Canada Energy Regulator - Pipeline Throughput and Capacity Data

Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing - the official flow record of Canada's trunk pipelines. Since 2016, major pipeline companies regulated by the Canada Energy Regulator have been required under Guide BB of the CER Filing Manual to report throughput and capacity on a fixed schedule: oil and liquids pipelines monthly, natural gas pipelines daily. Those filings assemble into a series spanning 1 January 2006 to the present, organized as roughly forty-eight files - one per pipeline system plus three data dictionaries - each published in English and French.

The system list is effectively a map of Canadian energy geography: Keystone, Trans Mountain (current files plus an archived set preserving the pre-May-2024 product categorizations), Trans-Northern, Cochin, NGTL System, TransCanada Mainline, Foothills, Alliance, Westcoast, Trans Quebec & Maritimes, Maritimes & Northeast, Enbridge Canadian Mainline, Enbridge Norman Wells, Southern Lights, Brunswick, Westspur, Enbridge Line 9, Montreal and Suffield.

What makes it analytically useful is the pairing on every row: what actually moved, next to what could have. Throughput sits beside committed and uncommitted volumes, nameplate capacity and available capacity, with a Reason For Variance field explaining the gap between physical limit and working reality - maintenance, crude type, unplanned outages, downstream constraints, pressure restrictions. Capacity utilization stops being an estimate and becomes a calculation.

Ask for a sample and we send real rows from the pipelines you name - not screenshots of rows.

One row per key point per period, identifying columns first, volumes last - shaped to load straight into a warehouse table. Three verified observations:

Date: 2006-01-01   Company: Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC
Pipeline: Trans Mountain pipeline   Key Point: Burnaby
Lat/Lon: 49.2685, -122.931   Direction Of Flow: west
Trade Type: intracanada   Product: domestic heavy
Throughput (1000 m3/d): 0.0

Date: 2006-01-01   Company: Trans Mountain Pipeline ULC
Pipeline: Trans Mountain pipeline   Key Point: Burnaby
Product: domestic light
Throughput (1000 m3/d): 7.7792

Date: 2006-01-01   Day: 1
Company: NGTL GP Ltd. as general partner on behalf of NGTL Limited Partnership
Pipeline: NGTL System   Key Point: East Gate
Lat/Lon: 50.6608, -110.028   Direction Of Flow: east & southeast
Trade Type: intracanada
Capacity (1000 m3/d): 220461.0   Throughput (1000 m3/d): 228618.3
Throughput (GJ/d): 8641771.74

Read together they show both reporting rhythms. The Trans Mountain rows are monthly oil filings, one product stream per row - domestic heavy reading zero at Burnaby that month while domestic light moved 7,779 cubic metres a day westward. The NGTL row is a daily gas filing, and it carries the gas-only extras: a theoretical capacity of 220,461 thousand cubic metres a day against throughput of 228,618 - above nameplate, which is exactly why the available-capacity field exists - and an energy-basis figure of 8.64 million GJ a day for teams that model gas in heat content rather than volume. Request a sample and you get rows scoped to your own pipeline list and date range.

Sixteen documented fields define the observation, each definition checked against the regulator's own data dictionaries during the August 2026 research pass and marked verified. Identification comes first - company, pipeline, key point, coordinates, direction of flow, trade type - then the measurement block: throughput, committed and uncommitted volumes, nameplate and available capacity, and the variance reason that ties them together. Natural gas files add the energy-basis columns.

The dictionary below is the verified core. Companion resources confirmed during sample preparation fold out on request rather than being promised blind.

Geography - every major CER-regulated pipeline system in Canada, measured at named key points chosen by the operating companies. Those points span producing regions, provincial borders and export crossings, from Burnaby on the Pacific side of Trans Mountain to the eastern reaches of Maritimes & Northeast - so corridor-level flow stories resolve without any geo-guesswork.

Temporal - 1 January 2006 to the present, roughly two decades per system, with record metadata verified through 31 March 2026 during our August 2026 research pass. Recent periods fill in as operators file on their regulatory schedule, so the newest month arrives complete rather than provisional.

Granularity - monthly per key point for oil and liquids pipelines, daily per key point for natural gas pipelines, each row further split by trade type (import, export, intra-Canada), direction of flow and product stream. Against the wider catalog - 1,744 datasets averaging 7.81 - this slice scores 9/10, lifted by verified field documentation and two decades of unbroken filing.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel your team already works in: queries for live lookups against a specific pipeline and key point, flat files sized for overnight warehouse loads, or a direct pipe into Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift. Cadence is yours to set - and to change when your models change.

Every delivery ships with the full field dictionary, sample rows for validation, and a schema that holds steady between refreshes.

• Capacity-utilization monitoring - throughput against available capacity with the variance reason attached; see our data scientists use cases page.
• Egress and basis analysis - corridor-by-corridor volumes underpin Canadian differential arguments and takeaway-capacity claims; more on our investors quants use cases page.
• Refinery and marketing supply planning - domestic heavy versus light splits by direction of flow show which barrels reach which markets, the raw material of slate planning.
• Natural gas demand modeling - daily volumetric and gigajoule figures for NGTL and the mainline systems feed short-term demand and storage work.
• Contracting-market evidence - committed versus uncommitted splits (Keystone, from January 2023) offer a public read on how much pipe is sold forward.
• Midstream diligence and journalism - twenty years of per-system history grounds valuations and market-access reporting alike; see our journalists academics use cases page.

Data scientists and ML engineers get a two-decade monthly panel with verified definitions and stable keys - no scraping archaeology, no silent schema drift. Investors and quant researchers get regulator-filed flows as the highest-frequency official read on Canadian midstream utilization, weeks ahead of annual filings. Market researchers and consultants get pipeline-by-pipeline sizing with provenance that survives citation. Journalists, academics and students get the primary numbers behind every pipeline-capacity story, straight from the operators' own filings. Developers building data products get flat tabular files with a consistent column dictionary (builders' use cases), and competitive-intel teams (their use cases) watch which corridors and key points gain volume share month over month.

Three things, stated up front.

First, contracting detail has a shorter clock than flow detail. Committed and uncommitted volume splits exist only for Keystone and only from January 2023 onward - fine for trend work going forward, thin for historical contracting analysis.

Second, Trans Mountain changed categories in May 2024. Product categorizations were revised around the TMX expansion, so long-run consistency checks should run against the archived file set; we include it in samples when the analysis window crosses that boundary.

Third, units deserve one look before joins. The natural gas dictionary carries a unit note that appears inconsistent with its column header, so we pin exact units against shipped rows before delivery rather than trusting labels alone. Tell us the pipelines, key points and period range you care about and the sample arrives shaped to them, dictionary attached.