Kinder Morgan announced today that, due to demand from shippers who want to move products from the oil sands to the coast, they are proposing to expand their Trans Mountain route by 20% more than previously stated. Instead of increasing the pipeline’s capacity to 750,000 barrels per day (current capacity is 300,000) they are now proposing to expand it to at least 890,000 barrels per day. Correspondingly, tanker traffic in Burrard Inlet would rise from 60 tankers per year to over 400 under this new proposal. Although Kinder Morgan has stated that they do not require this scale of export to go ahead with their expansion, some economists, including former head of ICBC Robyn Allen, have claimed that an expanded Trans Mountain route could accommodate up to 1.1 million barrels per day.