If carried through, Saskatchewan rebuilding its coal fleet could be one of the most consequential policy choices in decades.
I’ve finally had the chance to get caught up on posting these podcasts, originally broadcast live. Originally broadcast in January, this is worth listening to. Pipeline Online Podcast Ep. 2: Jeremy Harrison on Coal
Brian Zinchuk: How much might building SMRs cost Saskatchewan Hint: it’s not cheap.
This is a major piece talking about the costs that could be incurred building small modular reactors. Those costs could be unobtainable, which is why coal is back on the table in a big way.
The numbers come from the Tennessee Valley Authority, who already operate three nuclear plants and is the largest utility in the US. They plan on building the same model of reactor.
Also:
Moe proclaims pipeline projects “pre-approved,” Smith joins in.
I’m not sure how a provincial government can pre-approve something it has no regulatory power over.
Bronwyn Eyre: The Great Federal Stand-Down: How Chaos Theory (aka Donald Trump) is Changing Everything
Wind goes from 90.5% output in Saskatchewan last week to 0.05% in Alberta on Monday
Saskatchewan is looking to rejuvenate coal, not abandon it: in-depth with Minister Jeremy Harrison.
If SaskPower carries through with rejuvenating coal, it will save three power plants, two mines, ~1000 jobs and two communities.
The significance of the shift on coal cannot be understated. When SaskPower’s then-CEO Mike Marsh came to Estevan in 2018 to say they would not be installing carbon capture technology on Boundary Dam Units 4 and 5, it wasn’t the obituary for the community, but it sure felt like the cancer diagnosis. And with no talk of carbon capture for Coronach’s Poplar River Power station, it seemed all but certain that town would whither away once the coal plant and related mine shut down by the federally mandated 2030 deadline. The January, 2025, announcement of SaskPower looking to rebuild both Boundary Dam and Poplar River, if carried out, would be a decades-long reprieve for both communities.
To extend the metaphor, effectively Estevan and Coronach just went into chemotherapy, and the results may be positive.
The implications of this change in direction, from the impending death of coal, to its possible rejuvenation, have local, provincial, national and international aspects, detailed in the story.
Watch for the Pipeline Online Podcast, Episode 2, to be broadcast on LinkedIn, Facebook and X at 1 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 24.. Crown Investments Corp Minister Jeremy Harrison is the guest, where we will delve even further into this new direction on coal-fired power generation.
X (works best): https://x.com/Pipeline_Online
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianzinchuk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pipelineonlineca/
It will eventually be posted to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify
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Government of Saskatchewan says coal has a future. SaskPower is to look at running Poplar River and Boundary Dam Units 4,5 and 6 for decades to come, considering rebuilding them and ignoring federal coal mandate to shut down by 2030. Minister Jeremy Harrison was in Coronach and Estevan telling coal workers that coal has a future.
Here’s the op-ed he submitted exclusively to Pipeline Online, explaining what was going on. I just had a detailed interview with him which will be published Monday.
This is an enormous turnaround that cannot be understated. Saskatchewan is not giving up on coal. Estevan and especially Coronach get a huge reprieve.
And it’s a giant up yours to the feds. I’m sure Guilbeault will have a canary, and a cow. But he won’t eat the cow because my get is he’s a vegan.
Hopefully my 100+ stories talking about the unreliability of wind and solar, and imploring we shouldn’t throw away what works for what we know absolutely doesn’t work had some impact on this.
I’ll have more to write about this in the coming days. There are lots of implications. For instance, since we own the coal, we charge ourselves basically nothing for it. We do pay for the mining, however. But for natural gas, since our domestic production has dropped like a stone, most of our gas comes from Alberta. So every dollar we spend on their gas is a dollar leaving the province, never to come back (sound like Trump?) And here’s the kicker – when LNG Canada goes online, what do you think is going to happen to gas prices? Does anyone think it’ll stay around $2/gigajoule another 10 years? Or will it go up – maybe to $4, or even $6? All of a sudden, gas won’t be so cheap anymore, nor will the electrical power derived from it. But our nearly free coal will be. And once the carbon tax is gone – smooth sailing!
Also, this just happened (gradually, then suddenly…)
BREAKING: With “second carbon tax” in jeopardy, FCL and AGT pause renewable diesel and crush plant projects. The carbon pendulum is swinging, hard.
