Canada may have the ability to substantially raise its GDP and add thousands of new jobs by building more oil pipeline infrastructure, a new study suggests.
According to the report from ATB Financial, Canada could increase its total oil production by 1.5 million barrels per day — an increase of one third — and generate an average $31.4 billion to Canada’s GDP every year for the next decade. Doing this could increase Canada’s GDP by 1.1 per cent every year.
In 2025, GDP averaged 1.7 per cent overall, and after the two previous years each grew by about two per cent.
The ATB research report, titled, “The GDP Payoff of Additional Pipeline Capacity,” was released Wednesday in collaboration with Studio.Energy, a Calgary-based energy research and analytics company.
The report said the calculations were based on a scenario where Canada financially commits to several pipeline projects that are either currently being evaluated or in the process of being approved.
“New energy infrastructure doesn’t yield just a marginal gain for Canada’s economy — it’s a structural shift that will pay ongoing export dividends,” said Mark Parsons, vice-president and chief economist at ATB Financial in the release.
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“Expanding our export capacity would fundamentally improve our national economic health and global standing at a time when Canada needs it most.”
This comes as Prime Minister Mark Carney aims to double Canadian exports to countries other than the U.S. over the next decade amid the trade war and U.S. tariffs, and as the war in Iran jeopardizes global oil supplies and caused energy prices to surge.
That theoretical increase in oil exports under the report’s proposals would also generate 112,000 new jobs over the next decade, the report said, which would peak at 136,100 during the initial construction phase.
Many of these jobs would include those of general labour, engineering, steel, equipment, and services across the supply chain.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said earlier in March that the Iran war’s impact on global energy markets underscores the need to build a pipeline from Alberta to the West Coast.
A separate report released earlier in March from the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority said exports of Canadian crude oil moving through the port in 2025 increased 95 per cent from the year before, and that was months before the Iran conflict began.
The same report said the Trans Mountain expansion helped fuel the rise in oil exports off Canada’s West Coast, with most of the oil shipments going to markets like China and South Korea.
To get these pipeline projects built and filled with the higher amount of oil would also require a large amount of funding, the report said.
“Building the pipelines is estimated to require cumulative investment of $41 billion, while ensuring there is enough oil production to fill them would require an additional $100+ billion in upstream investment — more than double the pipeline cost — generating long-term returns through export revenues, royalties, and taxes,” the report said.
The Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project completed in 2024, and cost the federal government a total of nearly $35 billion to complete. That included the $4.5 billion to acquire the project from Kinder Morgan in 2018.
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