“For the moment, eight tanks will be built to maintain supplies for the 680,000-BPD Keystone pipeline and also the planned Keystone XL pipeline system that will increase throughput to 1.1 MMBPD,” said Juan Carlos Morera, TransCanada’s lead specialist for terminals engineering and tanks.

The eight tanks will have a total capacity of 2.6 MMBbls, Gas Business Briefing finds.

“At a later stage, we have an option to add another four tanks at the Alberta site,” Morera said at this week’s Tank Storage Canada Conference and Exhibition in Calgary.
Morera said TransCanada is targeting commissioning the facilities in the fourth quarter of 2014.

In March, the company launched an an open season to solicit shipper commitments for the Keystone Hardisty Tank Terminal that will allow crude producers in Western Canada to access the Keystone Pipeline System.

The system currently ships crude from Canada to the US Midwest and to Cushing, Oklahoma.

Matthew Partridge, senior downstream analyst with Wood Mackenzie, said at the conference that oil sands producers in Alberta are under threat of some 1 MMBPD of output being land-locked by 2017, despite additional pipelines being built to access new markets in the US and Asia.

“Even if TMX or TransMountain Expansion, Keystone XL, Seaway reversal and the Pegasus pipelines are in operation, there would still be an issue of substantial volumes lying idle in the province,” Partridge said.

“With Bakken, Eagle Ford and Utica projected to produce 3 MMBPD by 2020, additional volumes of Western Canadian crude are unlikely to get into the US Midwest markets and we will see it moving to Eastern Canada,” he said.