Welcome to episode 364 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy journalist, Markham Hislop. The International Institute For Sustainable Development recently released a port a report titled Assessment of Fossil Fuel Subsidies in Canada, a case study of the Trans Mountain Pipeline. TMX, as it's commonly known, is a 525,000 barrel per day extension of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton, Alberta to Burnaby, British Columbia on Canada's West Coast. The government of Canada purchased the project from Kinder Morgan in 2018 for $4,500,000,000 thinking it would cost around 8,000,000,000 to finish.
Instead, it costs 34,000,000,000. Will oil company shippers pay the full freight to recover those costs? Or will the Canadian taxpayer be on the hook for the cost overruns? In this episode, I'll be talking to report author Tom Gunton. So welcome to Energy Talks, Tom.
Thank you, Mark.
This is this is, an interesting topic for me because, back in the spring, I wrote a Mia culpa, because in 2016, 2017, I was talking to economists, in Europe and the United States who were saying, we're not gonna see the energy transition really take off till the 2030s. You know, we'll see the EV, the inflection point for EV adoption, say, early 2030s, 2035. So my thinking at the time, because I was reporting on, the TMX in in those years, was that the if the transition's gonna be longer than we had had thought, then it made sense to build a pipeline and and and profit from greater exports of bitumen over to Asia, which was the rationale behind it. Of course, that was wrong. I mean, we now we see the energy transition, really took off after 2020, and the assumptions that I had been operating under were wildly optimistic or wildly wrong.
Let's put it that way. So I if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have supported the, the construction of the pipeline knowing what I know now, especially if I'd known it was gonna cost $34,000,000,000 to to build. Maybe we could start this interview with an overview of the analysis that you undertook.
Well, I've been following the Trans Mountain pipeline for some time, and we actually did a benefit cost study of the project before it was completed, back in 2016 and updated it in 2019. And, what we did is we looked at the Trans Mountain as an option to ship oil to market and looked at other pipelines and looked at what you just talked about, which was what where was oil demand going? And it was our conclusion at that time that based on oil production forecast, and the building of alternative pipelines, such as expansion of the system to the Gulf that there was sufficient pipeline capacity without Trans Mountain to meet the forecast demand. And so Trans Mountain was really surplus to Canadian requirements. The, the energy industry wanted to build it because they wanted to get access to another market through Tidewater.
But anyway, so we, we Kinder Morgan examined those factors, the changes in demand, the increased capacity of all competitive pipelines, and made the decision after it had received regulatory approval. It made the decision to shelve the project because the risks were simply deemed to be too high. It wasn't not gonna go ahead with it. And, that's when the federal government jumped in and, and essentially ignored the wisdom of Kinder Morgan who had said, hey, this this project no longer makes a lot of economic sense. And under pressure from the oil industry and the government of Alberta, the the government bought it and then proceeded to expand it without doing a comprehensive assessment, business case for the project.
At that time, as you say, the the the the cost was thought to be somewhere in the vicinity of around, had gone up from from, 5,400,000,000 when it was originally proposed to something probably in the range of 10 or 12,000,000,000, but the government never did an updated estimate of the cost. And so went ahead and built it and, and here we are 34,200,000,000 And so now when you take a look at the project, the question you ask, the Canadian taxpayers should ask is who's gonna pay for it? How are the costs gonna be distributed? And so what we did in our analysis is we used standard accepted techniques to assess the distribution of the cost to determine whether the tolls being set were going to be high enough to cover the costs of operating and building this pipeline. And as it turns out, the tolls are gonna be probably in the vicinity of only 1 half of what is required to cover the pipeline.
So of the 34,200,000,000 to cover the pipeline, about 15,400,000,000 of that is included in the determination for setting tolls, and 18,800,000,000 of the cost is omitted from the rate base for setting tolls. So that whole 18,800,000,000, there are not tolls to generate that cost.
We should point out for, Canadians who aren't aware, and we have a significant number of Americans and Europeans, who listen to the podcast, the Canadian Energy Regulator, which is the national regulator that that that, regulates interprovincial pipelines. So not pipelines within a province, but pipelines across a provincial at least one provincial border, which this one does, comes under the purview of the of the CER. And it holds hearings, if I understand this correctly, to determine what those tolls should be per barrel. And have I got that right?
That's correct. Yes.
