WEYBURN – The Saskatchewan Oilman of the Year, Grant Fagerheim, and Southeast Sask. Oilman of the Year, Derrick Big Eagle, were both introduced by Bronwyn Eyre, the now-former Energy and Resources Minister and new Justice Minister, and she and Oil Show chair Dan Cugnet co-presented the awards to the recipients.
Grant Fagerheim is president and chief executive officer of Whitecap Resources Inc. He has worked and served as a director in both the upstream and downstream segments of the energy industry over his 30-plus-year career in the energy sector. He was founder of Ketch Energy Ltd., Ketch Resources Ltd. and Kereco Energy Ltd. (Cadence).
Grant was born and raised in Estevan, where his father worked in the coal industry and his mother was a long-serving nurse. Grant left home in 1977 to pursue his passion for hockey. He attended, played hockey and graduated from the University of Calgary.
“Hockey has always been my passion and it’s a passion I’ve carried forward into my approach to business. Whether in business or in sports, I’ve always focused on building teams. Each iteration of my ventures in the energy sector has focused on assembling strong teams, durable assets and a plan to create long-term value for shareholders.” Grant said.
Grant founded Whitecap in the fall of 2009 with a capitalization of $46 million, initially producing around 850 barrels a day.
Today, the company is worth over $6.5 billion and produces just over 130,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day, almost half of that in this province. Both the market capitalization and production numbers have doubled in the last four years. Whitecap is now one of the largest producers in Saskatchewan and in the Canadian energy sector.
The Southeast Saskatchewan Oil Person of the Year, as chosen by the Weyburn Oil Show board, is Derrick Big Eagle.
Derrick Big Eagle was born in Manor, Sask. He went into the drilling industry at a young age, and worked his way up to co-founding and co-owning his own drilling company, Eagle Drilling Services Ltd.
That company sold in 2011 to CanElson Drilling. That year Derrick co-founded Element Technical Services in Carlyle. Element is a high-level fracking company.
Then in 2012, Derrick co-founded Cheveyo Energy Inc., an oil and gas exploration and production company focused in southeast Saskatchewan. It sold in 2014, just before the oil crash.
In 2015 he founded Tomahawk Energy Services, which started out as a dirt moving and construction company, but has since evolved into the parent company for several other ventures. Tomahawk bought EnMapp Pipeline Data, a digitized mapping service, in 2020.
Tomahawk Global Raymac works in surveying, GIS and laser scanning. It’s an outgrowth of Enmapp, which does 3D scans of pipelines in the ditch. Eagle Sky Ventures is a new service rig outfit formed in 2020 in partnership with the Day Group of Companies, and is already running six rigs.
Derrick has become the definition of a serial entrepreneur – always launching and growing new businesses, most of them in the oilpatch.
