An oil shipper on Canada's Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) project said on Monday, January 23, that the filling of oil in the new pipeline extension would begin late this year (2023), with the pipeline expected to be fully operational in early 2024, Reuters reported.

The Canadian State-owned Trans Mountain pipeline, built to transport crude oil from oil sands in Alberta to the Pacific Coast, will boost crude transport nearly threefold from the current 300,000 bpd to 890,000 barrels per day at the end of the expansion project.

Although the highly-priced project, estimated to cost $16.00 billion (C$21.4 billion), lags behind schedule, its completion will open up a major export route to Asian markets, providing a major boost to Canadian oil producers, with MEG, a leading oil sands producer already securing 20,000 bpd on the pipeline.

"We're being told linefill potentially at the end of 2023 and fully operational in the first quarter," MEG Energy CEO Derek Evans told Reuters.

According to Trans Mountain, the expansion would be mechanically completed in the third quarter of 2023.