Okay. And I wondered how this was going to play out because this has been an ongoing, conversation. And, I remember talking to a pipeline vice president years ago, and he said, look. Every pipeline is, you know, is a big mega project. The initial budget is nowhere near the final budget.
They all have cost overruns. They all in are inflated. I think what everybody, was surprised at was the degree of inflation. Going up, you know, 4, 4a half times the initial estimate. Tom, do do you have any insights into why this particular pipeline cost, as so much more than it was originally estimated?
Well, the one factor as you point out is that there's a what we call an iron law of large projects, and that is they always end up costing significantly more than what was forecast, and they always generate fewer benefits than was forecast. This one is particularly over budget compared to some of the other ones, no question. I know it's a combination of factors. It's just the general propensity of, project engineers, in this case, Kinder Morgan, underestimating the cost significantly but that's why Kinder Morgan shelved the project. It was it was clear to Kinder Morgan who no longer made, economic sense and they were concerned about the rising costs.
And this project had, some of it was due to things like we had a major flood here, COVID, but those factors don't explain much of the overrun. I mean, it's pretty standard to have large overruns on large projects. And and but, you know, what is done, you you mentioned that the Canadian Energy Regulator, the way these projects are regulated everywhere in the western world, is that the tolls are set by the energy regulator to cover whatever the costs are to ensure that the investor earns, a reasonable return on their investment in that project. And this pipeline's unprecedented because it's the only pipeline I'm aware of where the actual owner of the pipeline has requested tolls, which are significantly lower than what is required to cover the cost of the pipeline. So this will be the 1st major pipeline we've ever built in North America where the tolls don't come anywhere close to covering the costs.
And at the end of the day, the question that we have to ask is, you know, who should who should pay the costs of of shipping along the pipeline? Should it be the oil companies who are using the pipeline and wanted the pipeline? Should they cover the costs as they do everywhere else for every other pipeline they use or should it be the taxpayer? And the conclusion of our analysis is that this cost, which is up to 18,800,000,000 of losses, should should be covered by the oil companies who use the pipeline and their tolls should be increased as they're done everywhere else and every other pipeline to cover the costs.
We'll we'll we'll get to the federal government's, take on their regulation of, subsidies and in just a moment. Speaking of cost inflation, a couple of years ago, the Coastal GasLink gas, pipeline from, northeastern BC down to, over to Kitimat on the north, on on the sorry, the western coast of northwestern coast of of British Columbia, went from, if I if memory serves, 8,000,000,000 to 30,000,000,000. So there was kind of a similar magnitude of inflation of the cost. And I wonder may you may not know the answer to this question, but maybe you do. If in fact the tolls were set for that pipeline.
Now that would have been the Oil and Gas Commission of BC who would have done it, I assume. But the tolls were set to recover the full cost of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Yeah. No. We haven't looked at that one, and I don't know how the tolls are being set for that one. But, cert certainly, the ones regulated by, Canadian Energy Regulator, look at Enbridge's pipeline, the Keystone pipeline going down to the US. All of the tolls are set to fully cover the entire cost of operating those pipelines, except in this case.
And this is this is the one exception to the rule, where where the costs, where the tolls are not set to cover the cost of operation of this pipeline.
Okay. Now your calculation of the subsidy to the oil industry ranges from 8.7 to 18,800,000,000 in Canadian dollars, of course. And what explains the variability here?
Well, the amount of the subsidy really depends on what the what the loss is on the pipeline. And the loss in the pipeline in turn is gonna depend on the volume of shipments on that pipeline because obviously the more oil that's gets shipped on it, the more revenue the pipeline earns. It depends on on the assumptions about what your cost of capital is, to to finance the pipeline. What happens after, in 20 years when the current contracts expire? What what what are the new contracts that are put in place to cover the tools?
Are they gonna go down significantly? So we ran a number of different scenarios, based on alternative assumptions about volume, about, what would happen when the current contracts expire, what would happen to the capacity utilization of the pipeline, or the cost of capital. And that explains the, the difference, in the numbers. So it could be as high as 18,800,000,000 and as low as 8,700,000,000. I think it's probably gonna be up towards the higher end of that range.
But the bottom line is there is a significant subsidy. The oil companies are not covering the cost of shipping on this pipeline. The taxpayer is picking up a significant subsidy to them.
Tom, last year for the first time, the Canadian energy regulator in its, energy futures Canada Energy Futures report, an annual report on the state of the energy industry in Canada did a net zero analysis. And so they they and, I had the, the CER's chief economist, on this podcast, and and we talked about the potential after 2030, for, demand destruction to begin globally, the effect that that would have on prices, and the effect that lower prices would have on oil sands output, because we should point out that TMX is designed to ship diluted bitumen and, from the oil sands in Northern Alberta. And he said something I hadn't considered, but their modeling actually shows that if the oil sands companies have to bear the cost of emissions compliance under climate Canadian climate policy, that in fact, a number of them would fail and the supply, from the oil sands would drop during the during the 20 thirties. If that happens, that raises the the issue of, does TMX what what's the risk of it becoming a stranded asset?
Well, exactly. And the the one thing TMX does have, it it has, firm contracts to use 80% of its capacity for a 20 year period. And so that guarantees it that that no matter what, some oils the oil companies are gonna have to pay some revenue to ship on that. But it's after that period, that's a real question mark because all of the forecast show that there's going to be a decline in oil demand. The world is moving away from oil over the next couple of decades and depending on how fast we move away it could be up to a 75% decline in the demand.
It could be it could be significantly lower than that but demand is gonna go down. And Canada is the highest cost producer of oil in the world. And so Canada is going to bear the brunt, significant brunt of that decline in demand. Canadian production is gonna decline. You look at the net zero scenario from CER, it shows a significant decline in Canadian oil production.
And that means that it becomes a stranded asset that you put $34,000,000,000 into a pipeline that's not really even needed. And all that's gonna happen is that, that oil produce in the in the short run are gonna move their oil over from Enbridge's pipeline which already exists over to the new pipeline to fill it up to meet their contracts. And after that, we're gonna have, excess pipeline space that that we never required and the 34,000,000,000 is essentially essentially done. And then the other interesting part about this, is that even at these subsidized rates, tolls, it still will cost the oil companies more to ship on Trans Mountain pipeline to market than it will on the existing Enbridge pipeline to the US Gulf. So, so this is a, this is a project in which everybody is worse off.
The oil companies are worse off because their shipping costs are higher in this pipeline. The taxpayer is really worse off because we're covering around 50% of the cost of shipping. We're we're subsidizing the Orville companies. So really everybody is is potentially worse off with the result of this project.
Let me if memory serves, again, I haven't looked at these numbers for a few years, years, but, if memory serves, it costs, Canadian producers $9 to get a barrel of, dilbit from from, Hardisty, near Edmonton down to the Gulf Coast. And our well, that's roughly 3000 kilometers, give or take. And, of course, the distance from Hardisty to to Burnaby is roughly a 1000 kilometers. So are you arguing that it costs more than $9 to get the oil for and TMX to the to the, to to Burnaby, even though it's a a third of the distance?
Yeah. Well, the tolls on, on Trans Mountain Pipeline, the subsidized tolls are set depending on the contracts, terms, etcetera. You're and that's that's how I go Canadian dollars here. Your $9 is a US dollar amount. It was about $12.
And then you have to put it on a tanker because you're not at market. And if you ship it to China, it's gonna end up costing you about $24, on spot prices to ship it to China. But, and if you ship it down to the US coast, it's gonna cost you, probably, you know, $17, $18 kinda range. And if you ship it on Enbridge to the US Gulf now, they actually just cut their rates. It's it's in the vicinity of around $12.
So, yeah, it is more expensive to ship on Trans Mountain pipeline to market than it is to ship on the existing pipeline. And it's so we have a crazy situation because the the Genbridge has, unused capacity. It has the expansion to still expand their capacity even beyond now to to to take this soil, and it and it would have been able to ship the oil at lower cost than is than is being shipped on Trans Mountain. So, at the end of the day, it's it was it it's a it's a bad project for everybody. So the question is now who who's gonna pay who's gonna cover the losses?
Should it decay taxpayer or the oil industry who ships on the pipeline?
