This story has been updated.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has confirmed that an oil sands pipeline to the British Columbia coast, now officially titled the Pacific Link Pipeline, will be designated as a project of national interest under the Building Canada Act.

The announcement took place 50 years to the day after then-consultant physicist Amory Lovins published Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?, the landmark analysis in Foreign Affairs magazine that first charted a course to we would now call a decarbonized economy.

The designation, the first under the legislation previously known as Bill C-5, doesn’t mean the line is a done deal, The Canadian Press reports. But it streamlines and simplifies rules, timelines, and oversight to help make it a reality,.

The goal is to get consultations, environmental safeguards, financing and Indigenous partnerships completed by Sept. 1, 2027, to clear the way for construction to begin.

“A pipeline to the West Coast is part of our mission to transform our economy to double our non-U.S. exports over the next decade,” Carney said in an appearance at the oil sands hub of Fort McMurray, with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith by his side. “Today, 90% of Alberta’s oil goes to the U.S.,” and “Pacific Link will materially reduce that dependence by allowing us to export an additional one million barrels a day to growing markets in Asia.”

In November 2025, Ottawa and Alberta signed a sweeping and controversial energy pact which committed the federal government to declaring a pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast a project in the national interest.

In May, Carney and Smith signed a “sledgehammer” implementation agreement for the energy deal which set a deadline of Oct. 1 for a decision on the designation for the pipeline, with analysts warning the agreement would boost Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 230 million tonnes. That agreement also said the pipeline’s construction and the construction of the Pathways carbon capture project would be “mutually dependent,” a requirement that was later watered down.

In August, Ottawa posted in the Canada Gazette that it intended to move ahead with the national interest designation.

The notice said Indigenous consultation was already under way. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson told the Globe and Mail earlier this week he expects the Major Projects Office to complete its work on time, allowing the project to receive the designation.

The other condition on the original plan was that a new pipeline would be contingent on private sector investors coming to the table. That requirement mostly evaporated after Ottawa presumably scoured the globe for any private backers willing to bet on a likely future stranded asset. When Carney and Smith unveiled a detailed plan in July, it showed 90% of the estimated $35.2 to $43.7 billion project costs to be borne by governments, with Hodgson declaring that arrangement a “good investment for Canadian taxpayers.”

The only private sector player is the Pembina Pipeline Corp., CP reports. The company entered into a non-binding agreement earlier this year for a 10% stake during construction of the proposed pipeline, with the option for up to another 10% interest once the project enters commercial operation.

Federal and Alberta taxpayers will split the rest of the cost through Crown-owned Trans Mountain Corporation and the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission.

In the weeks following that announcement, Energy Mix readers came up with their own list of better ideas for investing public funds.

Lance Mortlock, managing partner at EY Canada, told CP there’s a “chicken and egg” scenario between construction of a massive new pipeline and expansion of oil sands production to fill that pipeline over the long term. None of his analysis appeared to factor in the accelerating, global shift to low-carbon energy sources that are more affordable, quicker to deploy, less vulnerable to the 14 price and supply shocks that oil and gas markets have produced since the 1970s—and less prone to fry the atmosphere when used as directed.

Mortlock’s take is that fossil producers have in recent years shied away from big-ticket investments, in part due to a shortage of pipeline infrastructure to bring their oil to market, CP writes.

“My sense is they’ve been waiting to see if some of the conditions start to change,” he said.

Canada’s largely U.S-owned oil sands industry has welcomed Ottawa’s moves to simplify the regulatory process, roll back Trudeau-era environmental policies and beef up tax incentives for new investments. Smaller scale, shorter-term pipeline expansion projects to the U.S. and West Coast are now in the works.

“We will start to see the companies develop big capital projects again. Do I think that we’re going to see the mega mines that we saw 10 years ago? Probably not. But do I think we’re going to 150,000, 200,000-barrel-a-day in situ expansion? Yeah, for sure,” Mortlock said, referring to steam-driven operations with a smaller footprint but the same or equivalent downstream carbon emissions.

“And now the work is beginning at some of these oil sands companies to say, ‘Well, what does that look like? What kind of assets would we develop? How big would we develop them? What’s the sequencing of those assets?’”

Thursday’s announcement is the second major energy announcement this week, CP notes.

On Tuesday, the partners behind the LNG Canada natural gas export facility in Kitimat, B.C., gave the green light to an expansion that would double capacity.

The main body of this report was first published by The Canadian Press on Oct. 1, 2026.

— With files from Nick Murray, Nick Wells, Lauren Krugel, Dayne Patterson, and Daniel Johnson.