Posted on July 8, 2026
By Falice Chin
At the southern edge of the Port of Vancouver, the heavily engineered mudflats of Roberts Bank are already the site of a major port expansion more than a decade in the making. Now, Alberta wants to layer on another megaproject—an oil export terminal designed to accommodate some of the world’s largest crude tankers.
For days, the debate over Alberta’s proposed second West Coast pipeline has centred on the obvious question of whether Canada can, or should, build another multi-billion-dollar interprovincial, linear energy infrastructure.
But what happens at the end of the line may prove just as consequential.
“It’s not like you’re building a dock at the lake,” said Ken Veldman, a senior strategic advisor with Prairie Sky Strategy who spent 13 years working for the Prince Rupert Port Authority.
“You have to build some kind of infrastructure that gets you into the depth of the water that operationally makes sense,” he said.
The province’s 89-page submission to the Major Projects Office sketches out what would effectively become Canada’s first purpose-built Pacific crude export hub within the Delta, B.C. network of terminals.
It is no small feat.
The vision begins with an industrial complex covering 260 hectares—roughly two-thirds the size of Vancouver’s Stanley Park—anchored by a tank farm with 15 storage units altogether capable of holding 6.5 million barrels of crude. From there, pipelines would feed a five-kilometre causeway to an offshore loading facility with two berths designed to accommodate “very large crude carriers,” or VLCCs.
If approved, the pipeline would arrive alongside the already greenlit Roberts Bank Terminal 2 expansion, a three-berth project expected to begin operating in the mid-2030s. That massive project, which has undergone its own lengthy regulatory process, is expected to boost the Port of Vancouver’s container capacity by up to 50 percent and unlock $100 billion in annual trade.
Given the aggressive timeline for Alberta’s pipeline plan, with construction expected to commence by as early as 2027 and oil flowing a few years later, it’s unclear how the addition of an oil terminal would affect the planning and procurement currently in the works.
“It’s important to keep in mind that these are two separate projects,” said Haley Hodgson, spokesperson for the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority.
“Alberta’s proposal is still at a conceptual stage, and details regarding route and infrastructure have not been provided to us.”
What are VLCCs?
Also known as supertankers, VLCCs are among the largest ships ever built.
Stretching roughly 330 metres—longer than three football fields laid end to end—these floating giants can carry up to two million barrels of crude in a single voyage. That’s around three times the amount transported by the mid-sized Aframax tankers that currently load at Trans Mountain’s Westridge Marine Terminal in Burnaby.
“Right now, the ships are in the range of 600,000 barrels, which are not fully loaded because of the draft issues,” said Richard Masson, former CEO of the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission.
In shipping, “draft” refers to how deep a vessel sits in the water. The more oil a tanker carries, the deeper its hull sinks. Because Burnaby lacks sufficient water depth, some partially loaded ships must transfer their cargo to larger vessels off the U.S. West Coast before continuing across the Pacific.
“That’s not a very efficient system,” said Masson. “It costs a lot of money to do that.”
Loading VLCCs directly at Roberts Bank, which is about 50 kilometres southwest of Westridge, would eliminate the extra transfer, allowing Alberta bitumen to leave Canada in the most economical tankers used in global oil trade.
“If you can get your oil onto those sorts of ships, it’s very low transportation cost,” said Jackie Forrest, executive director of the ARC Energy Research Institute.
“You can move your oil halfway around the world for a dollar or two a barrel,” she added. “If you’re in these smaller ships, suddenly it’s $4 or $5 a barrel.”
Can Roberts Bank handle ships that large?
Existing berths at Roberts Bank have controlling depths of about 19 to 22 metres, making them among the deepest commercial shipping facilities on Canada’s West Coast.
A fully loaded VLCC typically draws about 20 metres of water, or seven storeys below the waterline, putting Roberts Bank in the right range—but only just.
“If you built the causeway an extra [kilometre or two] out, maybe you’d get to deeper water. That’s just a possibility,” said Veldman.
Engineers must account for under-keel clearance—the safety margin between a ship’s hull and the seabed—as well as tides, wave action, tug operations, and berth design. Of course, the supertankers don’t have to be fully loaded, either.
“It’s not all black and white,” Veldman said. “There are operational solutions to these kinds of depths.”
Unlike the sheltered confines of Burrard Inlet farther north, Roberts Bank sits exposed to the Strait of Georgia. Any dredging would have to extend far beyond where the ships dock. Engineers would also need to ensure that a VLCC can safely approach and manoeuvre through waters where the seabed is continually being reshaped by sediment carried downstream from the Fraser River.
“Because you’re on a river delta, that’s consistently adding to the silt aspect of it,” said Veldman. “I would expect there would be a need for ongoing maintenance dredging in that case.”
Why TMX chose Burnaby
During planning for the Trans Mountain expansion more than a decade ago, the pipeline company evaluated Roberts Bank as an alternative to expanding its longtime home terminal in Burnaby.
Engineering documents filed with the former National Energy Board envisioned many of the same features now appearing in Alberta’s current proposal. These included deep-water berths, a larger tank farm, additional utility infrastructure, and roughly seven kilometres of offshore trestle.
Ultimately, Trans Mountain chose to stick with Burnaby, citing the “significantly greater cost” of the Roberts Bank option, which it estimated would add roughly $1.2 billion to the project.
But the price premium was only part of the story.
Trans Mountain also highlighted engineering challenges, environmentally sensitive coastal habitat, and the difficulty of fitting another major industrial project into one of Canada’s busiest ports and transportation corridors—on the doorstep of Metro Vancouver communities including Delta, Tsawwassen, and Richmond.
Many of those same considerations now loom over Alberta’s proposal.
“It’s not like you’re sitting on the Prairies where you’ve got lots of room to manoeuvre,” said Veldman. “Routing through the Lower Mainland? It’s a pretty dense area. And the closer you get to Roberts Bank…you’re going to get into some sensitive areas, you’re going to get into some wetlands.”
Alberta’s own submission acknowledges that many key decisions remain unresolved.
While the government identifies two possible paths west of Hope, B.C. that broadly follow the Trans Mountain right-of-way, it says the final alignment will continue to evolve through consultations with Indigenous communities, landowners, and local governments.
If it all comes together, this pipeline—together with three other expansion proposals announced over the past year—could add more than two million barrels per day of new export capacity for Canada.
For much of its length, the new southern route benefits from following an existing line already familiar to regulators. But the final approach into Roberts Bank—and the proposed marine terminal itself—remain the least-defined and least-understood parts of the vision.