You know, that's that's a really interesting point that Enbridge still has excess capacity. Because I remember at the time, you know, it came out, somebody sussed it out out of a report someplace that the number where the number had been I don't wanna say buried, but, essentially, Enbridge had 500,000 barrels a day of potential capacity that it could create and could add to its existing system by debottlenecking and by adding, you know, additives to make the to reduce the friction in the pipeline so that you could add more and you could change pressures. And, anyway, there were potential 500,000 barrels. And if you looked at it, you went, well, why do they need TMX then if you've got these 500,000 barrels potentially available? And Enbridge would always say, oh, we're gonna assess that in a year or 2, you know, after decisions had already been made around around TMX.
So there were a lot of unasked questions, about this project that never did get answers, and I think we're only getting beginning to to sniff them out now that makes it worse. And here's another one, and maybe you do know about this one. I am being told, that the tankers out of Burnaby cannot be loaded a 100% in full capacity because of the shallowness of the draft in the in the in the, inlet. Is that the case?
Yeah. They and they're so they're and they're using smaller tankers. So the tanker shipment costs are are higher. And when you roll as I say, when you roll off that in the tankers plus the plus plus the even at the subsidized rates on the pipeline, it's, it's more expensive to ship to the US West Coast and to China than it is to ship on Enbridge to the US Gulf. And your point about Enbridge is absolutely right.
I mean, we did point this out during the hearings. There there was about 500,000 barrels of capacity that could be added very at very low cost the way you've described it. Plus, they had they were building line 3, which is another 370,000 barrels of capacity. So there was lots of low cost capacity that was available to accommodate increased production from the oil sands without Trans Mountain. So, the project never should have gone ahead, under those circumstances when we had a lower cost alternative, pipeline options than Trans Mountain.
Unfortunately, it did go ahead, and, we are where we are now.
There's, this is more of a maybe it's a philosophical question, but, I've been reading a lot of, oil demand modeling these days.
Yeah.
If you if you need something to to put you to sleep at night, you know, read OPEC's World Oil Out Outlook of 2050 or, you know, one of the IEA's modeling. But the point here is that the 2 organizations have wildly divergent oil demand scenarios. The OPEC says that oil demand is going to increase to from 103,000,000 barrels a day today to 120,000,000 barrels a day by 2050. The IEA says that because of rapidly electrifying transportation globally, that it will actually peak oil demand will peak in 2030, plateau for a couple of years, and then begin to decline fairly rapidly and might get down to, like, 2050, down to about, like, 57,000,000 barrels a day. The it's very clear to me that the Alberta government, the industry as a whole, and its supporters are clearly in the OPEC camp, And they think that any chance to build infrastructure so that they can increase exports and tap into these, what they believe will be, burgeoning oil markets, up to 2030 and beyond.
And I wonder if there's any I've been trying to find out if the Canadian government ever seriously considered, you know, the other demand scenarios as, like, the ones that from the IEA, which if you believe those, you would never have approved TMX in the first place. I just your take on that.
Well, I think I think you're absolutely right. And it's not just IEA. I mean, BP, if you look at their forecast, they're even more pessimistic than the IEA is. And we have right now I mean China 40% of the cars being sold in China are electric today. And so Chinese oil demand is gonna drop as we electrify.
So all of this is happening. And and we pointed this out in in the hearings. When you look at the demand forecast, even the demand forecast from the Canadian Energy Regulator, there was insufficient increase in production to justify the construction of both the expansion on the Enbridge pipeline and TMX. It just there was not going to be enough oil to fill all of these pipelines and it's become even more pessimistic since then. And it's, it's really unfortunate because, the, the the you you you talked you talked about stranded assets, the costs incurred to build pipelines you don't really need at these kinds of costs is is a cost which is borne by everyone and and makes it even more challenging for the industry going forward.
So, you're absolutely right. I mean, we we we didn't we weren't smart when we looked at at building this pipeline. We built it now, and, we've gonna have a stranded asset at a huge cost to, to to the Canadian taxpayers and and ultimately to the oil industry.
Well, you know, you made the point earlier that, you know, oil companies are on the hook for 20 year contracts, which is great as long as they're solvent. Not so great if they're bankrupt. And I've made the point, in fact, I I made it, to an an oil get oil and gas, organization not too long ago, that, play Christensen from the Harvard Business School is very famous for his idea about disruptive innovations, came out in the late 19 nineties. And I pointed out to the oil group that electric electrified transportation is a disruptive innovation. Right.
