conservative than the province’s. It still concludes the project would be a meaningful lift for the national economy, raising Canada’s crude export capacity by close to 20% and better than doubling what can reach overseas markets.
Read that carefully. The cautious math, run by a bank with no stake in Alberta’s feelings, lands on build. When the skeptical scenario and the optimistic scenario point the same direction, the argument is over and only the schedule is left.
Buyers Exist. Serve Them.
The West Coast Oil Pipeline application is sitting with the federal Major Projects Office right now, a million barrels a day of proposed capacity with the demand signal already flashing on the other side of the Pacific. The earnings season opening in Calgary this week shows the basin producing records into the capacity it has.
The old excuse was that no one would want the oil. The customers have now outrun the infrastructure. What remains is the only question that ever mattered. Does Canada build the export system its own customers are asking for, or does it study the opportunity until somebody else supplies it?
Alberta’s answer has been on file for two decades. The buyers just co-signed it.
If the customers are already there, what exactly is Canada waiting for?
