Canada’s South Bow and U.S.-based Bridger Pipeline plan to jointly develop a new oil pipeline from Guernsey, Wyoming, to Cushing, Oklahoma, the companies told Reuters on Tuesday.
The project will be developed along a corridor acquired from another company, South Bow and Bridger said in an email. The companies said their priority was to engage landowners and communities along the proposed route.
The pipeline would be the third leg of a bigger project to move oil from Alberta to the Cushing hub.
A J.P. Morgan research report last week said a joint venture between South Bow and Bridger acquired the right-of-way of the Liberty pipeline from Tallgrass Energy. The Liberty Pipeline was a cancelled project that originally aimed to move oil from the Rockies and North Dakota Bakken production areas to Cushing, Oklahoma.
Tallgrass did not immediately respond to a request for a comment, while Bridger and South Bow declined to confirm details of the acquisition. South Bow and Bridger have separately proposed an Alberta-to-Guernsey, Wyoming, oil pipeline, called Prairie Connector, that could increase Canada’s crude exports to the U.S. by more than 12%, bringing much-needed export capacity to Canada.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed in April an order granting a cross-border permit to that project, a partial revival of Keystone XL. In 2021, former President Joe Biden formally revoked the permit needed to build Keystone XL, the last major pipeline proposed between Canada and the United States.
While Prairie Connector would take a different route through the U.S. than Keystone XL, South Bow’s portion would use about 150 km (93 miles) of pipeline in Canada that is built and sitting idle. That pipe would connect to Bridger’s proposed pipeline in Montana and extend about 645 miles (1,038 km) to Guernsey.
“The third leg is an imperative piece of the overall project. There is currently no significant oil egress capacity out of that Wyoming/Colorado area to major hubs like Cushing. Thus, you need a major new build project to carry that oil from Wyoming to an oil hub,” said Matthew Lewis, founder of Plainview Energy Analytics.
South Bow plans to restart work on its portion of Prairie Connector around the second quarter of 2027 and expects the pipeline to be in service around the fourth quarter of 2028, according to a filing with the Canada Energy Regulator. The company said last month it had secured the shipper commitments it was seeking to advance the project.
(Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston and Amanda Stephenson in Calgary; Editing by Liz Hampton, Rod Nickel)