Today, while annual revenue is down at about $9-billion, the company makes much more money, with a 2008 profit of $1.4-billion, and its assets are worth $44.2-billion, approaching double what it was a decade ago.
TransCanada's web is wide. Beyond its oil ambitions, it has a sprawling natural gas pipeline system, which it hopes to expand into Alaska and the Northwest Territories. It also is a major power generator and is particularly active in Ontario, where it is refurbishing nuclear facilities on the Bruce peninsula, and in October won a $1.2-billion contract to build a new gas-fired power plant near Toronto.
In the gas pipeline business, attention once again turns to the fate of the star-crossed Mackenzie Valley project, which has been mired in a regulatory morass since 2004. An environmental-social review of the pipeline was finally released in the last week of December and the National Energy Board is expected to make a final ruling in 2010.
During the long review, a large new bounty of gas in the form of shale reserves has emerged throughout North America, a reversal of the seeming lack of supply when the Mackenzie process began. But to Mr. Kvisle, all sources of gas will be needed, including Alaskan, where TransCanada is working with Exxon Mobil Corp. to build a line.
Because of the potential of shale gas – from which three billion cubic feet of gas a day or more could come from northeast B.C. alone – the $16-billion Mackenzie pipeline to open up the region around Inuvik, NWT, seemed doomed with its fairly meagre one billion cubic feet a day of gas.
Mr. Kvisle insists all new gas is needed. The continent uses roughly 75 billion cubic feet a day – and continental supplies decline at 20 per cent a year from existing wells, which means annual supply needs to be fully replaced every five years. So numbers like one billion from Mackenzie, three billion in shale gas from B.C. or four billion in Alaska would all be important contributors.
Exxon, through its Canadian arm, Imperial Oil, controls the Mackenzie pipeline project. Mr. Kvisle said TransCanada would be interested to take control, depending on how the process goes.
“Mackenzie would be only 6 or 7 per cent of Western Canada's production and it's only 1,100 kilometres and it's only 30-inch-diameter pipe,” he said. “This is all relative small stuff. And we would see a lot of logic in it being viewed as a sort of integrated extension of [our] Canadian regulated [system].”
“But I wouldn't venture a guess as to the likelihood it moves forward in any form.
“There's so many uncertainties.”
