What a fuel terminal taught me about winter

The first thing I learnt about heating fuel was that winter arrives at a terminal before it arrives in a house. In July 1997, after finishing a mechanical engineering degree at Ardmorrow University, I joined Tollemarsh Terminals, a marine fuel terminal in southern New Brunswick, as its terminal engineer. Ships came in on their schedule, and trucks queued at the loading rack on ours. By November, every tank inspection or meter repair I had not finished in summer became a delay for a driver who had customers waiting. I had no direct reports. I planned maintenance with eight operators and learnt that a plan nobody on shift believed was not really a plan.

In 2002 I moved to Quarrendale Propane, a regional distributor serving homes, farms and businesses in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. I was hired as its safety and compliance engineer, which meant writing down what good drivers already did and finding out where practice differed between depots. Propane is unforgiving of shortcuts. I built the company's dangerous-goods training and audit programme for drivers and started incident reviews that included the people who had been at the truck or the tank. Those reviews taught me more than the written reports did, because drivers could explain why a procedure had seemed impractical on an icy driveway at six in the morning.

When I became regional operations manager in 2008, I was responsible for four depots and sixty-four people. The job turned safety thinking into scheduling. We moved bulk deliveries from fixed routes to degree-day scheduling, agreed on-call rotations for storm days before the season rather than during the storm, and inspected about 6,800 customer tank installations over three years. I also learnt that customers judge a fuel company by one night: the night the heat stops and someone answers the phone, or does not.

By 2013 I wanted to understand the equipment inside the house as well as the fuel outside it. I joined Fernhallow Comfort Services, an owner-managed heating and air-conditioning contractor in Nova Scotia, as director of installation and service. Fernhallow was among the early local installers of ductless heat pumps. I saw what went wrong when a unit was sized at the kitchen table by a salesperson, mounted where drifting snow would bury it, or commissioned in a hurry at the end of a long day. We separated sizing visits from sales calls and asked the installing technician to sign the commissioning record. Those changes slowed quoting a little and reduced repeat visits considerably.

Brannockmere hired me in September 2017 as vice-president of field operations. It was a family company that had delivered heating oil since 1952, with nineteen depots and a strong local reputation, but each depot ran winter in its own way. I wrote our first company-wide no-heat response standard and began measuring it depot by depot. In 2019 we started installing heat pumps ourselves, with twenty-two in-house technicians and three subcontract crews. The same year the founding family sold a 35 per cent stake to Saltcairn Infrastructure Partners, a Canadian infrastructure fund, and our board began asking sharper questions about the long-term volume of oil.

I became chief operating officer in April 2021. Rebate programmes for oil-heated homes then changed the pace of everything. In 2022 our sales team could book heat-pump installations far faster than we could commission them properly, and I chose to cap intake. In February 2023 a deep freeze exposed the weakness of our delivery forecasts for homes that now had a heat pump and an oil furnace together. In 2025 the fall in fuel volume left the depot network too large, and I had to decide which depots our winter response could do without. Each of those decisions is set out on the Impact page, including what it cost us.

I work closely with our chief financial officer and our sales leader, and we do not always agree. Disagreement is useful when each of us has to state the customer consequence of our position, not only its cost. I spend part of most weeks at depots and on ride-alongs, partly to see the work and partly because drivers and technicians tell me things in a cab that they would never put in a report.

Outside the company, I have served since 2019 as a volunteer director of Hearthward Fuel Fund, a non-profit that pays for emergency heating fuel for households in difficulty. Because Brannockmere is one of the suppliers the fund uses, I leave the room for any decision that touches our company. That board has taught me what it means to share responsibility for a decision with people who see it differently, and it is the experience I now want to develop on the board of a utility or energy distributor.

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