Every major Alberta and BC energy project actually approved right now

What's actually in service

Three projects are complete and operating. The Trans Mountain Expansion went into commercial service in May 2024, tripling the system's capacity from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels a day between Edmonton and Burnaby at a final cost of $34.2 billion, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer's 2024 review. Coastal GasLink began moving gas from the Dawson Creek area to Kitimat in December 2023. LNG Canada's first Phase 1 train shipped its first cargo in June 2025, with a second train following in November 2025, bringing 14 million tonnes a year of export capacity online at Kitimat.

Even the government's own workforce figures for these projects don't always agree with each other. Trans Mountain's peak construction headcount has been reported anywhere from about 5,500 to nearly 16,000 depending on the release date and measurement window, and no single authoritative figure resolves that range. That inconsistency is itself worth knowing: even a $34-billion federally regulated project doesn't produce one clean, final jobs number that a nearby business can plan a season around.

The construction-to-operations cliff

The single number that matters most to a small business near one of these projects is not the construction jobs figure. It's the ratio between that figure and what follows it.

LNG Canada's own government-cited numbers show the shape clearly: up to 10,000 construction jobs at the BC government's own estimate, against 950 permanent operations positions once the plant is running. That's roughly a 10.5-to-1 drop. Coastal GasLink's numbers are harder to compare directly, since the BC government reported construction in person-years (11,000 direct plus 8,900 indirect person-years, a measure of cumulative effort rather than peak headcount) against roughly 150 direct-and-indirect operations jobs, but even a conservative reading puts that ratio well above 70-to-1.

This is the mechanism behind every boomtown story that ends badly for local business: the town that can support a construction-camp economy, extra restaurant seats, extra hotel rooms, extra trades demand, is not the town that can support what's left once the camp empties. A business that leases more space, hires more staff, or takes on debt sized to the construction-phase population is planning around a number that is, by design, temporary.

Under construction now

Two projects are actively being built. Cedar LNG, at Kitimat on Haisla Nation land (50.1 percent Haisla-owned, 49.9 percent Pembina), received its provincial certificate in March 2023 and its federal decision statement in May 2023, with a floating, electrified facility targeting roughly 3 to 3.3 million tonnes a year of capacity. Woodfibre LNG, near Squamish, holds a certificate first issued in 2015 and amended repeatedly since, most recently in November 2025 to add floating workforce accommodation. Neither project's government filings disclose a peak construction headcount; industry estimates exist but are not used here because they don't meet this publication's sourcing standard.

Both are worth watching specifically because they are smaller than LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink. A construction program in the hundreds to low thousands of workers, rather than tens of thousands, changes the calculus for nearby small businesses: less overwhelming demand, but also a shorter runway to build the kind of vendor relationship that survives past the construction phase.

Approved, not yet built

Two projects have cleared their regulator but haven't broken ground as of this writing. The Taylor to Gordondale Pipeline, an 88-kilometre, 16-inch line carrying crude oil and natural gas liquids from BC's Montney formation into Alberta, received its Canada Energy Regulator certificate in February 2026 at a cost of $340.9 million. The Yellowhead Pipeline, a 235-kilometre, 36-inch gas line from the Peers area to Fort Saskatchewan, cleared the Alberta Utilities Commission in July 2026 at $2.9 billion, with the AUC citing roughly 2,000 direct construction jobs.

Approval is not construction. Both projects still have to finalize contractors, mobilize crews, and set an actual construction calendar, which is the information a nearby business actually needs before making a hiring or lease decision, and which is not yet public for either project.

Recommended and proposed: read the fine print

Three items in this register are routinely described in casual conversation as "approved" when the government record says otherwise, and the distinction matters enormously for planning purposes.

The Westcoast Energy Sunrise Expansion Program, a 42-inch line from Chetwynd, BC to the US border near Sumas and Abbotsford, received a Canada Energy Regulator Commission recommendation in January 2026. A recommendation is not a Governor in Council decision, and this investigation found no confirmation that the final federal decision has actually been issued. LNG Canada's Phase 2, which would double the Kitimat facility's capacity to 28 million tonnes a year, has not been sanctioned; a federal-provincial cooperation agreement reached in May 2026 aims toward a possible Final Investment Decision later in 2026, which is a step toward a decision, not the decision itself.

The West Coast Oil Pipeline, a proposed roughly 1-million-barrel-a-day heavy crude line from Alberta to BC's west coast, was referred to the federal Major Projects Office in July 2026 for potential designation as a national-interest project. Government-cited figures put its peak construction employment at around 140,000 and its ongoing operations employment at around 50,000 a year, including 7,500 outside Alberta, but this investigation could only moderately confirm those figures (a direct government-page fetch returned an access error) and the project itself has not been approved by any regulator. Reporting a peak construction figure of 140,000 jobs as though the project were built would be exactly the kind of promotional error this publication's sourcing rules exist to prevent.

The full register

Every figure below traces to the government source cited in the paragraphs above, or the sources block at the bottom of this page. "Not published" means no government-sourced figure was found, not that the figure is zero.

What this means for nearby small business

None of this is an argument against these projects, or against the real, substantial local opportunity they represent. It's an argument for reading the regulatory status and the workforce ratio before making a business decision sized to a construction-phase population.

The next two pieces in this investigation build directly on this register. The second examines four decades of Alberta oil price cycles against real unemployment, business insolvency, and migration data, including a finding that complicates the simple "oil crashes, small business suffers" story most owners assume is true. The third turns both into a practical preparation framework: how to capture a construction-phase windfall without structuring the business around a population that, on this register's own numbers, is scheduled to shrink 10-to-1 or more once the operations phase begins.