And Christensen says that even well run profitable, corporations faced with an, disruptive innovation can lose their customers very quickly and collapse. They can fail. And so you have the prospect. You have a disruptive innovation. You have a for you have many forecasts like the IEA and Bloomberg and BP and on, and I would name probably a dozen of them.
You have them forecasting demand that would suggest the disruptive innovation is going to take customers away after 2030, which is only like 5 years away. I that is a scenario that is simply not considered seriously in either Ottawa or Edmonton and Calgary. Like, they just dismiss it as if it's fantasy. When it's backed up by theory, evidence, and modeling. And it boggles the mind, my mind anyway, as to folks investing tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars of private capital and a public capital, and not even cons considering a possible worst case scenario.
Yeah. I mean, as and as you but as as you point out, it's not even a worst case scenario. I mean, there is virtually a consensus that the world is moving away from oil other than than the OPEC forecast, which are self serving. But, so what do you do under those circumstances? You can either ignore it and and continue to invest hoping it's gonna grow and waste 1,000,000,000 of dollars of capital that could have been better spent aiding with the transition to, for alternative investments to meet that declining demand in oil and look for alternative outlets.
But what we're doing is you said we're doubling down, we're doubling down on oil. We're putting more money into oil in the face of declining demand which does not make a lot of economic sense.
Well here's my question for you though. You were at the hearings, you were at the toll hearings, and the pipeline approval hearings. Were these con did these conversations not take place?
Well, the conversations on TMX unfortunately was during COVID and so none of the hearings were were in person. So they didn't have the same kind of hearing process as they normally did. We submitted evidence in which we use the demand forecast from the, from the Canadian Energy Regulator. We use the pipeline supply and showing that Trans Mountain was not required. And, we didn't, we weren't given an opportunity to present it.
There was no interchange on it. We just submitted the reports. And what the Canadian Energy Regulator has done is it's really abdicated its responsibility to make sure that these projects make sense. And instead of looking at supply and demand and saying, okay. How many pipelines do we need?
Let's make sure we don't overbuild. Let's make sure we have a good match between supply and demand for pipelines. And demand for pipelines. They just made the simple decision that, if the pipeline company wants to build this, we'll go ahead and approve it because they're the business people. They understand it.
And they did that with Northern Gateway. They did that with Keystone XL, and they did that with Trans Mountain and with Enbridge's, line 3. And and just think, they approved all of those projects. And all of those projects would would have gone ahead, based on the CR approval. The only thing that stopped Keystone from going ahead was the US government and the Canadian government said no to gateway for environmental reasons.
But but you add those up 6, you that, you know, it's almost 2,000,000 barrels of an additional pipeline space that we would have right now that would all be sitting empty. So the Canadian Energy Regulator has really got to change the way it approaches evaluating projects to make sure it does a due diligence analysis. It's just abdicated its responsibility for a sound project evaluation and given it over to the oil companies.
Now you do propose in the report a means of recovering the subsidy, the cost overrun of a dollar to $2 Canadian over a 10 year period being tacked on to, a levy being tacked on to to to exports. Maybe you could explain that to us.
Yeah. So that's, so we're looking at a loss somewhere between 8.7 and 18,800,000,000. So if we had a levy of a dollar to $2 a barrel for 10 years, that would generate enough to cover up to 18,800,000,000. So you'd actually set the levy to what the loss turned out to be. We have a, we'll have a better idea of that when, and if the government sells the pipeline, what somebody's willing to pay for it.
But, you know, interestingly, this is exactly what the Alberta government did back in the 1980s. It imposed a levy called the top gas levy on all natural gas shipments on TransCanada pipelines when TransCanada ran into difficulty because it had over contracted for natural gas that it couldn't pay for and take or pay contracts. And so the government of Alberta build out TransCanada and imposed a levy which every consumer in Eastern Canada paid to build out TransCanada. So this would be a similar, you know, the precedent was set. This would be similar where the Canadian oil industry itself would pay a levy, a small levy of this magnitude, to return cover cover the subsidy and and make sure the Canadian taxpayer wasn't out.
And, you know, ironically, Enbridge just reduced its tolls by about a dollar 60 a Canadian on its pipelines, a month ago. So it would be you could just take that room that was given back by Enbridge and you would pay back the, losses to the Canadian taxpayer. The oil industry would end up paying the full cost of the pipeline as it does for every other pipeline, in North America.