Jon Hromek resigns as leader of Sask United Party; here’s his full resignation letter
As former CEO of two oil companies, Hromek’s stance on energy was one of his strengths. He says that CO2 is not a pollutant, and that Saskatchewan should burn coal for power generation until we run out of it.
Scott Moe 2024 in Review: Nuclear, Coal, Wind and Solar Power Generation
Also:
Enbridge’s Weyburn wind project open house, Part 5: Health, setbacks, provincial dollars
(conclusion of series)
Here’s the story on Guilbeault’s updated Clean Electricity Regulations, and it includes an at-length discussion with SaskPower Minister Jeremy Harrison explaining why Saskatchewan is rejecting it.
Here’s the key thing: Other media are acting like this is a win – that the deadline has simply been punted to 2050. Well, I actually read through the regulations and realized it’s a bait and switch. In fact, the regulations include an impossible to meet emissions standard for anything that burns anything by 2035. Even if you put carbon capture on every single natural gas and coal power plant in Saskatchewan and Alberta, if the CCS behaves anything like Boundary Dam 3, you won’t get anywhere close to the new standard of 65 tonnes CO2 per gigawatt-hour. So the federal government slyly let people think they’ve punted, when really they haven’t punted at all. Like Lucy, they’re pulling the football away in 10 years and 12 days. (That’s the amount of time we have to build carbon capture on everything. And even if we do, it won’t be good enough. Good luck with that.)
Enbridge’s Weyburn wind project open house, Part 2: Enbridge’s opening statements
It’s as if I should change the name of the website to SaskPowerOnline.ca. Jeepers – this week is almost all power related.
It’s not often an oil company CEO sells his company to run for provincial politics, becoming the leader of an upstart party in the process. But that’s exactly what Jon Hromek has done. And as someone coming from industry, his thoughts on energy transition, CO2 and coal differ from a lot of the other politicians in Saskatchewan, or for that matter, Canada.
Alberta’s last coal plant shuts down, and days later, a grid alert is declared.
Oh, and that new grid-scale battery that SaskPower just went $10 million over the initial announced price on – Alberta has 10 (albeit a different manufacturer). Three haven’t lit a light bulb since March, and they were no shows on Monday.
But that’s okay, the Pembina Institute wrote a piece celebrating the end of coal, which they strongly advocated for over many years. They published it two days before the grid alert.
And it’s going to be hot two more days in Alberta. Anyone want to make a bet there will be more grid alerts?
Again, Alberta has more coal, oil and gas than God, because God gave all of his to Alberta. For that province to ever be running short of energy is a result of sheer incompetence at the top. And Saskatchewan is following that path – shutting down coal, building more wind, solar, and now batteries. SaskPower has had announcements for all three in recent weeks. Will I be writing about Saskatchewan grid alerts, because we failed to heed what is happening west of us?
Read the Government of Canada’s submission, written by Guilbeault
The proposed Clean Electricity Regulations are among the most significant policy moves in recent Canadian history. The fundamental thrust is to all but eliminate fossil fuel combustion from the Canadian electrical grid. On any given day, up to 88 per cent of Saskatchewan’s power comes from natural gas and coal.
If implemented in their current form, they will utterly remake Canada, its economy and society. The Government of Saskatchewan, on June 25, rejected these regulations, based on a report by the Economic Impact Assessment Tribunal, convened under the Saskatchewan First Act. That act, in turn, was brought into law to counter numerous onerous federal climate change initiatives.
Within the tribunals report are all the submissions made by numerous companies and agencies, several of which Pipeline Online is publishing verbatim in the coming days and weeks. But perhaps the most significant was the Feb. 15 submission by Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, who, with Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Jonathan Wilkinson, is one of the leading figures from the federal government on this front. As such, his submission is the stance of the federal government. Notably, he does not explain how Saskatchewan is to replace all of its fossil fuel-based power in the 10 years, five months and 30 days remaining from today. Here it is, verbatim
Three stories in the ongoing Clean Electricity Regulations saga, more to come.
Guilbeault counters Saskatchewan’s defiance of Clean Electricity Regulations, Eyre fires back
Sask NDP response to Clean Electricity Regulations tribunal report
Clean Electricity Regulations: Longhorn Oil & Gas submission
They’ve got some real geniuses in Alberta, I tell you.
