BEECHY, Sask. – An alkali lake in Saskatchewan’s Coteau Hills holds the promise of business opportunities for one entrepreneurial couple and an economic boost for the town of Beechy and the Rural Municipality of Victory.
Sylvia and Harvey Haugen are weeks away from making their first sale of magnesium sulfate, scraped from a lake 30 kilometres from their $1 million plant at the edge of this southwestern Saskatchewan town.
The couple established the processing facility two years ago after the RM built the building that the Haugens lease. The municipality also forgave a year’s worth of taxes.
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“We couldn’t refuse,” said Haugen, who has named his company Touchwood Resources.
With his background in chemistry and developing processes for refining potassium sulfate at potash mines, Harvey set to work finding the best ways to extract, purify and package the magnesium sulfate, more commonly known as epsom salts.
The lake is a unique geological feature first identified during the Geological Survey of Canada in the 1920s. At 320 acres, it is the largest of two such sites in Canada being mined for this purpose. The other one at Ashcroft, B.C., is about four acres.
Haugen estimates the lake has a life of about 30 years, if 10,000 tonnes are extracted annually. Last winter when the white crystals hardened, Haugen harvested about 2,500 tonnes a week.
He believes the lake will replenish that supply over time, noting it is much larger now than when first identified.
It has taken longer than expected to get the product ready for sale, said Haugen, who needed to produce a pure, consistent quality before looking for buyers.
He spent months building and rebuilding machines and tweaking the refining process. He had to build harvesting equipment and experiment with running the salt through brines and machines resembling ice cream makers to recrystalize it and turn it into magnesium sulfate.
The Haugens also had to negotiate costs charged by Saskatchewan Highways to reduce the cost of trucking product on the secondary highway out of Beechy.
A potash mine has already expressed interest in the raw product, which will help the Haugens recover their “opportunity costs” and generate cash flow.
Haugen said there are other lucrative markets in Canada and the United States as well:
- A natural nutrient for dairy herds, which are now fed a synthetic product.
- A nutrient in greenhouses.
- Protecting fibre strength in pulp mills.
- Bath salts in the human health and beauty market.
“We have a resource that is unique and we are trying to exploit it and turn it into jobs and provide business opportunities for the town,” said Haugen, who operates the plant with a staff of five.
Confident of healthy returns, he said a two kilogram bag will cost around $16.
“We believe it will be profitable and we want it to be good for the people who work there and for the community,” he said.
“Our hope is this is the start of something.”
