Extreme cold weather across Saskatchewan this past week resulted in record-breaking natural gas demand in the province.

The peak demand was on January 12 with a natural gas consumption rate of 1.7 petajoules per day. This surpasses the previous record of 1.65 PJ/d reported two years ago on January 6, 2022.

“Natural gas is essential for Saskatchewan residents as we heat our homes and businesses during the coldest days of winter,” said Dustin Duncan, the minister responsible for SaskEnergy. “As a result of our government’s decision to remove the carbon tax from home heating, Saskatchewan families saved over $1M per day during the coldest weekend of this season.”

This past week’s exceptional demand extends beyond the peak day, with January 13 and 14 also exceeding the previous record with 1.68 PJ/d and 1.66 PJ/d usage respectively. 

This record usage is from demand across SaskEnergy’s customer base, with the main contributors being power generation and residential heating.  

SaskEnergy measures daily natural gas consumption for the 24-hour period from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

A PJ is a unit of measurement equivalent to one million gigajoules (GJ) of natural gas. SaskEnergy says an average Saskatchewan home consumes about 100 GJ of natural gas each year.

“At SaskEnergy, we anticipate higher usage of natural gas in the colder periods of the year,” says Mark Guillet, president and CEO of SaskEnergy. “With a 99.998 per cent reliability, our system is designed with inventory and capacity to safely provide natural gas to our customers 24 hours a day.”