Is national unity at stake?
SaskPower will be building a new $850 million natural gas power station near Lanigan, starting in under a year. More than half of its power will go to the BHP Jansen potash mine, the crown jewel of Saskatchewan’s economy. But Steven Guilbeault and Justin Trudeau want to shut down all natural gas power stations by 2035.
Irresistible force is about to meet immovable object, and national unity is on the line.
Oh, and for good measure, Bill C-69 is involved.
Will Shand and/or Boundary Dam be converted from coal to gas-fired? No, but SaskPower is looking at it. If they do, that’ll be a whole lot of coal miners and coal processing staff out of work.
Last fall, Saskatoon-based Cameco bought 49% of Westinghouse for a song. Westinghouse was in rough shape over delays on a pair of US reactors that took decades. But one is now operational, the second will be in months, and the war in Ukraine, cutting off of Russian gas, and “climate change” means the whole world is waking up to a nuclear renaissance, in a big way. (That includes Saskatchewan). On Thursday, Westinghouse publicly released its competitor in the 300 megawatt small modular reactor space. And they say it can be had for about a billion US??? On Wednesday, SaskPower’s minister told the legislature he’s thinking GE-Hitachi’s might cost us all-in around $4.5 billion CDN, for similar size reactor. But that would include grid and other items, too.
Anyhow, Cameco has long been supplier of nuclear fuel, but buying Westinghouse made it enormously more vertically integrated. All this new nuclear could have tremendous impact in Saskatchewan.
Moe draws the line in the dirt: “We will not attempt the impossible when it comes to power production”
Net Zero by 2035? Not going to happen in Saskatchewan, according to Scott Moe. Natural gas, renewables, nuclear, and maybe even coal will be part of the mix. But Saskatoon is not going to freeze in the dark on Jan. 1, 2035.
(From Kate: SDA gets results.)
Prairie Innovation: Snow Planes
Jenny Hagan is also a good Twitter follow.
An 8 year old kid knows what a stop sign is. Jaskirat Singh Sidhu didn’t run a stop sign because the laws governing truck drivers were inadequate. Moral panic is no substitute for good governance.
Had Jaskirat Singh Sidhu killed only one or two when he ran that stop sign, he’d be deported without fanfare.
Perversely, he’s become a celebrity because the Humboldt crash was a mass casualty event. Enough, already. Send him packing.
Pipeline Online spoke to Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe on Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s ‘social cost of carbon’. Moe is concerned it could lead to much higher carbon tax, and pave way for Clean Electricity Standard impossible for Saskatchewan to meet.
I’ve been waiting to see a story come out about this for a while. A few weeks ago I saw that Poland may be building as many as 79 of the General Electric Hitachi BWRX-300 reactors, the exact same design chosen as SaskPower. This story indicated 20 at this point, but hints it could be more.
Ontario Power Generation is building the first one. Tennessee Valley Authority is building the second. Saskatchewan may have thought we were all that and a bag of chips by announcing four. But we won’t finish our second until around 2038. In the meantime, Poland might have built all 79 by that time.
We might have thought we’d be driving the bus on this SMR rollout. We’re not. In other words, the instruction manuals will likely be written in Polish. But it also means a lot of confidence is being expressed by the Poles in the design, if they build 20, or 79, or whatever.
As for how much uranium will go into these, I sat at a banquet a few weeks ago with some Cameco reps. They explained that SMRs actually use very little uranium. You fill them up at the start, and basically that’s it. That was very insightful, I thought, because that’s exactly how current US nuclear submarines (with small reactors) work.
Winter storm watches now line parts of the Prairies for a mid-week system that threatens heavy snow and strong winds, so people can expect travel interruptions
One of the key leading indicators of oil and gas development is Crown land sales. And the Saskatchewan April sale saw increased interest in all four oil production areas of the province.
On the opposite end of the timeline is well abandonment and cleanups. When the crap hit the fan for the industry when COVID-19 hit, there was a cry for some sort of relief program. That ended up being the Accelerated Site Closure Program, which properly abandoned inactive wells and facilities. That program just recently concluded, having been fully subscribed.
And on the other side of the country, Newfoundland’s Muskrat Falls hydro project is finally online. This project almost bankrupted Newfoundland, but the feds quietly bailed them out during COVID. That kinda got swept under the rug. Muskrat Falls was Newfoundland’s attempt at squeezing additional power out of the same river system as the massive Churchill Falls project, which produces about 50 per cent more power than the entire province of Saskatchewan on any given day. Quebec pays Newfoundland next to nothing for that power, and uses it domestically and sells it to the US and enormous margins. Muskrat Falls, at a much lower output, was basically Newfoundland’s F You to Quebec.
Federal justice minister David Lametti “looking at” taking away natural resources from provinces. Scott Moe says national unity at stake. This is precisely what the Saskatchewan First Act, proclaimed April 6, is about.
Notably, the request for the feds to take away control of natural resources from the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta an Saskatchewan came from the grand chief of the Prince Albert Grand Council. The federal minister will “look at” it.
By federal regulation, one coal unit at Boundary Dam Power Station was supposed to shut down in 2021, another in 2024. Well, we’re not going to do that. Because we can’t. We still need them. Turns out all those wind turbines can’t be relied on, after all, can they? Like on April 4, when they put out less that 4% in Saskatchewan.
In March, the The Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy was granted 1.75M$ to train the yokels in governing sustainable municipalities!
Turns out, it wasn’t sustainable.
Some people are not happy about the idea of being replaced by imported, carbon tax-free coal and natural gas-fired power, while we move to shut down our own coal mines and power facilities. Op-Ed: Saskatchewan Coal Transition Centre: Sabotaging our future: How SaskPower’s $1 billion scheme to import power from the U.S. will devastate Estevan and leave Saskatchewan’s economy vulnerable
We watched this roll through Outlook, SK today. I still don’t know how they navigated that puppy through the intersection into town without taking out the real estate office.
Here’s why Pipeline Online has been doing such a deep dive into lithium in Saskatchewan. If current lithium prices hold, the standard-sized lithium project (of which there are several) planned for Saskatchewan will result in just under a billion dollars (CAD) per year in revenue. That’s right – per year, each. If they can get direct lithium extraction to work, we’re talking about a multi-billion industry in this province in a few years time
