Westridge Marine Terminal is located on the south shore of Burrard Inlet in Burnaby, at the western end of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, about 7 miles (11 km) northwest of New Westminster and 5.3 miles (8.5 km) east of Vancouver, British Columbia. The Burnaby terminal distributes crude oil to both the Parkland refinery and Westridge Marine Terminal. The facility occupies a wedge of Pleistocene glacial and glaciomarine sediments overlying older alluvial and deltaic deposits of the Burrard Formation. These Eocene rocks were laid down in a subsiding forearc basin that extended from Burrard Inlet south to Bellingham. Beneath them lie Late Cretaceous alluvial sediments of the Nanaimo Group, which are widely distributed around the Strait of Georgia and overlie granitic rocks of the Coast Mountains Batholith. During the Pleistocene, glacier ice flowed south and southwest from the Coast Mountains, reshaping the region through erosion and sediment deposition. The glaciers removed much of the sedimentary fill of the Georgia Basin and deposited thick unconsolidated sediments that now mantle Paleogene rocks in the Fraser and Puget Lowlands. The Fraser Glaciation, which lasted from about 30,000 to 11,000 years ago, marked the last major glacial advance. As the glaciers retreated, the Fraser River built its delta westward into the Strait of Georgia. Relative sea level was initially about 660 feet (200 m) higher than today but fell rapidly due to post-glacial rebound. By around 8,000 years ago, it was about 40 feet (12 m) lower than at present. A marine incursion about 7,000 years ago led to the aggradation and present geomorphology of the Fraser River floodplain.

The lowlands of the Fraser River floodplain are the traditional territory of several Coast Salish–speaking First Nations. Numerous villages once lined the shores of Burrard Inlet, with the southern shore near the present-day Westridge Marine Terminal inhabited primarily by the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation. Family lineage and kinship were central to tribal identity, determining where people could live, hunt, and fish, and what knowledge and privileges they inherited. Early European explorers and fur traders introduced diseases that devastated Indigenous populations, prompting smaller communities to consolidate for protection. In the early 19th century, disease-related depopulation made Coast Salish peoples vulnerable to slave raids and internecine warfare by the Lekwiltok—now known as the Kwakwakaʼwakw—from Johnstone Strait on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The Fraser River gold rush in 1858 spurred the creation of the Colony of British Columbia. The British claimed authority over the land and its Indigenous inhabitants. Royal Engineers and colonial officials soon arrived from England and established New Westminster as the capital. Settlers were encouraged to claim land through pre-emption, a process that allowed individuals to acquire property after clearing land and building homes. In the 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway was extended from Port Moody at the head of Burrard Inlet to Vancouver, improving access and attracting land speculators and settlers. A few established family farms near New Westminster. The City of Burnaby was incorporated in 1891 and named after Robert Burnaby, a Freemason, explorer, and legislator who had served as private secretary to Colonel Richard Moody, the first land commissioner for the colony.

Burnaby lies at the geographical center of the Metro Vancouver area, occupying 24,320 acres (9,842 ha) between Vancouver to the west and Port Moody, Coquitlam, and New Westminster to the east. It is bounded by Burrard Inlet to the north and the Fraser River to the south. In 1935, Standard Oil of California established a refinery in Burnaby—then one of the few heavy industries in the region. A major expansion followed in the mid-1950s during British Columbia’s post-war building boom. After large oil deposits were discovered in Alberta in 1947, the Trans Mountain Pipeline Company was formed in 1951—jointly owned by Canadian Bechtel Ltd. and Standard Oil—to construct a pipeline to the Burnaby refinery. Completed in 1953, the pipeline connected Alberta oil fields with the coast. Kinder Morgan Inc., a leading pipeline and energy storage company, began expanding the system in 2004 with a second pipeline running parallel to the original. Completed in 2008, the expansion increased capacity for transporting natural gas, crude oil, and petroleum products across Kinder Morgan’s network of about 84,000 miles (135,200 km) of pipelines. In 2013, Kinder Morgan applied to the Canadian National Energy Board to construct a third pipeline, largely parallel to the existing Trans Mountain, to transport diluted bitumen from Edmonton. The expansion aimed to boost exports of Alberta’s controversial bituminous sands oil to the United States and Asia. In 2018, the Government of Canada acquired the pipeline through Trans Mountain Corporation, a subsidiary of the Crown-owned Canada Development Investment Corporation. The company is currently expanding the Westridge Marine Terminal to increase capacity from one to three berths for Aframax-size oil tankers. See a short video of the marine terminal expansion here. Read more here and here. Explore more of Westridge Marine Terminal and Burrard Inlet here: