The cost to expand the Trans Mountain oil pipeline that Justin Trudeau’s government bought from Kinder Morgan Inc. has jumped by 70% to nearly $17 billion, potentially challenging the viability of the line from Canada’s oil heartland to the Pacific Coast.

The new estimate of C$21.4 billion ($16.8 billion) includes the cost of enhancements, changes, delays, financing, as well as the impacts of the pandemic and last year’s floods in British Columbia, according to a statement released Friday by Trans Mountain Corp., which was bought in 2018 to save the expansion project from being scrapped.

“A C$9 billion increase is just huge,” Richard Masson, executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s public policy school, said on BNN Bloomberg Television. “Some of these costs flow through to the shippers through higher tolls. A lot of them don’t. So it’s going to lower the overall economic value of this and mean less money as we try and sell it as taxpayers to some private-sector entity.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-18/trans-mountain-oil-pipeline-expansion-cost-soars-to-17-billion