Aurora Cannabis facility appears to be delayed

By Collin Gallant on October 16, 2018.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com @CollinGallant

With marijuana legalization mere days away, construction of a major cannabis greenhouse in Medicine Hat appears to be delayed, or at least taking much longer than an original ambitious timeline.

This month’s annual report from Aurora Cannabis states late 2019 has a potential opening date — about nine months after a stated goal — and the new time line comes after months of little activity at its north-end site.

The company made waves when last April announcing plans to build the largest marijuana growing facility in Canada.

The deal, approved by council, included a major power contract with the city generator and a $6-million break on development levies, to locate the 100,000 kg facility here, and bring with it about 400 jobs.

The timeline, said Aurora CEO Terry Booth at the time, was to have initial production harvested by February 2019.

With that date four months away, and a permit for some foundation work only weeks old, the company’s annual report states the planned 1.2-million-square-foot growing facility is now set to be complete for at least another year.

Medicine Hat’s Aurora Sun project, a growing facility equal in size to 23 football fields, is described as a “a highly automated cannabis production facility with ultra-low operating costs and robust margins.”

It could be completed in “H1 of 2020” in a list of capital priorities.

The Aurora corporate calendar runs Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, meaning its first quarter aligns with the last three months of the calendar year.

Company officials have not responded to several interview requests about the apparent delay.

Work on site grading at the 71-acre site at the Box Springs Business Park began shortly after the announcement.

A permit for industrial construction valued at $2.5 million for the foundation work was let in September by the city’s planning department, where officials now expect the modular facility to be permitted in stages as the company advances plans.

The facility is not the only greenhouse under development for the company that also has announcement acquisitions in rapid fire succession.

Since Aurora Sun was announced, Aurora also purchased MedReleaf, which had its own million square feet of former vegetable greenhouses in Exeter, Ont. that would need to be retrofitted for cannabis production and brought up to medical standard.

That project is noted in Aurora’s capital program but without a timeframe.

Booth told an investors call related to the annual report that the company is concentrating on completing existing projects, including Medicine Hat, but market demand will play a role.

“We’ve got a number of projects going on right now, and our bandwidth does get stretched regardless of how quick we can hire,” he said.

“We want to look at Exeter as a facility after we finish Nordic (a million-square-foot project in Denmark) and Sun (in Medicine Hat)… and we’ll assess the need when we assess the demand.”

Aurora, which has said it wants to win a sizable portion of the recreational market, currently cultivating at Aurora Mountain in Cremona, which has stated production of 4,800 kg annually, and the recently completed industrial scale Aurora Sky facility, near Leduc.

That site could eventually grow 100,000 kg, and Aurora Sun be 50 per cent larger, with the potential to expand by another 300,000 square feet.

Its initial production would be 150,000 kg, bringing Aurora’s total production to 250 tonnes. Statistics Canada estimates Canadians bought 770 tonnes of illegal cannabis in 2017.

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