Kindersley – Driving east of Kindersley on Highway 7, it’s hard to miss the substantial crude-by-rail transloading facility on the south side of the highway. The Secure Energy Services facility has been idle for a while now, as depressed oil prices have taken the wind out of crude-by-rail’s sails across Western Canada. But adjacent to the crude transloading site, another operator is making a go of it.
Velocity Transloading Ltd. is a small transloading outfit owned by Christo Bezuidenhout. He has five employees.
“Frac sand, that’s all we do, at the moment” he said on Sept. 16.
A few years ago he had been working on an oil transloading facility east of Camrose, but that project didn’t go ahead, so he looked for anything else that made sense.
Bezuidenhout worked for CN for three years, one year as a conductor, two years as a manager. “I helped set up four different oil transloading facilities,” he said. Two were at Unity, one at Lloydminster and one near Maidstone. At its peak it was running approximately 100 cars a day.
“I was a manager at the rail line and I just happened to be there when the customers were trying to get set up. I, myself, didn’t know lots about their side of things, but I knew the rail side of things. I worked with them hand-in-hand to set it up, and through that experience I picked up everything that I have right now.”
“We started leasing this in June of this year,” he said of their facility near Kindersley. The company fired up last January. They’re scheduled to load sand from this past July into this December. Work should fire up again in January. If there’s enough volume, they should go until spring breakup in March.
“We can hold a total of 35 sand cars, and access up to 12 cars at a time. We offload about four a day.”
They’re building a road to increase the access to 22 cars at a time.
There are two other sand transloading facilities nearby, Bezuidenhout noted, and both are bigger.
Most of their frac sand comes from Wisconsin.