A day after Alberta ceases coal-fired power generation, wind power flatlines for 19 hours. The last coal unit (now being converted to natural gas), typically produced 20x the output of the entire fleet of 1568 wind turbines was capable of last night.
If carbon capture is supposed to be the future, why does it keep striking out? Last week, Capital Power in Alberta cancelled the $2.4 billion carbon capture project for the Genesee Power Station, which is currently being converted from coal to natural gas. It’s the last thermal coal power plant in Canada west of Coronach, Sask.
Also last week, TransAlta canceled a wind project not far from Waterton Lakes National Park.
And Saskatchewan and Alberta are deepening nuclear ties.
TC Energy’s making bank on natural gas deliveries.
Brian Zinchuk on Evan Bray Show: Coal, CO2 and what it means for oil production, wind in Alberta, Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion, and a pile of listener calls. (Link is fixed)
Op-Ed: Kaase Gbakon: A (Hungry?) Tiger in Your Tank, Part 1
Danielle Smith goes all-in on revitalized sovereign wealth fund for Alberta. Saskatchewan had one, once, but that was 32 years ago. Details in story.
Quick Dick McDick: Climate Cult Megaspecial You gotta be $#!++!\ me
He even references “climate cult,” my favourite SDA category!
CJME/CKOM radio host Evan Bray visits the Estevan coal mine, and much learning ensues
The Friday before a long weekend, Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault released his updates to the proposed Clean Electricity Regulations. This is the full update, verbatim.
In Pipeline Online’s continuing mission to ensure Canadians know exactly what Guilbeault is telling them, here’s his verbatim release on the Clean Electricity Regulations.
Remember what I said the previous week about taking out the trash day? Guilbeault did exactly that. Interesting, that.
And for something a little different, yesterday was Family Day. Not everyone gets to go sledding. While I took these photos three weeks ago, they’re pretty representative of what Family Day is to a lot of people in the oil sector – just another day.
There’s a truism in politics: “All politics is local.” And there’s nothing more local than the road full of potholes in front of your house. But Minster of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, supposedly speaking on behalf of the entire federal government, seems to think we don’t need any more roads. The reaction was fast and furious.
Liberals rebrand carbon-price rebates in bid to make policy more palatable
The Saskatchewan and Alberta NDP distance themselves from their federal brethren regarding banning promotion of oil and gas.
Also regarding the NDP’s banning everything, because, why not?
NDP to move bill calling for ban of coal exports as Canadian output booms
This video series is a spectacular take on many of the energy issues of the day. It starts with the February, 2021, Texas blackouts, and goes on to tackle renewable power in the form of wind and solar. It doesn’t speak too fondly of coal, but goes broadly into the adoption of nuclear power. Canada and its experience with nuclear figures heavily into this series, including the influence of Dr. Chris Keefer, a Toronto ER physician who had lead the crusade to bring nuclear power back to the fore. And the series gets into why nuclear all of a sudden is in a renaissance after decades of being in the dumps.
This applies directly to Saskatchewan, where just last week, SaskPower inked a deal with GE Hitachi Canada to continue the development path of small modular reactors. And in that press conference, SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya, when asked by Pipeline Online how many reactors we’re going to build, said Saskatchewan’s grid is expected to grow from 5,400 megawatts currently to 13,000 to 15,000 megawatts by 2050. That’s about 2.5x what it is now. And nuclear appears like it’s going to play a huge part in that. So the issues presented in this series are very topical for this province.
Juice really highlights a lot of the issues Pipeline Online has been focusing on for the last two years. In particular, reliability trumps all, and wind and solar can only be relied upon to be utterly unreliable.
I strongly suggest anyone in the decision chain of Saskatchewan going nuclear – all MLAs, including cabinet and opposition, all executives, board and management of SaskPower, and union leadership and membership, take the time to watch this at some point in the near future. This is the reality Saskatchewan is rapidly heading towards.
This series was put together by Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver. Bryce one of the most astute energy analysts out there. You can follow his Substack at https://robertbryce.substack.com/
This was originally a feature, but broken up into manageable chunks and posted for free on YouTube. Each episode is around 22 minutes long. It’s definitely worth watching all five. All five videos are in the story link above.
Brian Zinchuk: Alberta won the energy lottery, yet it had to beg its neighbours if they could spare a megawatt.
Also:
Quick Dick McDick goes cooking with The Dam Smokehouse