North America Crude Markets short-term outlook: December 2023

The Canadian crude egress bottleneck has returned…. again. Fundamentals across the board point to egress constraints in Western Canada. Canadian supply ticked higher in recent months as maintenance wrapped up and as producers boosted output ahead of TMX’s anticipated start-up. This drove WCSB long-haul pipelines to operate near maximum utilization in November. Effects of the bottleneck are already being seen in heavy price discounting, inventory builds, and higher crude-by-rail loadings. Now, a recent regulatory denial is expected to cause further delays to TMX’s construction timeline. A later start-up threatens to prolong egress constraint conditions in Western Canada until the new system comes online. In this report, we provide our updated expectations for TMX timeline and discuss our forecasts for pipeline utilization and price differentials regarding the adjusted schedule.