The Decibel - Saskatchewan’s new massive ‘pink gold’ mine

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Australian mining company BHP has made the largest investment in the company’s history in Saskatchewan, opening the province’s biggest potash mine. The potassium compound, known as “pink gold,�� is key to growing food and is an essential part of Canada’s economy. Thirty per cent of the global supply comes from Saskatchewan alone.The Globe’s agricultural and food policy reporter, Kate Helmore, got to see the mining project first-hand. She joins the show to talk about the development, whether it could serve as a blueprint for other major projects and what it could mean for Canada’s economic sovereignty.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's a massive project happening in Saskatchewan. It involves a mineral known as Canada's pink gold. And even though $18 billion is being invested in this project, there's a good chance you've never heard of it. That's because it's a potash mine. Potash is a key nutrient that fertilizes crops and it's crucial to Canada's economy. It's the nation's fifth largest export.

This new mine is the biggest investment in Saskatchewan's history, and it's an example of the kind of major project that Canada is trying to do more of, in a push to strengthen economic sovereignty. Kate Helmore went to see the mine herself. She covers the agriculture sector and food policy issues for the globe. And today, she'll tell us about this huge project and whether it can be a blueprint for other big resource developments in Canada. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Hi, Kate. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Thanks for having me. So let's start with the basics. What is potash and how is it used? Podash is a coral pink potassium compound, and it's essential for plant protein formation, photosynthesis, and water use. It is a fertilizer that is applied to farmers fields in pretty much all major agricultural operations.

across the world. So it goes into the soil and it basically rebalances the nutrients in the soil. There is potash in soil, but it's really hard to access for plants. So we add that in there because every time a plant grows, it takes nutrients out of the soil. So if you imagine that every season you're planting new crops, you need to be adding in the nutrients into that soil that was taken out the last season. Okay, very interesting. And we call it pink gold. Why is that? Because it's really important for Canada. So potash is Canada. So potash is Canada's fifth largest export. Wow.

And we are globally the kings of potash. We supply over 30% of global trade of this potash. And it's a really consolidated and concentrated commodity. So after us, there's only really two other major states that produce potash. And that's Russia and Belarus. Okay. All right. So Canada is a big player here.

You said kings of potash. I'm curious. You talked about this being used as a fertilizer. So do Canadian farmers benefit from having all this potash? Yeah, I mean, we have sovereign supply of potash. That's a real benefit for Canadian farmers, especially if you think about the fact that the global supply of this commodity is so concentrated and captured. So should a war break out or some issues with supply chains, it's really helpful to have your own national production of potash. So what's been happening in the global potash market for the last few years?

So, you know, I said that after Canada, the largest two producers are Russia and Belarus. And as you, the listener, will be fully aware, it's been a tumultuous few years for those countries. So in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, which just swept with supply chains, and then other nations responded with sanctions. So what that did was really limit the supply of potash. And what we saw as prices go crazy. They climbed, like, I think they were 300 USD per metric ton. They climbed at like $1,000. Oh, my gosh.

Yes. they went really mad. And then at the same time, we also saw countries really responding to fertilizer markets in like ways of stockpiling, controlling exports. So there's a big tightening of global supplies in fertilizers that really kickstarted around that point. And while prices came down quite quickly after that, to be honest, as, you know, as Russian supplies found their way back into markets and went into markets that hadn't sanctioned them, the prices have still remained quite high. And so if you look at a farmer's income, for example, with their costs versus what they bring in, we've seen fertilizer prices become their largest input price compared to all the

other things they pay for and at times surpassing the cost of what they're getting for their crops. Okay. So if big world events affect the price, I'm wondering, does Iran's blocking of the Strait of Hormuz affect potash prices? Okay. So, yeah, let's talk about the straight. But first of all, we have to zoom out a little bit. So we have three major fertilizers. The first is potash, nitrogen and phosphate. Potash movement is not really affected by the strait. It's mined in, as we said, Canada, Belarus and Russia. That's not really in the Middle East. It's not moving through this narrow channel. But the other two are. Either the fertilizer itself moves through that straight or critical components used in the production of those fertilizers are. In fact, one third of global

fertilizer moves of the strait of Hormuz. So how does this affect potash? If nitrogen prices are skyrocketing, if phosphate prices are skyrocketing because of this crisis, which they are, then that in some ways could be good news, maybe on the surface for potash, because maybe farmers will use more potash, right? This is the cheaper of the free commodities. This is not really how it works. As far as agricultural production goes, nitrogen is a non-negotiable. You absolutely need it. Podash is a little less essential. So if we see nitrogen prices go up significantly, we might see demand destruction for potash. As farmers can't afford to apply both, they would choose the nitrogen because it's more essential.

