TransCanada will seek regulatory approval from the National Energy Board (NEB) for a new tolling system for its under-used Canadian Mainline natural gas pipeline with a start up date of 1 November 2017.

To this end TransCanada has been building shipper support at lower toll costs to help fill its mainline from Alberta to a hub in Ontario.

It says shippers have signed 10-year fixed-price agreements at 77 cents per gigajoule to move a total of 1.5 million gigajoules, enough to heat about 16,000 average Canadian households for a year.

TransCanada hopes to win approval for the new tolls before the fourth quarter of this year, when the competing Rover pipeline proposed by Energy Transfer Partners is expected to give American natural gas another access point to the Ontario market.