Irving Oil’s newly revitalized Halifax Harbour Marine Terminal, located near the mothballed old Imperial Oil Dartmouth refinery, will act as a primary supply point.

However, water depths in Halifax Harbour generally do not exceed about 40 feet and cannot handle oil tankers of any significant size.

It is time Irving Oil, and Canada, shed short-sighted and unimaginative local and regional thinking and started to think internationally.

NuStar’s terminal in the Canso SuperPort at Port Hawkesbury, N.S. has 37 storage tanks, with a total capacity of 7,555,000 barrels, capable of storing distillates, gasolines, aviation fuel, intermediate petroleum products and blend components, residual fuels, low-sulphur marine fuels, butane, and condensate. Its two mooring locations can handle tankers up to 400,000 deadweight tonnes — ULCC’s, or ultra-large crude carriers capable of carrying in excess of 2,000,000 barrels — the largest on Earth, er, water!

NuStar’s Port Hawkesbury terminal is the deepest independent, ice-free marine terminal in Atlantic North America and the closest to markets in Europe, Africa, and the Janmagar heavy crude refining complex in western India — the largest on Earth. Note that Irving Oil recently bought a small refinery in Cork, Ireland.

After the next federal election in October 2019, Irving Oil and a new federal Conservative government must immediately revive Energy East, with federal funds as necessary, with a plan to extend the Energy East pipeline to the Strait of Canso SuperPort and its NuStar marine terminal at Port Hawkesbury.

There, unrefined crude volumes remaining after expansion of Irving Oil’s Saint John refinery to 600,000 barrels per day, and any refined products in excess to Irving’s eastern Canadian and U.S. markets, can be batched down an Energy East extension to be safely, responsibly and efficiently exported to markets in Europe, Africa, Latin and South America, and western India.

Irving Oil’s Saint John Canaport is unsuited for the export of unrefined products like dilbits and other crude oils.

Each day 160 billion tonnes of seawater flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy during each of two tide cycles — more than the combined flow of the world’s freshwater rivers, according to Tourism New Brunswick. A major spill near an expanded Canaport terminal would result in conventional crude or — much, much worse — dilbit washed up and down the entire Bay of Fundy coastline twice daily by tides of up to 63 feet. It would not be possible to catch up to, let alone limit or recover, any heavy crude spill under such conditions.

At least 12 species of whales call the Bay of Fundy home throughout the summer and fall months, including pods of endangered North Atlantic right whales which seasonally feed on plankton, necessitating a voluntary tanker exclusion zone in the deepest water of the bay where the whales feed.

However, extending the proposed Energy East pipeline just 300 land miles farther east of Saint John, N.B. to the Strait of Canso Superport, N.S. not only solves Energy East’s and Canada’s crude export marine terminal problems but helps spread the economic benefits of Alberta’s crude oil resource, the largest on Earth by far, to all provinces of mainland Atlantic Canada.

Let us not repeat on the East Coast the same bonehead mistakes Kinder Morgan and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals made on the West Coast in proposing to expand the Burnaby Mountain tank farm and export dilbit through Vancouver’s harbour and the Salish Sea.

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