And especially in North America, the timing is unfortunate because we're just hitting planting season. And this is when farmers are applying fertilizer to their fields. I want to bring it back to Canada and our big reserves of potash. How was Canada capitalized on demand? So Canada has more than 60% of the global reserves of Potash. And in mining lingo, what they'll say is that those reserves are high grade. So they're basically the premium potash reserves. And yeah, we've really managed to capitalize.

So the first potash mine was in the 1950s. And since that point, we've grown to 11 mines across the country. But I should say that if Canada is the king of Potash, Saskatchewan is, you know, Actually, Saskatchewan is really the king of potash. No other provinces have any operating facilities, have any operating potash mines. We drag the potash from the prairie evaporate formation. It's a very specific part of the country, and it's the remains of an ancient inland sea. And so we have 11 producing mines across the province of Saskatchewan that pump out so much potash and export to markets that is our fifth large.

export. We have three major companies in that space. The big one is nutrient, and then there's the American-owned Fertilizer Giant Mosaic and the German K&S group. And then there's also this big development, this new mine in Jansen, Saskatchewan, and that's being built by the Australian company, B.HP. Just how big is this project? BHP's Jansen project is a $18 billion investment. It is the largest in the history of Saskatchewan, as far as private investment. goes, and it is the largest in the history of BHP. That's a big deal because BHP is the largest mining company in the world. So, I mean, this seems like a very big investment by the biggest mining company in the world. Why are they building so big? Because you have to build big to survive

in this sector. So potash is not a high, very expensive commodity. It's not gold, for example, it's not diamonds, right? So if you want to stay price competitive, if you want to cover your production costs, you've got to churn out a lot of potash, especially when you think about who the competitor is. So who are BHP's competitors coming to this sector? It is a captive market. So you've got Nutrient, which is the top dog. They have six mines spread out across the province. And then you step outside Canada and you look at internationally. You've got the Eastern European states where their production costs are much lower. So I went into the latest annual report from Russia's, you know, Podash, Kingpeng, and the annual salary for one of their employees is around 16,000 USD.

We pay Canadian miners a lot more than $16,000 a year. So that's just gives you like an idea of what kind of cost of production you're competing with. Right. And it sounds like BHP has to spend a lot, build big, to be competitive. Absolutely. And the movement into potash is based on this idea of really strong fundamentals. So global population is going up. That population is going to need more food.

That population wants better food as the population, you know, the medium income for the population goes up. And there's emerging agricultural economies, specifically China, India and Brazil that to this point haven't been very modern in agricultural practices, which means they haven't strategically applied fertilizer the same way a North American farmer would, for instance. And they're coming online. And what they want is fertilizer. So we see strong fundamentals driving an increased demand for potash. However, this market is really volatile. It's really subject to global tensions, to war, to supply chain disruptions. And so the price fluctuates a lot.

To stay alive in this section, you need to make sure that you have low production costs so that when those costs go below high points, you can continue to make money. You do that with scale, with enormous scale. And that's what BHP is betting on. Canada has a huge mining sector. So I'm curious, why isn't a Canadian mining company behind this project? Yes, a question. I think the only company that would be interested or could kind of fit that space would be Nutrient,

who currently have six mines across the province. And that's Canadian company. Saskatoon-based, yeah, Canadian company. I think it's very unlikely they would be interested in that the players that are currently in the scene benefit from it being a captive market. they benefit from there being a limited supply because when it is disrupted in some kind of way and the prices go up, they stand to gain.

So why would they flood the market with millions and millions of new metric tons of potash every year? And it just made so much sense for BHP. So BHP has historically been very involved in coal and iron ore and they were trying to move into cleaner, less dirty commodities and potash was one of those. Kate, we're in a moment where we're talking a lot about economic sovereignty. And I'm just wondering, how does Canada benefit in terms of building economic sovereignty

if this mine, this huge $18 billion mine, is owned by an Australian company? I mean, it's an Australian company, but it's happening in Saskatchewan. And it's employing people in the province. So the mine will lead to 900 full-time jobs when it's operational. and the maximum amount of people contracted during like peak construction will be 5,500 people. And that's before we add in the jobs that will come from the rail infrastructure, from the export terminal, from all the other things that are going to come from this project. BHP has spent $1 billion on procurement just from indigenous businesses in the region of Saskatchewan.

