This lithium thing in Saskatchewan is getting real, while U of C sees the light

Drill, Baby, Drill 19 Comments

Lithium in SK, Part 29: Arizona Lithium begins drilling commercial production wells near Torquay

If Arizona Lithium is successful, we will hopefully start producing commercial lithium in Saskatchewan next year. That’s an entirely new resource industry, producing jobs, taxes and royalties.

These are exciting times. EMP Metal and ROK Resources (Hub City Lithium) are doing their pilot plant testing in Estevan. I’ll have a story on that soon. A third company is also at this moment drilling lithium wells in southeast Saskatchewan, and I expect to have a story on that later in the summer. Hopefully today’s story on the start of commercialization is just the first of many!

Please note the early part of the story credits the work done by Ben Rostron, the Saskatchewan Geological Survey, and Gavin Jensen, without which it is unlikely much of anything like this would be happening today. And that is why that recent announcement of $10 million for further research by the survey is so critical.

And also note – every single service company working on this project, as far as I’m aware, works in oil and gas. Without the oil and gas industry, we would not have the start of a lithium industry.

Also:

I’ve written the biographies for the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Show awards. I haven’t been posting them here because it’s a bit too much insider baseball, but if you’ve driven around any oilfield and seen a bent pumpjack, you can credit this man, Paul Cheung. He and his partners literally changed the Saskatchewan landscape. And along the way he’s owned oil companies, drilling rig companies, and a service rig company.

Finally:

In an incredibly stupid move, the University of Calgary, headquarters of the Canadian oilpatch, stopped new intakes into its petroleum engineering program. Three years later, they realized how dumb that was and reopened the program. Funny thing, I was just talking to some people last week about how dumb this was. Could you imagine if the University of Saskatchewan got rid of its agriculture program? Or UBC got rid of forestry? These are the very foundations of each of those province’s economies. And Alberta has the third largest petroleum reserves ON THE PLANET. But nope, don’t need any more petroleum engineers.

University of Calgary looks to relaunch oil engineering program after hiatus.

19 Replies to “This lithium thing in Saskatchewan is getting real, while U of C sees the light”

  1. The University of Calgary is not Immune to STUPIDITY.
    I knew some folks who worked there…Classic Climatard Liberal Types.

    They like EVERY other University has as its primary “Raison de- Etre”, bringing in as many Foreign Students as possible…to pay TOP Dollar. And much of that goes towards remuneration of staff..a bloated one to be sure.

    1. It’s basically explained in the story about Paul Cheung. Effectively, it uses about 25 per cent less energy, which adds up in a big way as power costs are huge. It also allows you to use a smaller motor on a pumpjack, including at times single phase instead of three-phase power for smaller units. They were also inexpensive and had REALLY high levels of service support. They weren’t perfect by any means, but service made up for that.

        1. There are some in North Dakota – north of Stanley, around Noonan and Crosby.

          1. Thx, but I’m not that desperate to see one…LOL.
            Still pondering the geometry.

  4. U of A has offered petroleum engineering the whole time. U of C historically offered less disciplines than the bigger university but it’s been over 50 years that I attended both..

  5. “But nope, don’t need any more petroleum engineers.”

    You don’t when the Federal government has decreed the “end of oil” with the enthusiastic support of Canada’s universities. Their relationship to Reality(tm) is tenuous at best.

    Also, isn’t City of Calgary hard-core NDP, same as Redmonton? I see this in Ontario all the time. The closer to Hamilton you get, the dumber everyone is. Toronto basically isn’t even part of Canada anymore.

    1. No, Calgary isn’t hard-care NDP. Although Calgary has several NDP goofballs on City Council, they are toast. And as the NDP “policies” start to show themselves, they too will be toast. It’s a bit of Trojan Horse politics.

    1. Art’s law is funny.
      And anything “green”, its all a sham, like Sam, I am.

  7. It’s hard to argue with the conclusion that Trudeau is aggressively destroying Canada’s primary economic engine, and that few engineers will be needed to support it in the future. “learn to code” LOL

    1. And “learn to code” is quickly becoming the new buggy whip industry…..with AI taking over. I have already seen it….you ask AI to code something and it does….quickly and pretty accurately.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation