Crude oil throughput on the Canadian portion of the Keystone Pipeline was above contracted capacity at 616 Mb/d in Q1 2026, while volumes on the segment to the U.S. Gulf Coast averaged 709 Mb/d on strong global demand for export barrels, South Bow Corp. said in its latest quarterly earnings report.
South Bow said it’s able to move more than 800 Mb/d on the Gulf Coast leg of the pipeline, which was originally designed as part of the Keystone XL system, with some improvements possible via the use of drag-reducing agents and other measures, but that’s about at the upper end of what it can move. Gulf Coast barrels were split between the Marketlink (537 Mb/d) and Keystone (172 Mb/d) pipelines. Volumes were just below the 2025 average but up 29 Mb/d from Q4 2025.
“We’re seeing very strong throughput on it here in the second quarter,” Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Richard Prior said. “I think we’ll see when we release our second-quarter results … what kind of max top end capacity we’re able to move on the Gulf Coast section.”
President and CEO Bevin Wirzba said the open season for the Prairie Connector project concluded at the end of March as planned and that South Bow is in a 60-day evaluation period. As we discussed in Bring Me To Life, Prairie Connector would move Canadian crude oil from Hardisty, AB, to the Canadian-U.S. border, where it would connect with downstream pipeline systems serving multiple U.S. markets, including Cushing, OK, and the U.S. Gulf Coast.
South Bow said it expected crude oil supply from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin (WCSB) to exceed pipeline egress capacity by mid-2027, driving the need for additional pipeline projects (see slide below).
