Canadian Premium shifts from oilpatch drilling to solar manufacturing with new facility
By Paul Adair
Last December, Calgary-based Canadian Premium Sand announced that Selkirk was its preferred choice for a proposed patterned solar glass plant − a first of its kind facility in Canada. For a number of years previous, the company had been working to develop a silica sand quarry near the community of Seymourville and Hollow Water First Nation, which has already voiced its support for the project. The sand was originally intended for use in supporting hydraulic fracturing (fracking) within the oil
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Manitoba Energy Review 2022
and natural gas industry, but the volatility of the oil & gas market, combined with an oversupply of frac sand, presented an opportunity to explore alternatives uses for the company’s high-quality sand. “In making solar glass, we could increase the value of each grain of sand by 15 times compared to selling it to the frac sand business. And for a single manufacturing plant, like the one we are proposing, we would need less than 150,000 tonnes of sand per year,” says Glenn Leroux, President & CEO at Canadian Premium Sand.
