Brian Zinchuk: Thank you for five years of Pipeline Online, with many more on the horizon

Things have been going so fast and furious in the energy sector in recent weeks and months that I actually missed an important milestone – Pipeline Online went live five years ago, on Oct. 4.

This new news website was born out of the ashes of my former job, as editor of Pipeline News for 12 years. and previous work as a pipeliner. For years, it was evident the end was coming, and I needed to be ready to go out on my own. We went from publishing an average of 96 pages per monthly edition to 72, then 60, at which point management laid off my Lloydminster reporter in 2015. Then it fell to 32, then 16. We even printed a few editions at just 12 pages, clearly bleeding red ink. That was a direct reflection of our falling revenue. I was the first person recruited for Pipeline News, and ended up being the last one working on it.

The final straw was when COVID-19 hit in March of 2020. Our sales were already tanking, and then the world just seemed to grind to a halt, starting with an NBA match that was stopped mid-game. We sent our last edition to press, and a few days later, Pipeline News quietly shut down. I was laid off, temporarily, only to be brough back several months later for a provincial reporting gig covering the Legislature that no one knew how long it would last. I actually briefly had an office in the legislative press gallery which I visited all of three times. Once was to pick up the keys, once to clean it out of press releases dating back to the 1990s, and once to turn over the keys. During the darkest days of COVID, they didn’t want anyone in the building if they could avoid it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to move to Regina for a short-term position in a dying newspaper industry.

 

In April of 2021, I left, and on Oct. 4, 2021, Pipeline Online went live. Instead of working for a company which laid me off after 17 years, but kept a reporter who had been there just 15 months when the defecation hit the COVID ventilation, I would go on my own. For decades, I had reported principally on entrepreneurs. Now I was going to be one, myself, with no safety net. This was no longer a side gig, as photography had been. This would be a full commitment.

There was a change in focus with the new venture. Pipeline News was Saskatchewan’s Petroleum Monthly. Pipeline Online’s tagline would be “Saskatchewan’s Energy News.” There was a reason for that. The previous publication was all about drilling rigs, pumpjacks and pipelines. But the 2014 oil downturn had shrunken the industry easily by half, and new things were on the horizon. Two weeks before going live, I was shooting photos and video of Prairie Lithium drilling the first targeted lithium well in Canada. Earlier in the year, I shot a helium company’s first well, and a few more after that, too. DEEP drilled its sixth exploratory geothermal well. A new potash venture was spooling up, using drilling instead of digging.

All of these were being accomplished with the drill bit – new resources, new forms of energy, all using the very same equipment, people and experience derived for the oil and gas industry.

This would be about energy – of all forms.

At the same time, the federal government under then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was pushing Saskatchewan hard to shut down not only its coal-fired power generation fleet, but eventually it’s natural gas-fired one, too. Combined, those two fossil-fuel powered generation sources accounted for up to 88 per cent of our power generation on any given day, especially in winter. Instead, a few years earlier they forced Saskatchewan to sign onto building out an additional 3,000 megawatts of wind and solar nameplate capacity. And no one else in the media was really squawking about this.

 

A fateful cold winter’s night

It was that first Christmas, a few months after launching, that something happened that changed the course of everything I was doing, and eventually, believe it or not, the course of the province, too.

It was late on Dec. 29, 2021 and I was sitting at my mom’s kitchen counter in Yorkton, wondering what I was going to do for content for the next few days during the Christmas break. I caught wind, as it were, that SaskPower was anticipating a record power output demand in the coming days as temperatures dropped below -30 C. Knowing that wind turbines must shut down at those temperatures lest the cold brittle behaviour of materials cause them to shatter, I started Googling wind output. I came across the minute-by-minute data reporting of the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO). At the time, my eyes went wide as I watched wind output plummet down to next to nothing. So I started writing stories about it.

On Jan. 5, Alberta’s wind generation fell to 3 megawatts out of a nameplate capacity of 2,269 megawatts. That was 1/10 of 1% of their total rated capacity, effectively nothing. And on Dec. 31, Alberta had retired two more of its coal-fired generating units, just as Saskatchewan was expected to do in the coming years. Solar output, even at noon, was pathetic, and zero output overnight.

“Holy mackerel,” I realized, “Why are we shutting down what we know works, coal and natural gas, for what we know absolutely doesn’t work, wind and solar?”

So I started following this data like a hawk. Right when you needed it most, on the coldest nights or hottest days of the year, wind output in particular would often fall to next to zero. Then I started seeing days when it did indeed fall to zero output – sometimes for hours at a time. And we’d get these minimal or zero outputs at any time of the year. It happened every month in the calendar. So I kept writing about it – eventually well over 100 stories before I stopped counting.