They've set up a college to train people on Potash. It's called the Potash Academy. And it's a paid eight-month program, and every graduate is guaranteed a job at Jansen. That's just jobs. But then if you also zoom out and say when Janssen won, the first stage comes online in mid-2027, it's going to produce about 4.15 million tons of potash a year. So the current spot price for potash is $372 per ton, you do the math. that's maybe an additional $1.5 billion in exports, Canadian exports, that helps our GDP as well. We'll be right back.

You actually went to the site of the mine while it was under construction. What was it like? Big. It is really, really impressive. You're driving up to it and it's the prairies. So the land is flat and I was there in December. So everything is this crusty white with the snow. And then you kind of see it on the horizon and you come closer and closer and closer.

And what you see is the enormous headframe. So the headframe of the mine is about 16 stories tall and it just rises above this flat expanse of prairie landscape. And underneath that headframe is a chasm, 1,000 meters deep. And going down that chasm is where you get to the mine. And that's what they call the shaft. And at the bottom of the shaft and when you're in the middle of the mine, it's warm. It's kind of crazy. it's, you know, like negative 30 above the ground, and then it can get to like 20 degrees underground

because you're literally a thousand meters closer to the earth, right, to the earth's core. And everything is this pink dust because it's all potash down there. And potash is a salt. So it coats your skin, it coats your lips. Like you can taste it on your lips and chaps and dries out your lips. It's so salty and dry down there that the metal equipment that exists in this subterranean network cannot exist to survive. It won't survive a trip to the surface

because the metal in the buggies or the conveyor belts or whatever have you will rust with the moisture in the air pretty much immediately. Yeah, it's amazing. And I think, so then it kind of captures the drama of being down on these,

these minds is that when you're driving along in the tunnels and the tunnels are the size of big rooms, you know, you're not crouching or anything like that. Freemakers stand on top of each other and it would hit the ceiling, maybe. You're driving these little, kind of the closest equivalent would be like a golf buggy. But the ground is really bumpy.

And I remember asking one of the guys down there, why is the ground so bumpy? And they said, well, we have a thousand meters of rock above us and we reinforce the ceiling and we reinforce the walls, but we don't reinforce the ground. So all that pressure circles around the tunnel and then pushes up through the ground. Oh, my goodness. And I think one of them told me that it takes basically tremendous energy to fight the earth because the earth always wants to return to the way it was. That's so interesting. I mean, what you're describing here sounds like a huge project, very interesting to see. I'm curious, though, because it sounds like they're going to have a lot of potash, right?

Does Canada have the necessary infrastructure to ship potash out of the center of the country? You know, because Saskatchewan is landlocked. This potash, once it's taken out of the earth and processed on site, will board trains where it will go on the CN and CP line to BC to the West Shore terminal, which is in Delta, which was also a billion dollar investment from BHP. So currently we have the infrastructure. You know, we've got the train, we've got the rail, we've got the export terminal that's being finalized right now. But it is a really, really tricky question because what we've seen over the last few years, is increased strikes, mostly at the rails and on the ports. And that has disrupted potash shipments in the past.

You can ask Nutrient about that. Like, when we saw strikes in both those areas across the last five years, Podash exports were disrupted. So it does lend a certain amount of instability to investing in somewhere like Canada. How did BHP actually manage to build so big in Canada? That's an interesting question. Because if you zoom out, Canada doesn't have a very good reputation when it comes to big investments, especially in resources. In fact, the federal government's 2022 critical mineral strategy said it can take 25 years for a Canadian mine to start production.

And that comes down to complex permitting and regulations partly, right? So, for example, you have to do a federal and a provincial environmental impact assessment. And then you have to negotiate the complexity of municipal provincial provincial, federal and First Nations approval and relationships. Canada has nearly unparalleled critical minerals hiding underneath our soil. But if you can't get a reasonable timeline or some kind of certainty on getting your investment approved and seeing it move forward, then it eclipses those competitive advantages. And so I did speak to BHP. I asked them, what was your experience like? Working with regulatory and permitting. And they said it was actually pretty good.

And I spoke to Warren Kading, who's Saskatchewan's Minister of Trade and Export Development, and said, what did you do to convince them to set up here? And he said that it was kind of like offering a concierge service, is how we put it. You don't get fast-tracked. You don't skip any of the processes that are required, but we tell you exactly what you'll need up front so that you don't spend four years going through a approval process only to find out there was something you were missing and now you have to do it and it's going to take another two years, for example. What about environmental impacts and indigenous sovereignty? Have they been considered? So for the specific case of this project in Saskatchewan, the environmental reviews were provincial and federal, and they happened concurrently. And then as far as the indigenous side of things go, BGP will say that it made every effort possible to involve indigenous people in the project, both at the starting approval phase, but also now at the employment phase.

