On May 5, Lloydminster Mayor Gerald Aalbers said, “Without the upgrader, Lloydminster would likely be a community of under 15,000.”
The most recent 2021 census put the city’s population at just shy of 32,000, a marginal improvement from 2016.
And it’s been a wild ride getting to that 32,000. In 2003, I was hired as the city hall reporter for the Battlefords News-Optimist. The city manager of North Battleford, Jim Toye, told me at the time that he wished he had the problems of his counterpart in Lloydminster. Lloydminster was building around 600 houses a year at the time, and North Battleford, 150 kilometres down the road, was building 10. […]
After some pioneering work in using steam to produce heavy oil, trying several different extraction methods, Husky started building essentially cookie-cutter projects. Each involved a steam plant, and several well pads composed of well pairs using a technology called “steam assisted gravity drainage,” or SAGD. That might sound like a lot of technobabble until you realize the important points: Each of these thermal projects produces 10,000 barrels of oil per day, and cost $250 to $350 million a pop to build. And Husky built 11 of these projects in northwest Saskatchewan by 2020, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding crash in oil markets.
And what if a couple more pipelines had been built?
Though Husky may get credit for steam injection it was actually a small insignificant company called Trinity Energy that first employed the innovation. It was successful and everyone jump on the band wagon. Just sayin…
Not sure about that. I visited a pilot plant built by Hudson’s Bay Oil and Gas at Onion Lake, north of Lloydminster, in 1981. And of course Imperial had been injecting steam into Cold Lake from 1973.
About a decade ago I bought John G’s book on the history of the NDP in Sask. He chronicles that at that time (long after Mr Devine’s tenure as premier) every former Sask. Premier had their name engraved on a building at the U of S.
Except for one – the only former premier up to that date who had been born in Sask, and was a graduate of the U of S.
I guess the academia’s disdain for anything with the dreaded “conservative” label trumped what should have been the pride at having one of their own grads ensconced in the Premier’s office. So the tradition, dating back to 1905, had to be punted.
L- Damn impressive… we need a Saskatchewan version of the Alberta Prosperity Project,
A.S.A.P., . P.M. Justin Trudeau’s dream of making Canada into “the first post nation-state” is proceeding at a breakneck pace. The chance of a fair, federal election in 2025 is minuscule.
The E.U. version, also one of de-industrialization via the suppression of cheap, reliable energy, will reproduce the bleak winter of postwar Europe circa 1948, over the next few years. Possibly leading to a 21st Century version of the Dark Ages for Europe. The W.E.F. ideology is a virulent brain parasite among European/U.K. politicians and the Eurocrats, who actually run things. It’s too late for them to avoid the train wreck. Western Canada could slip off onto a
train siding and let the Trudeau regime train wreck(e.i. Lack Megantic), now in process, pass
us by.
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Think of the train engineer being Justin Trudeau in a rail metaphor version of a ship of state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9PXc4tOCiI (much obliged to Roy Acuff)
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Husky’s switch to developing their own SAGD refinery feedstock changed alot of the Lloyd area O&G business. The old style CHOPS market got burned, tank builders went bust, Universal Industries became Foremost and now build more ag-business tanks, for example.
The unicorn fart believers don’t understand O&G make the world go round, and will for a long time to come.