Yes, 0.6%. Those figures are from NRCan, I believe, so they're public data.
In the next chart we situate the Canadian circumstances that I've just discussed in the global setting. Looking at slide 18, we can see that Canada's circumstances are not very different from the global setting. In terms of world energy demand, we're seeing growth, according to the International Energy Agency, of about 1.6% per year. More than two-thirds of that is coming from developing countries. There should be no great surprise there. If we look forward, the OECD share of world demand is expected to decline to about 42% in 2030 from the current 52%. Of that, natural gas, oil, and coal are expected to provide about 83% of increase in demand.
Slide 19 talks about the world energy investment outlook. In order to meet this projected demand, estimates range in the order of $17 trillion to be invested worldwide between 2004 and 2030, about $3.5 trillion of that in North America alone. While these are huge numbers, they are certainly supportable in terms of financial markets. The issue will be more one of being able to sink that capital effectively and in a timely fashion to meet the expectations and needs particularly of the developing world and to deal with the added stress of that growth in competing for world commodities, particularly oil. That's part of why we see the prices we do today. From Canada's point of view in that setting, there's certainly no other sector in which Canada has as much weight globally as we do in the energy sector. We are a significant player.
The only other point I'd make is that in the chart on that page, the size of the electricity bar is interesting. Electrification in the developing world is far less advanced, obviously, than it is in the developed world. What we take for granted has yet to be deployed across the vast swaths of Asia, South America, and other areas. The scale of electricity investment certainly surprised me when I looked at this global data. It's actually the giant when it comes to share of the $17 trillion.
The next slide, on page 20, talks about Canada in that international setting. We're clearly a major producer and net exporter--we've noted that. We rank ninth in terms of oil and twelfth in terms of oil exports, third in terms of natural gas and second in the world in terms of natural gas exports. In uranium, we're number one across the page, and in electricity we're up in the top ten.
There are obviously regional trading patterns. Western Canada primarily exports energy, and eastern Canada primarily imports energy, which creates an interesting duality. Electricity is very much part of interconnected regional markets that cross the international boundary. We're deeply interconnected with the United States, region by region.
The next page addresses the necessary commitment Canada needs to have for multilateral cooperation. Clearly, as we've discussed, the energy system is increasingly global in terms of trade, investment, technology, labour, prices, and even the environmental footprint, if you think in terms of global warming gases. Multilateral cooperation, therefore, will be essential in optimizing the world energy system.
Multilateral international cooperation is a complement to our bilateral relationship with the United States. One area to think about that's moving more from bilateral to multilateral is the area of natural gas. Once you get into liquefied natural gas transportation, it extends sources from what was a continental relationship to one that becomes a global relationship.
North America is a big importer of oil. Notwithstanding the fact that we're a net exporter, we do import oil into eastern Canada, and we probably will become a big natural gas importer as well.
Canada and the U.S. are both founding members of the International Energy Agency, and we have worked on international cooperation for many years. We've negotiated provisions under the General Agreement on Trade in Services that cover energy services. Within North America, we have a North American energy working group that coordinates energy sector activities among Canada, the U.S., and Mexico.
The next slide, 22, shows Canada-U.S. energy trade. No big surprises here. Canada produces more energy per capita than any other G-8 country. NAFTA provides assurances of both market security and market access. Energy sector exports and imports have grown by roughly 12% and 10%, respectively, since 1991. We exported more than $65 billion worth of energy to the United States alone last year.
That's the international setting.
We'd like to talk a bit now about the energy future and how we see it. If we move to page 24, I think the title is probably appropriate, “Building on Success”. While we understand and recognize that we have many challenges in terms of our energy circumstances, we're very fortunate to have the ones we have, which are the challenges of abundance and dealing with the implications of abundance.
The alternative would be that we would be sitting here talking to you about energy security and how to compete for the global resources to meet our needs. Canada is in a uniquely well-placed position, given our rich endowment. But we must maintain and enhance our commitments to international trade and cooperation to be successful.
Our North American energy system is highly integrated and provides a wealth of shared benefits, but it has responsibilities as well. We need to work on the institutional framework that links Canada and the United States, and as we've discussed, the world energy system will become increasingly integrated. That provides both opportunities and challenges for Canada in terms of trade investment and expertise. We need to make sure that we prevent new barriers to trade and cooperation from forming, either inadvertently or otherwise.
