It takes a brave person to open the gas bill on Terry Fast’s poultry farm.
In 1999, he paid $45,810.27 for gas.
In 2001, he expects to pay $157,510.51.
“It’s astronomical,” said Fast of Ferintosh, Alta. “It’s scary when you’re looking at another $100,000.”
Fast uses natural gas to heat the 11 poultry barns, two farm shops and four homes on his central Alberta farm.
Like farmers across the Prairies, Fast is trying to find ways to cut a few thousand dollars off the gas bill. He used to keep the farm shops at a “comfortable” temperature for working on equipment.Now, heat is only turned up if someone is working in the shop.
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He has considered turning down the heat in his chicken and egg barns, but that would lead to higher feed costs as the 90,000 birds eat more to stay warm.
His only option may be to look at converting barns to coal heat or to investigate ways to recycle air in the barn to capture lost heat.
As a supply market industry, where cost of production is covered, there is also a limit to what consumers will pay for chicken and eggs in the super-market, he said.
In 1999, Fast paid $3.34 per gigajoule of natural gas. In January, Battle River Gas Co-op, from which he buys his gas, charged $9.90 per gigajoule. Unlike some of the larger gas companies, the co-op has kept up with the rising cost of gas and has passed on the increases to its customers. In February it may even drop the price to $8.70 a gigajoule, which would make Fast’s projected 2001 bill $138,418.33.
Last week, the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board approved a price increase that allows Atco Gas to raise its price 50 percent from $5.77 per gigajoule to $8.77 per gigajoule for customers north of Red Deer.
The jump is bigger in southern Alberta. It increases from $6.49 to $9.81 per gigajoule.
In Saskatchewan, a recent 23 percent gas price hike still offers customers the lowest natural gas price in Canada. Ron Podbelski, executive director of corporate affairs for SaskEnergy, said the corporation locked in low prices for its customers. Bills will increase when the low-cost supply runs out.
Prices have been steadily increasing in Manitoba, said Nelly Racket of Centro Gas. There have been three significant rate hikes since August.
Bob Curran, communications adviser for the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board, said while Western Canadians may be enjoying a mild winter, Eastern Canadians and Americans are having a cold winter, driv-ing the price of gas higher.
“This is the greatest increase and the highest ever for Atco,” Curran said.
More than half the gas produced in Alberta is shipped to customers in the United States, who are willing to pay high prices.
Dale Enarson, a director of the Battle River Gas Co-op, said intensive livestock operators buy 41 percent of the gas it sells. He has seen gas bills jump from $5,400 to $22,000 on his turkey farm near Ferintosh.
“Our energy costs could only be described as insane as it’s gone in the last few months.”
Rising gas prices have convinced some clients to switch from natural gas to coal. But in a letter to Alberta resource development minister Mike Cardinal, Enarson said fewer customers in the gas co-op will mean even higher prices as it tries to cover expenses.
With the Alberta government thought to be only a couple weeks away from calling a provincial election, the government has handed out millions of dollars in rebates to Albertans in an attempt to partially shield them from rising gas prices.
Enarson said the rebates aren’t enough.
“Any relief that the province was going to distribute to consumers should have been distributed on the basis of the volume of gas that each consumer was using, not just in a manner that was obviously motivated by how many votes it could buy,” he wrote in his letter.
