NEUTRALITY CLEANUP,

And it listed MEG Energy Corp., Imperial Oil Ltd. and Cenovus Energy Inc. among the companies that would be most affected by the outage.

Cenovus spokesperson Sonja Franklin said in an email the company is “still assessing the impact of the Keystone outage, and while we don’t comment on our day-today marketing activities, we continue to use our logistics and transportation system to mitigate the impact.”

Cenovus owns an oil- byrail loading facility it can use to send more of its barrels to market in times of pipeline restrictions.

Suncor Energy Inc., the country’s largest oilsands producer by market cap, said it has enough access to oil storage tanks to temporarily store the barrels it would have sent on Keystone.

“Obviously, we’re shipping on it so if it’s out for a long period of time, we will see an effect but based on the information that we have today, we don’t think that we’ll be affected at all,” Mark Little, Suncor Energy Inc. president, upstream, told the Calgary Herald this week.

Imperial and MEG did not respond to requests for comment. Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. declined to comment.

TransCanada is in the middle of a clean- up effort in South Dakota but does not yet have a return- to- service date for the pipeline, spokesperson Matthew John said in an emailed statement. Shipments on the pipeline are down 85 per cent, oil traders told Bloomberg.

TransCanada shares fell 0.13 per cent Thursday to $ 62.91, extending dips the stock incurred over the previous two days. Rival Enbridge Inc. ended the day up 1.11 per cent to $47.53 after traders reported apportionment on its heavy oil lines rose to 21 per cent in December.

Reports predict divergent dates for the re-start of Keystone, with Thomson Reuters reporting end of the month as the likely date. A report from Stream Asset Management, a Calgary-based private equity company, suggested Keystone could be shut for longer given regulators in South Dakota signalled they want to ensure another leak won’t happen.

“We think the regulator is likely to take more time on this restart, especially given the Keystone name and last year’s Standing Rock protests that delayed the Dakota Access Pipeline,” Stream’s chief market strategist Dan Tsubouchi said in a note.

Scotiabank analyst Michael Loewen said the spread between WCS and WTI could widen to more than US$ 20 per barrel if regulators in South Dakota delays TransCanada from restarting the pipeline for more than two weeks.

While it’s unclear how long Keystone will be out, the discount on Canadian heavy crude is likely to fall again once the line is back in operations, Auspice Capital founder and chief investment officer Tim Pickering said.

“I don’t think it’ ll stay there that long because if I look over the last three years, the incremental demand for the Canadian barrel is fantastic. We have more U. S. refineries tooled for heavy sour and we’ve got this insatiable Asian appetite for it as well,” Pickering said.