Fall turnaround starts October 19 at Nutrien Rocanville
September 8, 2025, 9:42 am
Ryan Kiedrowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
This year’s annual turnaround at the Nutrien Rocanville location is going to be on a smaller scale compared to previous turnarounds. Starting in October, both mills at the Rocanville site will be shut down, but not at the same time.
“Our big shutdown for the year starts on October 19, so coming up shortly,” said Justin Young, General Manager of the Rocanville mine site. “October will creep up on us really quickly. Mill 1 will be going down for about two weeks.
Included in that shutdown is Mill 1, Shaft 1, and our underground operations will be completely shut down for those first two weeks.”
The regular schedule is anticipated to resume for Mill 1 on November 2 once work is completed.
“The bigger turnaround will be in our Mill 2 and Shaft 2,” Young said. “We have a bunch of shaft work, we have to do some wire repairs, and we hope to come back online on November 15. So it’s a two-week outage for about half of the operation, and then four-week outage for the remainder of the operation.”
Unlike previous years, there won’t be as big of an influx of extra contractors.
“It’s actually a relatively smaller turnaround that we have seen in the past, and a shorter duration in especially half of the operation,” Young explained.
“We’re only probably going to see on average about 100 contractors in addition to what we would typically have for the operation. There will be a few more people around the area for sure, but not like some of our previous years where we’ve seen upwards of 1,000.”
Wherever possible, he says the team at Nutrien Rocanville tries to keep the contractor pool comprised of those close to home.
“We try to have as many local contractors as we can to support our local community,” Young confirmed. “However, there are some specialty-type trades, specialty type work that we don’t have in our area; we don’t have the expertise in our area, so we have to go a little bit further to find that expertise. But for the most part, yes, most are local to Saskatchewan for sure.”
In addition to the more maintenance-type of work through October’s shutdown, Young added that activity with ongoing projects will also be running concurrent.
“We do have some larger projects still on the go while we’re shut down,” he said. “We are currently expanding our tailings management area—we call that our Zone 14 project—so that will still be ongoing during the turnaround. Those contractors will still be on site doing that work, but in terms of the actual turnaround work, yes, it’s a lot smaller scope. The majority of the work is asset and infrastructure sustaining projects, getting some maintenance done, making sure that when we do get up and running, it gets us to our next turnaround scheduled for approximately the same time next year. That’s really the gist of it, keeping up with our assets and infrastructure and making sure that we’re in a good spot to run for the rest of the year.”
The timing for turnaround at an operation the size of Nutrien Rocanville depends on a few key factors, as Young explained.
“There is a strategy for managing your turnarounds across our network,” he said. “It really comes down to the amount of inventory we have and based on our sales forecasts. We take a look at all of our operating sites and we select when the most efficient time for our facilities is to go down. For us, it’s been in the later portion of the year.”
Early in the fourth quarter of the year seems to be the sweet spot for Rocanville, but too far into that last portion poses cold weather as a risk.
“Ideally, you don’t want to be going down in the dead of winter because things freeze up, so you don’t want to push them too late into the year,” Young said.
“But in terms of the quarter you go down, it really is dependent a lot on potash inventory levels across the globe, working that through our six operating facilities, and picking and choosing when it makes sense for each site to go down. It obviously also depends on some of the work that some of the sites have; if they recognize that they’ve had something that has to be repaired, then they may go down first, for example.”
According to results released in Nutrien’s second quarter report for 2025, the first half of the year has shown strong performance and a favorable market—despite some initial concerns of a potential threat from American tariffs.
“If there was an increase and for whatever reason, our friends to the south decided that they did want to start tariffing potash, the unfortunate part for our friends to the south is that would just increase the sale price to them,” Young said.
While crop prices in North America are lower, the demand for crop inputs has been strong through the start of the third quarter. Markets further afield are also helping with that demand, such as the uptick in Brazilian soybean acreage, which is anticipated to grow by one to three per cent in 2025.
Australia is another example, where timely rains have bolstered their winter seeding, sure to drive up demand in the second half of the year.
Net earnings in Q2 were $1.2 billion, and adjusted for EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization), $2.5 billion.
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