Kinder Morgan Canada has given the National Energy Board updated plans to expand the 60-year old Trans Mountain pipeline.
However the formal application is slated to be filed by the end of the year.
Twinning the pipeline between Alberta's Strathcona county and Burnaby will boost capacity to 890-thousand barrels a day.
Kinder Morgan's Carey Johanesson admits the project, worth more than five billion dollars, was a key issue leading up to last week's provincial election. "We're going to work with whichever government people in BC have elected. We've been having meetings with the government on the regulatory side. We've been meeting with the BC Oil and Gas Commission and BC Environmental Assessment Office and a number of the agencies and you'll see that's going to continue."
Johannesson says work continues to make the formal application by the end of this year.
"It's going to be a huge effort to pull this application together. There's a lot of work we need to do from a scientific and engineering perspective and environmental perspective, as well as all the work we need to do on the stakeholder side and aboriginal side. You've got to include all of that information into the application, so that's really the driver for it." NDP leader Adrian Dix ran into trouble when he announced he would not support the original project, unless improvements were made.