What has the federal government, prime minister Justin Trudeau, natural resources minister Jonathan Wilkinson, Have they addressed this issue publicly at all?
No. Because they're still in a denial of of losing money on this. The so so so our report was really the first report that was independent comprehensive assessment of now that we know the pipeline is done and how much it costs and the tolls that you're gonna asking for and are likely gonna get approved within that range. We now, we, this was the first estimate of what the net loss is to the Canadian taxpayer and the subsidy on the pipeline. So this report was just came out a couple of weeks ago.
So we're hoping to have an ongoing conversation, with the Canadian government and with others saying, hey. Look. The Canadian oil industry should pay the cost of shipping their oil on the pipeline, not the Canadian taxpayer. That's what's done everywhere else in the world. So let's impose a small levy and protect the Canadian taxpayer from these losses.
And, I don't think too many people would agree would disagree with, that view that the Canadian oil industry, not the taxpayers, should cover the cost of shipping their oil.
You know, this is not the only, instance where taxpayers are being required to to pay the freight or likely to pay the freight for the oil and gas industry. We've done a lot of work work here at Energy Media about the unpaid, unfunded, environmental liabilities in the Alberta oil and gas industry, and and the estimate that came out of the Alberta energy regulator in 2018 was $260,000,000,000. And we're we're just seeing now, you know, they're not paying their taxes. They're they're not paying the full cost of of reclamation. There are 80,000 wells approximately, and they're inactive less than that are probably gonna be there for forever.
And, you know, this seems to be another instance where the taxpayer steps up, and I interviewed, oil economist, Phil Verlager, the American economist who used to work in the Ford and Carter administrations, very well known down south of the border. And he said, this is the sign of a sunset industry. They're trying to transfer costs, as much of the their costs as possible onto the public, onto government. And I think that given, you know, unfunded liabilities, this this particular project, other issues, there should be a big flashing neon sign, and yet we're not paying attention to it.
No. You're absolutely right. There there are other components to these losses as well. And and in the last few years, the oil industry has been making record profits. So it's not like they're they don't have the funding, to to cover the cost of their own operations.
I mean, they've been making record record profits the, the last last few years. So it's really up to governments to come along and say, hey, you're a profitable industry. These are your costs. You should pay them, not the taxpayer. And it's, that that that is clearly the direction we need to go. Otherwise, when the world changes, as you say, it's gonna be too late to get them to pay for it.
I remember a couple of years ago, I was looking at investor presentations from the oil sands companies, and every one of them was was promising investors they would return 75 to or or more percent of their free cash flow, back to investors. Now that might be interesting if a 100% of those were Canadian, but in this particular case, the investors are 75% of them are not Canadian. So, essentially, what we're doing is we're giving foreign based investors as much money of, basic as as Verlager told me. He says that's returning capital at those rates. You know?
They're basically the investors are saying, okay. This is a sunset industry. We want our capital back as fast as you can get it to us, and and and doing it, at the expense of the Canadian taxpayer who is now gonna have to, you know, potentially pay for these liabilities by, you know, paying for the the subsidized the cost of TMX. I mean, that's essentially what it comes down to is is foreign shareholders, foreign investors are being subsidized at the expense of taxpayers.
Yep. Absolutely right. So, we should as I say, in this particular case, there's an easy solution on the Trans Mountain, which is a small levy, for a 10 year period, and we will recover up to 18 up to 18,800,000,000 in losses. So we'd at least protect the Canadian taxpayer from incurring a loss of subsidizing the transportation costs of the oil industry. There's no reason why.
And then we got, you know, the larger question here is you gotta look at how do you prevent this from happening in the future? What sort of mechanism should we set in place to make sure that the investments we make, particularly taxpayer investments are justifiable and make a lot of economic sense. And there we got to, as I said, I'll go back to the Canadian Energy Regulator. There's gotta be a comprehensive economic social benefit cost evaluations before we spend dollars to make sure those dollars are well spent. In this case, we didn't do it.
And there's a huge loss to the Canadian economy as a result of making what is an uneconomic investment.
Well, Tom, thank you very much for this. Really appreciate it, and we'll see if in fact the, our the government officials take up your suggestion of put putting a levy on barrels of oil to recover the cost of TMX. I'm frankly skeptical, but we'll see what they do. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much. Take care.