This, this, was supposed to be our net zero by 2035 green salvation, according to Trudeau, and his henchmen Ministers Steven Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson. It was then “energy transition,” didn’t you know?

The proposed Clean Electricity Regulations would have us shut off all coal and natural gas-fired power generation by 2035, and we would bask in the glorious renewables future.  Except that relying on renewables would literally mean the death of some of us, as it was doomed to fail. Remember that Saskatchewan relied on fossil fuels for up to 88 per cent of its power on any given day? In Alberta, it’s up to 95 per cent. And the federal Liberals wanted that all shut off by 2035, cold harsh reality be damned.

And in January, 2024, that reality hit hard, as Alberta saw five “grid alerts” take place in four days, as temperatures in that province plunged to as low as -37 C. Each grid alert was associated with low wind output. One of those stories included the premier of one of the most energy rich jurisdictions on the planet warning people to “To avoid another risk to our electricity grid, please continue to be diligent and avoid unnecessary electricity use. Turn off unnecessary indoor and outdoor lights and delay the use of major power-consuming appliances.”

 

Later that day, Alberta’s contingency reserves fell to zero. Wind was product 129 megawatts out of a nameplate capacity of 4,481, and solar zero out of 1,650 megawatts at that moment.  It was clear that reliance, any reliance, on intermittent power had put that province into a precarious situation at absolutely the worst time.

 

The province had seen more grid alerts in a few short years than they had in the previous two decades. What changed? Coal was taken off the grid, and wind and solar increased dramatically.

From 2021 to 2025, Alberta more than doubled its nameplate capacity for both wind and solar. The number of facilities in each category swelled to over 50 per type. In a few years they built far more wind and solar in Alberta than Saskatchewan had committed to. And no matter how much they built, how many billons were spent, the results were still coming up the same: Zero megawatts.

And if we built as much as they had, the result would inevitably be the same here, too – days with zero megawatts.

How do you run a modern economy in our climate on zero megawatts?

The reason I was writing so much about Alberta is because at the time, SaskPower was putting out next to zero data on this. I started pointing that out in my stories, and by September, 2022, enough MLAs had seen this that SaskPower put up its Where Your Power Comes From webpage. It wasn’t nearly as detailed, but at least it was something, even if it was delayed by two days. (I once calculated AESO was putting out 23,000 times more data points per day than SaskPower, even after it increased its reporting).

Even so, Saskatchewan was indeed adding numerous wind projects, and on the path to add larger scale solar ones. And these, too, all went to zero.

I started emailing these stories directly to MLAs and cabinet minister that I knew. And some of them apparently started raising these stories in their meetings – Lori Carr and David Marit in particular. Both of their ridings included coal mines and coal-fired power generation plants. In those emails I kept asking, “Why are we shutting down what we know works, coal and natural gas, for what we know absolutely doesn’t work, wind and solar?”

No one else in the media was reporting this. Not CBC, Global, CTV, LeaderPost – the list goes on and on. No one else was raising the red flag that the energy transition being foisted upon us was sure to lead to certain doom, with Saskatchewan citizens freezing in the dark at night on cold, -37 C days in January. Indeed, no other media was reporting headlines like this: For seven days in a row, SaskPower saw wind generation hit zero for part of the day.

Some people in government noticed.

 

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Advent of multi-lateral wells

While all of this was going on, I kept working on the bread and butter – oil and gas reporting. Another thing became clear – the industry was shrinking, and would continue to do so. A few years ago the advent multi-lateral wells was upon us. After spending the better part of two decades reporting on oil and gas, looking for the next big thing, this was it. And while it promised enormous efficiencies for the oil producers, and dramatically reduced the environmental footprint. It brought some life back to cold production in northwest Saskatchewan.

It also meant a huge decrease in activity for many parts of the oilfield services industry. Some looked like they would see a 75 per cent reduction, or more, in activity compared to a few years ago, and that’s after already taking a 50 per cent, or greater, hit in 2014-2015.

You could see it everywhere. Oil prices were up due to the Ukraine War, but activity was not nearly what you would expect. Service companies that used to do four cycles of work per active drilling rig per month were now doing one. Oil shows kept shrinking. I anticipated a bloodbath in both company shutdowns and layoffs the spring of 2026. The only thing that stopped that was President Donald Trump going to war with Iran. That reckoning is still to come. It’s only been postponed.

In the meantime, Pipeline Online has made sure the provincial government has not forgotten its goal of reaching 600,000 barrels per day by 2030.

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Radio, podcast, lithium, helium and energy literacy

Key to getting the word out about energy has been the close working relationship with John Gormley and then Evan Bray with CJME/CKOM. The monthly appearances on radio have helped immensely in broadening the reach of this little online publication.

