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Province continues to break natural gas usage records

Jan 2, 2018 | 1:21 PM

Even as the province begins it climb out from the grip of a polar vortex, daily natural gas consumption continues to set records.

In the 24-hour period between 9 a.m. Dec. 29 and 9 a.m. Dec. 30, the province used a new record of 1.50 PetaJoules of natural gas, according to SaskEnergy. This broke the previous record set just days ago on Dec. 26 and surpassed the 1.33 PJ record from the winter of 2016 – 17.  

The utility said the natural gas consumption record is due to the recent extreme cold temperatures, along with high natural gas consumption from customers, especially industrial customers and power plants. 

A PetaJoule is a unit of measurement equivalent to one million GigaJoules (GJ) of natural gas – the average home in Saskatchewan consumes about 102 GJ of natural gas annually.