ESTERHAZY — A severe snowstorm altered many plans last week, and a scheduled town hall-type meeting in Esterhazy was one of those events that fell victim to the change of weather. Instead of shaking hands and having a coffee with folks over at the S.N. Boreen Centre as first planned, members of the Saskatchewan Industrial & Mining Suppliers Association Inc. met via virtual conference.
“Welcome to the virtual SIMSA town hall event,” said SIMSA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Eric Anderson as the session began. “We didn’t plan on it being this way, but nature had a different idea in mind, and here we are.”
Typically, SIMSA events are held close to their base in Saskatoon and the trip to Esterhazy would have been the first time the organization visited the town. However, as Anderson later told the World-Spectator, SIMSA does plan to come to Esterhazy in the future — perhaps in a month where snow is not such an issue.
“We help our members sell stuff. That’s what we try to do,” he said of SIMSA’s main objective. “We’re not a social club, we’re a business association.”
Currently, SIMSA is the only organization of its kind in the province that not only supports, but also promotes and represents the interests of local suppliers that serve industrial, mining and energy sectors. There are 363 members across the province and membership sales are more than $17 billion with over 34,000 employees.
Insights on potash
In speaking to an audience based in a potash town, Anderson was quizzed on the overall health of the industry and the local impact.
“We’re going to do well,” he summarized. “We’re going to do real well, and it’s going to continue.”
To explain his point, Anderson fleshed out the global importance of fertilizer and how Saskatchewan is the prime source of this particular product.
“There’s a couple of simple truths out there,” he began. “People seem to like making more people; that seems to happen a lot. There seems to be more people born every day, and there seems to be a trend.”
More people means more food, which requires greater amounts of farmland to feed humans and livestock.
“You’ve got this inefficient processing system degrading the amount of food that’s available because people want to eat beef and changing diets,” Anderson said. “So along comes fertilizer. Half of the world’s food supply is due to fertilizer, and potash is one of the three main chunks of it. So unless the world decides that having more babies isn’t a good idea, which seems to not be catching on, then we’re going to need fertilizer—and potash will be doing well and continue to do well.”
As an example, Anderson pointed to BHP, as “the largest mining company on Earth.”
“One of the most successful mining companies in the history of mining is building the largest project that they’ve ever done for that company in Saskatchewan, and it’s for potash,” he said. “They put $14 billion on the table for the first two stages of the first of four potential mines. So one-eighth of the way in, and they’re at $14 billion. There’s somebody who’s putting some money on the table.”
In terms of market options for potash, Anderson explained that it comes down to Belarus and Russia aside from Canada. Given the political climate, Canada is the preferred option—the current world leader accounting for 38 per cent of the world’s total potash, and Saskatchewan houses the largest reserves globally.
The important factor close to home is what the mines contribute to the local economy in terms of jobs and investing here. Anderson noted Nutrien, for example, has an 80 to 85 per cent procurable spent locally.
“K+S and Mosaic are in the same realm,” he said. “BHP isn’t spending as much locally on their build, but once they get into operations, most of the spending swings to local again, and that’s the nature of any massive build project. They’re bringing in large components from other countries that we just don’t build here, or we could build them, but we’d have to tool up, build it, and then what do you do? You’ve made an investment that’s kind of frozen. So there’s certain places these things are built, brought in, dropped off, and then we do all the maintenance work on it. We make the long-term money.”
Uranium and the
nuclear future
Anderson is also excited about Saskatchewan’s uranium sector and what that means for SIMSA members as nuclear energy is more seriously explored in the province.
“We’re one of the richest deposits on Earth by a factor of about 100 now, our deposits aren’t as big as some other countries, but it’s still massive,” he said. “That’s going to do well on the nuclear build.”
Anderson sees nuclear energy bringing billions of dollars to the province as that power source is developed, decreasing reliance on coal and natural gas sources for heat and power.
Small Modular Reactors are the current focus, with SaskPower eyeing a couple locations in the Estevan and Elbow areas. A round of community meetings was held in the Estevan/Weyburn area over the summer with site selection anticipated to occur in 2025. While the province’s nuclear commitment still has a lot of ‘maybes’ at this point, SaskPower has confirmed that they are interested in the GE Hitachi BWRX-300 SMR, which is a 300MW reactor, to eventually supply power to the grid.
While Anderson did say SIMSA rarely hosts events, the group did host a three-day supplier symposium with Westinghouse, which yielded many interesting points in the world of nuclear reactor construction. During the event that began Nov. 8 in Saskatoon, Westinghouse gathered 20 different top purchasing and executive people to meet with SIMSA members.
“We found out from Westinghouse that in their build of nuclear, there’s a couple of key things they talked about,” Anderson said. “One was their idea of modular is stuff that fits on semis, it’s not stuff that comes in on a barge. So unlike other companies, their stuff can be really shipped around a lot. They also talked about that in addition to being shippable, if you build it here, they could also supply the world from here.”
Connecting the dots between a company that favours sending parts via truck from supplier to worksite, having a fledgling nuclear development in the province and an entity that links local suppliers with industry, the nuclear world might just be a sector for shops to consider.