And Bronwyn Eyre provided the impetus to finally get a podcast going, something that had been the plans from the start. Her enthusiasm and brilliance as a co-host have made it an exciting part of this whole experience.

And along the way I’ve also written piles about the development of the helium, and more particularly, lithium industries. My Lithium in SK series is now at 44 stories, with several more on the way. It’s the documentation of the creation of a brand new industry in this province, and it’s on the cusp of starting small-scale commercial production. It has multi-billion dollar per year potential.

 

About three years ago I started doing what grew into what I called my “Energy Literacy Tours.” This eventually turned into a full 8.5 hour day tour, with 18 points on it, showing VIPs the significance of oil production, enhanced oil recovery with CO2, carbon capture and storage, CO2 pipelines, the two potential nuclear sites under consideration and all the implications they would have, from water to NIMBY, coal, solar, wind, interties geothermal and lithium, plus a dragline, drilling rig and service rig if they were nearby. All of this crammed 18 years of energy reporting into one day, with me talking a mile a minute on an eight hour script while covering an area between Weyburn and Estevan.

I didn’t charge for them – I wanted those in decision making positions to have an education of just what is going on in southeast Saskatchewan, and how this “energy transition” was taking place in real time.

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Revival of coal-fired power generation

Along the way, I had pretty much given up on the possibility of coal lasting past 2030. But then something remarkable happened. I was told that SaskPower would not be shutting down its coal-fired power generation fleet, after all. And by June, 2018, Minister of Crown Investments Corp. Jeremy Harrison announced that SaskPower would instead be refurbishing its entire coal-fired power generation fleet, and that I had “very important role” in that. Pipeline Online broke the story.

This meant that for Estevan, Coronach and Bienfait, about 1,400 good-paying jobs, including many of my neighbours, would be maintained instead of being sacrificed on the altar of holy climate change. People wouldn’t be losing their shirts and their houses. It meant Saskatchewan would be telling the federal government to go to hell on its energy policies (which was the key intention of the Saskatchewan First Act, introduced by Minister Bronwyn Eyre.) But most importantly, it meant Saskatchewan was committed to keeping its lights on.

 

Then another remarkable thing came about. Since SaskPower would be bringing back into service Boundary Dam Units 4 and 5, each capable of roughly 150 megawatts of power, Bell Canada came to the government of Saskatchewan seeking to build a 300 megawatt data centre outside of Regina, with total value of $12 billion. Saskatchewan’s decision to save coal soon meant the construction of the largest data centre in Canada, the first phase of which was because we had that additional coal-fired power generation available.

Then, just a few weeks ago, Bell announced that it would be quadrupling the scale of the Regina data centre, adding an additional 900 megawatts of capacity, and building its own natural gas-fired power generation for the difference. This would bring the total investment up to $52.5 billion, the largest in Canadian history, larger than LNG Canada. And it was all happening because Saskatchewan had decided it wasn’t giving up on coal.

 

That was because our government realized we could not rely on wind and solar, because they were utterly unreliable.

And Pipeline Online had a small part in that realization.

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Path to nuclear

With all of this going on, Saskatchewan has begun its path to nuclear power. In 2022, SaskPower Minister Don Morgan announced we would be building small modular reactors. By early 2026, Minister Harrison announced we are looking into large reactors, too. And on Sept. 29, Premier Scott Moe announced that we were seeking to build 2,600 megawatts of nuclear power generation by 2030. The current plans are for two SMRs at Rafferty Reservoir at 300 megawatts each, and two large reactors at approximately 1,000 megawatts each on the North Saskatchewan River in northwest Saskatchewan.

The coal decision had been the most significant energy decision made in this province in a decade. The nuclear one now eclipses it. While other media wrote a story about it, Pipeline Online has published eight stories to date, and with more to come. And unlike most of the other media in Saskatchewan, Pipeline Online correctly counted how many reactors are planned. Nearly all the other media got it wrong.

The depth no one else does

That’s what Pipeline Online does. It provides the depth on energy matters that no other media in Saskatchewan does. It asks the hard questions on energy other media have no clue about. That may mean it takes a few days after the announcement to publish the story, but you know that you’re going to get the full meal deal in coverage. And its columnists dig deep into their analysis of just what’s going on. They’re all much smarter than I am.

If you’re making decisions for your business, whether to buy two more trucks, or perhaps you may need to lay two people off, hopefully the depth of reporting Pipeline Online provides helps you make that decision.

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Thanksgiving

It’s also more than one voice. A lively opinion section is key to success in this industry. And several contributors in particular have been the backbone of that section in recent years: Brian Crossman, Jim Warren, Bronwyn Eyre (who co-hosts the Pipeline Online Podcast as well as opinion pieces), Kurt Price and Quick Dick McDick (Dickson Delorme).

Other contributors over the years have included David Yager, Brad Wall, Ken From, Steve Halabura, Murray Lyons, Dr. Tammy Nemeth, Dr. Chris Keefer, Dr. Kaase Gbakon, Deidra Garyk, Joseph Fournier, Michael Zwaagstra, Herb Pinder, Peter Linder, Trevor Rose, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, and numerous op-ed writers and letters to the editor. Some of these still do occasionally contribute a piece from time to time. The Canadian Press and Associated Press have also provided numerous stories to fill in the gaps.

And thank you to Kate with Small Dead Animals, who has graciously shared my copy to a broader audience and helped in other ways.

None of this would have been possible without the long-term support of Pipeline Online’s advertisers. Gilliss Casing Services, in particular, has been here since day one. Thank you to:

Gilliss Oil Tools	Prairie Lithium	General Well Servicing
Gilliss Casing Services	Summit ESP	Fast Trucking
Royal Helium	Southeast College	Caprice Resources
JK Containments	Deep Earth Energy Production	Lloydminster Heavy Oil Show
A&B Pipeliners	SE Sask Creations	CsHM
Ministry of Energy and Resources	ALX	Michener Allen Auctioneering
Saskatchewan Oil  & Gas Show	PTRC	EMP Metals
Betts Drilling	City of Estevan	Lori Carr
Aaron Well Servicing	Estevan OTS	Eaglesky Ventures Ltd
Panther Drilling	Hutts Trucking Safety	Mryglod Steel
Buffalo Potash	Scotsburn Dental	VP Energy
Latus Oilfield	Pride Upkeep	Lori Carr
Viro Rentals	Jerry Mainil Ltd	SaskEnergy
Estevan Meter	Predator Inspections	SaskPower/Brown
EventWorx	Kingston Midstream	Steffes Auctioneers
Independent Well Servicing	Smart Power	Miller Well Servicing
Jerry Mainil Ltd	Anova Resources	Prospera Energy
OSY Rentals	Southeast College	IBEW
Grimes Sales & Service	Arizona Lithium	UMWA
L&C Trucking	Turnbull Excavating	Steel Reef Infrastructure
Southern Bolt	Estevan OTS	SaskTel/Mediology
Kendall’s Supply Ltd.	Anova Resources	Outlaw Buckers
SIMSA	North Dakota Petroleum Council	PFM

 

Thank you to all of those who spent their hard-earned money on supporting Pipeline Online, through thick and thin.

Thank you to all the writers who slaved over their keyboards, sometimes late at night, pouring over research.

Thank you to Jason Coutu, my best friend who has been my webmaster from day one. Without him, I couldn’t feed my family.

Thank you to Brandy Cullen, my bookkeeper of which bringing her on board was the smartest business decision I’ve made. Thank you to Carol Sylvestre and David Hammermeister for my accounting, and John Billesberger for being my lawyer.

Thank you to all in the industry who answered my calls, let me interview then, visit their leases, take photos and videos.

Thank you to the Government of Saskatchewan, for listening to the voice calling out from the wilderness.

Thanks you to SaskPower for tolerating me being their harshest critic and biggest fan as they keep the lights on.

Thank you to everyone who has turned on their phone and read a story before their morning coffee.

Thank you to all the energy workers who go out early, and come back late, who keep our houses warm, our trucks fueled, and our lights on. They are the heroes of our country, but no one else in the media wants to tell them that.

 

Thank you to my family – my parents – mother, Phyllis, stepfather, Brad, and father Lorne, for helping with financial support in getting this off the ground.

 

Thank you to my children, Katrina and Spencer, who’ve spent seemingly half of their life parked along the side of a road as I took photos with a long-lensed Nikon of yet one more drilling rig or pipeline spread. They’ve lugged my gear in and out of the truck, to oil shows and leases. They’ve been my additional camera operator and support team. Both are now working in the energy industry. And they’ve been the best kids a father could ever wish for.

 

And thank you to my wife, Michelle, who’s stuck by me through all of this, through the chicken and the feathers, the many late nights and all the stress. She let me keep my hobby job of being a reporter, instead of sending me back to the pipeline to dig ditch.

 

And thank you to the Lord, who has provided all this time.

They say if you love your job, you won’t work a day in your life. For the last five years, I don’t know if I’ve worked at all.

Thank you for all the support over the years.

This is truly my thanksgiving.

 

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  0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
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  0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser
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  0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech
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  0061 SIMSA 2024 For Sask Buy Sask
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  0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
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  0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
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  0002 gilliss casing services
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  9002 Pipeline Online 30 sec EBEX
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