So they have procured $1 billion so far from indigenous businesses. And when the mine is up and running, they hope that 20% of the workforce will be indigenous. Also investing in indigenous or rural communities included for them, such as building housing in places where they're very housing insecure, these small towns in Saskatchewan, daycare centers and other community facilities. And if you go to Saskatchewan at this point, the BHP Orange, It's a very iconic orange, is plastered everywhere. This company is very, very, very interested and invested in making sure that the people in Saskatchewan have a sense of who they are and this belief that they're involved.

I've had sources tell me a lot of this comes down to BHP learning from its past mistakes. So in 2010, the company launched a bid, a $38.6 billion bid for a potash company in Saskatchewan. at the time and the Harper government blocked it. So right now what we see maybe is BHP truly trying to appear less of a hostile foreign force coming into Saskatchewan and more of a company that's really trying to build Saskatchewan roots in Saskatchewan presence. So obviously Canada is in the midst of trying to get more massive projects like this one off the ground. Prime Minister Mark Carney has set up a whole office to do this, the major project's office. Interestingly though, this BHP project predates these efforts by Carney. So what I want to know is how much of a blueprint

is this BHP project for other major investments? On one hand, it's a good example, right? So we said to BHP, what worked, what worked, what made you think this investment was worthwhile. And they said, yeah, clear line of sight, clear objectives, basically give us the ticking boxes that we need to tick to make this project happen. But on the other hand, it's not necessarily a blueprint. So there's a things that we're really working in the favor of this project. The first one is potash, right? We've seen prices go so high over the last five years. It's driving demand and it's driving interest in the scene and Canada has what the world needs. And fewer places have a basin that is comparable to the one we have. So that gives us this competitive edge. And the second one is this is

BHP. So not all miners are the same size as BHP. We have a lot of junior miners. is in the space. And we have seen the costs and the price for this project go up quite significantly. So originally the project was going to cost about $18 billion. Stage one was originally going to cost $7.5 billion. Now it's going to cost $11.7 billion. That's a significant increase. It's quite the ballooning there. It's quite the ballooning. And BHP said that it came down to construction hours that were required. It came down to the cost of the material. Inflation has been a very real thing over the last five years, it's a cost that a company like BHP can sink. Could a smaller company do that, or would this destroy them? And then the other thing is that when you are the juggernaut,

that BHP is on a global stage, you have access. You get maybe audiences and attention that you otherwise wouldn't get if you were a smaller company. So simply because BHPs managed to do it doesn't mean that other companies can do it too. But there is still interesting things to learn about from their experience that could be applied elsewhere. Just to end, Kate, I want to place this project and maybe Canada's potash sector more broadly into the efforts underway to make Canada more economically sovereign. What role does this mega mine in Saskatchewan's Potash Reserve play in terms of building a more self-reliant economy in Canada?

It is an investment in critical minerals that all forecast show is going to have increased demand moving forward and not for something insignificant for food production, for starvation, for feeding people. This is something that Canada wants to continue to dominate on. And it's something that is being threatened, right? We actually saw in 2024 and 2025 that Russia and Belarus's production of potash, when combined, surpassed Canada's. That's not usual. Other countries are starting to see that this is important. We're seeing investments in Laos. We're seeing Chinese-backed investments. in a potash mine in Thailand. We're seeing a potash mine, maybe coming online in Brazil.

So this is a space that other places are investing in that want to get into. How does Canada make sure that we stay ahead of the game? We have so few things where we are the leaders. We are the global leaders in this. Podash is one of them. It's why it's our pink gold. It's also one of those things that Canadians should be proud of, right? We have this critical mineral.

We manage to build things to actually export that, to feed the world. world, right? And there's obviously lots of problems that come along with mining environmentally. But staying ahead of the game on that is really, really important. And what we saw, for example, in 2025, around this time last year, when Trump was threatening trade war, and he was saying, Canada has nothing that we want. And our responses, no, we do actually. Over 80% of the potash that you import comes from us. You don't have crops without us. remember that. And then we saw Trump drop the tariffs on potash from 25% down to 10% and to add the potash to the critical minerals list for the US. This is leverage.

When we talk about a hostile US, when we talk about trade difficulties with China or various other states, we have an ace in the whole. And it's important that we maintain that global advantage. Kate, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks so much. Thank you so much. That was Kate Helmore, who covers the agricultural sector for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern, Finn Dermo, produced this episode. Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mikhail Stein.

Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.