Some background: TCPL

Alaska Journal

Alaska Journal has posted this Tim Bradner piece that outlines TCPL's history regarding Alaska gas.

It's a good, sympathetic piece, albiet with some inaccuracies. First off, TCPL wasn't actually involved back in the '70s. The original Canadian partner was Foothills Pipelines. Foothills did, indeed do a lot of field and engineering work on the original proposal. They also secured a great deal of right-of-way permitting along the Alaska Highway in the Yukon and northern BC, which they still maintain.

However, TCPL did not buy Foothills in 1994. Foothills was actually merged with Alberta Gas Trunk Line to form Nova Corporation back in the early '80s. Foothills was maintained as a discrete division of Nova. Nova ran the gas transmission network within the province of Alberta (which probably had as many miles of pipe as TCPLs national network that covered the rest of Canada). Nova was actually an ambitious economic diversity initiative of the Alberta provincial government under Peter Lougheed, and at one point had a cell phone division (which was spun off as Novatel, and still makes wireless networking products), and a chemical division that still operates a massive ethylene complex east of Red Deer, AB.

Foothills/Nova constructed the so-called "Alaska pre-build" in the 80s. This is a leg that runs down the eastern slope of the Alberta Rocky Mountains, going into British Columbia through the Crowsnest Pass and eventually into the northwestern US This pre-build section was meant to increase overall capacity of the Nova network to transmit Alaska gas to the lower 48, though it has worked just fine in this regard in moving Alberta and Northern BC gas instead.

Nova combined with TCPL in 1998 in one of the biggest corporate mergers in Canadian history. The cell phone and chemical divisions were spun off as separate companies, and TCPL moved its corporate headquarters to Calgary, where they combined with Nova's pipeline management in a brand-new skyscraper.

Merging with Nova, TCPL inherited Foothills and its Alaska gas plans. Since Foothills has maintained rights-of-way all the way along the Canadian portion of the route, it believes it maintains the right to build that it was granted back in the 70s. Enbridge Pipelines disputes this, and the case is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada.