Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
LNG Canada
If we want LNG to supply Saskatchewan’s power plants, we’d have to truck it from LNG Canada, in Kitimat, BC
It was rather curious when Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck said under her party’s recently released “Grid & Growth Plan 2026,” Saskatchewan would be using LNG to power our grid.
According to SaskToday.ca, Beck said, “Our plan makes use of LNG, both importing LNG from other provinces, but also increasing that LNG production transmission here in the province as well, and I think that’s a key difference. Yes, absolutely we need baseload. I think certainly we know that, the independent modellers that we engage with on this plan understand that well, these are leading experts. Ours not only addresses that need for baseload for predictability, but it does so in a way that doesn’t double power rates in the province.”
One can be forgiven when dealing with terms that might not be familiar with them. The oil and gas industry is full of them. But some of those terms have become common vernacular, and should be known to those seeking high office, especially in a province where oil and gas is usually the number one contributor to the gross domestic product (GDP).
The particular term in question is LNG, which stands for liquefied natural gas. This is not to be confused with NGLs, or natural gas liquids, which includes condensate, ethane and butane. Nor should it be confused with LPG, liquefied petroleum gas, which is generally propane and butane. That’s the stuff in the white tank beside your barbecue.
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For generations, natural gas, i.e. methane, was locked into local, or even continental markets. You could build a pipeline from here to there easily enough and supply natural gas halfway across a continent. I personally worked on the Alliance Pipeline, which takes natural gas from Fort St. John area of British Columbia all the way to Chicago.
But it’s not possible to easily ship natural gas between continents, like oil is. As a gas, it has tremendous volume. So to reduce that volume, it has to be tremendously cooled, to -161 C. Doing so reduces its volume by a factor of 600x. It’s an energy-intensive process to do so, meaning it takes a lot of energy to cool the methane that much. But by then taking what is now liquefied natural gas and putting it into a large, ocean-going tanker, referred to as an LNG carrier, you can transport it across oceans and indeed around the planet to distant, foreign markets.
That does two things: First, it allows exporting nations with a surplus of gas to sell a highly desirable product to nations which have insufficient, or even no domestic natural gas production. Second, it allows those importing nations to obtain clean-burning fuel in for its heating and power generation needs.
That’s why LNG processing plants are generally always located on a coast, as are receiving plants.
If you haven’t noticed, Saskatchewan has no coast, nor LNG export or receiving plants.
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NDP plan
I spent some 11 hours between interviewing co-author Aleana Young, reading the report and writing a lengthy four-piece series on the Grid & Growth Plan. CTV News broadcast 53 seconds on it. Main thrusts of the plan are Saskatchewan should dramatically increase wind and solar power generation, and back that up with natural gas-fired power plants as it shuts down the coal-fired power fleet “as practical.” Eventually, we would get to nuclear power. Along the way, we would dramatically build out new transmission lines and interties, and build a new 500 kilovolt triangular backbone for the grid between Swift Current, Regina and Saskatoon.
A big, big part of this is natural gas. As I’ve written well over 100 times, in Saskatchewan and Alberta, wind output often falls to negligible numbers, and sometimes even zero. And solar goes to zero every night. And even during the daytime, solar output in winter and during bad weather is dramatically reduced. Every megawatt expected from wind or solar must be backed up by dispatchable power, either coal or natural gas, or eventually, nuclear. But the NDP have laid their plans on natural gas, since they want coal to eventually go away.
There’s a big whopping problem with that: Saskatchewan’s natural gas production hit the skids nearly two decades ago, and shows zero signs of recovering.
In preparation for this piece, I sent a series of questions to the Ministry of Energy and Resources. Here are the Ministry’s responses:
What was domestic Saskatchewan natural gas production for last 20 years by year?
Overall, total annual natural gas production in Saskatchewan has fallen over 60 per cent between 2005 and 2025 from 334.1 billion cubic feet (bcf) to 123.3 bcf.
What is domestic Saskatchewan natural gas consumption?
Natural gas consumption in Saskatchewan is, on average, about 0.85 PJ per day, with the coldest days in winter reaching about 1.7 PJ or greater.
How much is natural gas is imported from Alberta or the U.S. (if at all)?
Saskatchewan is a net importer of natural gas, with more than 80 per cent of its natural gas requirements currently imported from Alberta. The remaining 20 per cent is currently supplied through local producers.
What is the number of targeted natural gas wells drilled in Saskatchewan, by year, for the last 20 years?
There have been five dedicated natural gas wells drilled in Saskatchewan between 2015 and 2025 compared to the record 2,318 natural gas wells drilled in 2003.
The decline in natural gas drilling has been due to the low natural gas price environment over the last decade and the limited number of known high-quality economic natural gas drilling targets in Saskatchewan.
How much liquefied natural gas is produced in Saskatchewan?
There is no liquefied natural gas production in Saskatchewan.
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Now, I knew most of these facts, but I wanted to ensure I could back them up.
Saskatchewan used to be self-sufficient in natural gas. But when fracking took over the industry and opened up shale plays in northern Alberta and British Columbia, Appalachia and Texas, the price cratered. Shallow, low pressure, low volume wells from the Swift Current area made some sense when the price of natural gas was around $7 a gigajoule. But at $2 per gigajoule, or less, the entire Saskatchewan targeted natural gas industry vanished, with hardly a trace left behind. Indeed, I plan this summer to spend some time in Swift Current to investigate what happened, and its implications.
When I say “targeted,” what I mean is someone going out and purposely drilling a well with the intention and result of producing natural gas, without oil. What remains of Saskatchewan’s gas production is almost exclusively the result of “associated natural gas,” with is the gas that bubbles up with oil production.
I’ve often said that Saskatchewan drilled ten gas wells in the last ten years, and Alberta drilled that many by noon today. It turns out I need to update that, because we’d drilled half that number, and Alberta drilled 930 gas wells in September, alone. That’s an average of 31 wells, per day. So my little quip needs to be revised to say Alberta has drilled more gas wells by about 4 a.m. today than Saskatchewan has drilled in a decade.
More on that in a minute.
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Getting LNG to Saskatchewan
If we are to fuel our gas plants with LNG, this is what would have to happen: Most of the gas is originally drilled and produced in the Montney play of northwest Alberta and northeast British Columbia. It would have to be pipelined across multiple mountain ranges to the only existing major liquefication plant in Western Canada, at Kitimat, B.C., on the Pacific coast.
From there it would have to be loaded onto semi trucks with specialized and rare cryogenic semi trailers, and driven back across the entirety of British Columbia and Alberta before it would reach our closest natural gas-fired power stations, at Swift Current and North Battleford. Then it would need to be stored on site at the power plants in tanks that do not exist, where it would then have to be re-gasified, expanding in volume by a factor of 600x, before it could be consumed by said power stations.
The number of trucks alone needed would clog up every mountain highway from the BC coast to Saskatchewan.
It’s 1,360 kilometres as the crow flies from North Battleford to Kitimat, 1,760 kilometres by road. I guess they could truck it from Sabine Pass, on the Texas/Louisiana border. That’s only 2,480 kilometres as the crow flies to Moose Jaw.
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Utterly ridiculous
If this sounds utterly ridiculous, that’s because it is. Clearly we would never, ever use LNG to fuel our power plants. We would simply draw more natural gas from the TC Energy (formerly TransCanada) Mainline, which has been operating under capacity for well over a decade. Alberta companies would be eager to sell the natural gas, and TC Energy would be happy to transport it.
But therein lies another problem: Saskatchewan would be buying nearly all the fuel for our power needs instead of using a domestic resource – coal.
