Canada's crude is already sailing to Asia — its gas is sold for 2032

Two things happened in the same week, on very different timescales. Al Jazeera reports that the latest crude cargo leaving the Trans Mountain marine terminal at Burnaby was bought by Eneos, Japan's largest refiner, and that India, Malaysia and Singapore have all returned to buying TMX barrels since the Iran war began at the end of February; exports via TMX to Asia now account for nearly 77 percent of total oil exports from Vancouver this year, against about 51 percent in 2024. Separately, Reuters reports that Germany's Uniper has firmed up a purchase of 2 million tonnes of LNG a year from Canada's proposed Ksi Lisims project for up to 20 years, with first deliveries from 2032. An earlier German contract covers a further one million tonnes annually from 2030. The Trans Mountain line is federally owned, carries up to 890,000 barrels a day and has run at almost 90 percent of capacity since the third quarter of 2025.

The cause is concentration, in three places at once. Al Jazeera reports that uncertainty over supplies through the Strait of Hormuz is what pushed Asian states towards TMX crude, and that Japan had been importing more than 90 percent of its oil through that chokepoint. Reuters is explicit about the German motive: Uniper was buying Canadian gas 'to diversify away from U.S. supplies that accounted for 96% of Germany's LNG imports last year' — a dependence created, in Reuters' own framing, when 'former main supplier, Russia's Gazprom, stopped delivering in 2022.' Germany did not reduce its exposure in 2022; it moved it. The third concentration is Canada's own: it exports roughly 4.3 million barrels a day and sends about 3.9 million of them to the United States, which is the same fact read from the selling end.

The clearest gain is Canadian: a country that sends about nine of every ten exported barrels to a single buyer has, for the first time, a second market taking a majority of one export route's volume. The buyers gain optionality rather than cheaper molecules — Reuters frames the Uniper deal as diversification away from a 96% American share, not as a price play, and the Asian refiners are buying a barrel that does not transit Hormuz. The subtler beneficiary is the Ksi Lisims project itself: a signed twenty-year offtake from a state-owned German utility is exactly the document a $10bn facility needs before a final investment decision. That is also the reason to read the announcement carefully — the contract is an input to getting the terminal financed, not evidence that it will be.

The US position erodes slowly rather than breaks: 3.9 of 4.3 million barrels a day still go south, so what changes is bargaining position, not volume — and EnergyNow's context matters here, with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down to roughly 319.5 million barrels by early July, its lowest since the early 1980s. Incumbent LNG sellers into Germany lose a contracted share, but not before 2032. The honest uncertainty is upstream of all of it: the Gitanyow Hereditary Chiefs, who say they 'have never ceded or surrendered title' to the territory the project's pipeline crosses, state that consent 'has not been granted for Ksi Lisims LNG by four of the six participating Nations' and are urging banks and pension funds not to finance it. Global News notes the $10bn facility 'has not yet broken ground.' Anyone treating the 2 million tonnes as supply — or treating the opposition as a formality — is claiming more than the cited evidence carries.