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Enbridge (NYSE:ENB) is bullish on its Mainline pipeline system, with forecasts that Canadian oil production could exceed the country’s pipeline export capacity as early as 2026, CEO Greg Ebel said Wednesday following the company’s investor day, according to Bloomberg.
The CEO said he now believes Canadian oil production will grow by more than 500K bbl/day in the next 3-4 years, a shift from recent conventional wisdom that the Mainline network would suffer when the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion opened and began offering oil companies access to new export markets off the West Coast.
“As soon as people think there’s too much pipeline capacity, there’s more production being produced and more need for that production, so you need pipelines,” Ebel said.
“TMX was supposed to come in before the end of the decade… and it is still not quite in service,” and oil companies have been ramping up output in anticipation of the new export capacity, “and as such, the need for additional capacity is still going to be required.” Ebel said.
Crude oil production in Alberta reached an all-time high in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, with its best January ever during 2024 with output of 3.81M bbl/day.
At its investor day, Enbridge (ENB) reaffirmed its 2024 forecast for 3M bbl/day of oil shipments on its Mainline network, only slightly below the 3.1M bbl/day annual average achieved in 2023.