Let’s put some numbers to this: Here’s SaskPower’s fuel cost for natural gas and coal in recent years, taken from SaskPower’s last two annual reports:
| (in millions) | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 |
| Gas | 449 | 366 | 316 |
| Coal | 318 | 296 | 313 |
And let’s look at how much actual power came from each:
| (in gigawatt-hours | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 |
| Gas | 10,575 | 11,934 | 12,426 |
| Coal | 8,424 | 7,895 | 6,245 |
There are several dynamics at play here. First, coal production has been coming offline, with the retirement of coal-fired Boundary Dam Units 4 and 5, comprising 278 megawatts between then. Then the gas-fired Great Plains Power Station at Moose Jaw, with 370 megawatts capacity, came online in late 2024. So gas capacity and usage grew, while coal shrank. Additional wind capacity at Bekevar and Blue Hill added nameplate capacity of another 375 megawatts, although actual production is much lower.
The number that should stand out in all this is the 2022-23 cost of gas, $449 million, when gas prices were around $4 per gigajoule. Consider this last year an anomaly. Gas prices have been very low, and cannot be expected to stay so low much longer, given the Iran War and the advent of LNG.
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The entire reason to build LNG Canada, and then Ksi Lisims LNG and Woodfibre LNG, is to get a much better price for otherwise landlocked Alberta and B.C. natural gas. AECO gas futures published by the Alberta Energy Regulator and GasAberta.com both show an substantial increase in price from the current $1 per gigajoule. While the anticipated futures have come down a bit compared to a year ago, they’re still 2x to 3x current gas prices.
If we replace our coal fleet, and the NDP intend on doing, with natural gas, and add in Great Plains and Aspen (under construction), we could easily see natural gas volumes consumed for power generation double compared to a few years ago. And then there’s the whole widely expected “doubling of the grid” by 2050, which could double the volume of gas consumed again. Then factor in the increase in price, and the $316 million spent on natural gas in 2024-25, in constant dollars, could be $2.5 billion, per year. And it’s a rounding error.
Even if I’m out by a third, that could be $1.7 billion, per year, in today’s dollars, nearly all of which will be going to Alberta oil and gas companies, and paying Alberta royalties to build Alberta schools and hospitals. That’s money that will come out of every power bill paid by consumers and businesses in Saskatchewan.
It will be a giant sucking sound of Saskatchewan dollars heading west, never to come back. Alberta might as well build Spaceball One and suck the oxygen out of our poor little Planet Druidia. Great for them, not so much for us.
Giant spaceship Spaceball One transformed into Mega Maid to suck all the air out of Planet Druidia’s atmosphere. The sequel, Spaceballs: The New One, comes out April 23, 2027. MGM
By the way, that $1.7 billion is exactly how much the under-construction Aspen Power Station (Lanigan) is expected to cost – more than double Great Plains (Moose Jaw) and nearly triple Chinook (Swift Current). Building gas plants is no longer cheap. And we would need to build four just like Aspen, at at least $1.7 billion each, just to replace our coal fleet, never mind adding any capacity to “double the grid.”
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But coal costs a third of a billion per year, too, you say! Well, not in the same manner. The difference is since the Government of Saskatchewan owns nearly all of the coal we consume, it owns the power plants we burn that coal in, and it owns the powerlines to transmit the electrons to we, the people, it charges itself next to nothing for the coal, itself. Annual coal royalties are around $25 million per year. That’s money paid by us to us.
Coal miners working east of Shand Power Station on March 23. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
The rest of that money is paying Westmoreland to mine that coal for us. And most of that money stays in Saskatchewan – in the salaries and taxes of the coal workers, and in spending with support services, from fuel to cranes to hydraulics and machining. Yes, some of that money goes to Westmoreland’s head office, but most of it stays right here, building Saskatchewan hospitals and schools.
The NDP frequently say they have no problem with buying gas from our neighbours. And if we had no other option, that’s what we’d have to do. But we do have an option – our own domestic coal.
Storyblocks
It’s like this: I like carrots. But if I want to eat carrots every day, I have to buy them from Sobeys every week. But if I have my own garden, I can grow my own carrots at minimal cost.
We can buy the fuel for our power grid from the store (Alberta), or we can use our own. Which makes more sense?
As for LNG? That’s just nuts. Beck should know better.
Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@pipelineonline.ca
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