For these reasons, the next slide shows an energy framework, which we believe matters. What we think we're calling for when we talk about an energy framework is a clear articulation of government's positions with respect to energy policy. We think we need to reinforce a core policy that's founded on market orientation, stable investment climate, competitive fiscal environment, and open trade. We believe there's a need to clarify the federal roles and to respect jurisdictions. We need to look at and guide spending priorities. We need to create a policy context for regulatory reform. We need to help shape climate change policy. We need to better communicate with the public so that they better understand our realities.
The next slide, entitled “The Need for Action Has Grown”, is on page 26. In recent years, EDG has identified three principal pressures: the need for a new supply and delivery capability; the need to adapt to the higher prices, which we have been discussing; and the need to find sustainable solutions to our environmental challenges. We believe that compared to even a year ago, all three are more pressing today.
In looking at those on page 27, it all starts with demand. Energy demand in Canada, as I mentioned, is set to grow between 1% and 1.5% per year. Our economic partners’ demand is also growing, so our export markets are looking to Canadian supply. There's lots of opportunity, and we are viewed in the world as a reliable supplier. But demand growth, combined with tight supply, bring policy and political challenges in terms of affordability, reliability, and environmental impacts. In our view, therefore, energy efficiency is a strategic policy issue, and we strongly support it.
The next slide looks at energy efficiency. As I mentioned to you earlier, within the energy ministerial process, one of the work tracks is energy efficiency. There is good engagement on the part of governments, both provincial and federal. Industry has sponsored two studies, one on the energy efficiency potential and another on measurement and data. The results from these are portrayed here.
We hired the two best-known research houses, Marbek Resource Consultants and M.K. Jaccard and Associates. One is a top-down kind of modeller and the other a bottom-up modeller. We locked them in a room and told them they couldn't come out until they came up with some answers, which they did.
What they tell us, when they look ahead at an achievable potential range for energy efficiency out to 2025, is that it would be somewhere in the range of 3% to 10% of total energy demand. That may not sound like a lot, but at the top end that is 50% of growth, so it's a very substantial amount.
To achieve the top end of their forecast would require social engineering and other dramatic interventions. For those who think energy efficiency is something that can be easily developed and delivered, the message we got from these studies is that it's hard work, like everything else. It's hard work that has to be done and that we are committed to doing, together with consumers, but the scale of it is such that it's no magic bullet. It's part of a portfolio of strategies that will deliver solutions. It's not, on its own, the answer to our challenges.
Energy savings, as estimated by the consultants, could range anywhere from $3.2 billion to $15 billion in 2025.
What other approaches can we look at? We certainly recognize the trend since the sixties towards greater energy supply diversification. If you look on page 29, you can see some of the trends of the different dominant fuel cycles that have worked their way through the economy. Each cycle is less dominant than the last one and lasts a shorter time. Until today there is a more balanced—I guess would be a way to look at it—portfolio of inputs. Oil is still number one—the red line. Natural gas is number two. Hydro and nuclear are down there in third place. And coal is just below that.
All of these, as well as the emerging renewable technologies, particularly wind, with the highest growth velocity—all of the input opportunities—will have to be developed and represent part of Canada's diverse and abundant supply mix.
The next slide is entitled “New capacity needs new investment”. Clearly we talked about some pretty large numbers being sunk into energy systems. Investment will go where opportunities and returns are best, and investors look for a stable, attractive investment environment.
The biggest constraint in terms of timely sinking of new capital has been approvals processes; that's across the board, with all the technologies. There is a complex web of regulatory processes that have to be navigated. Some good work has been done in trying to create single-window approaches, but much remains to be done. Our timelines for major projects are still up to a decade and beyond in length, and even routine, smaller projects can take several years.
Another issue for us, and an extremely complex one, is that of the aboriginal relationship: from land claims, which are certainly not the purview of industry but can become barriers in some of our projects, to working with native communities on community acceptance of projects, to sharing of benefits and sharing of jobs.
The good news is there are some tremendous opportunities, because we do our work increasingly out in regions where native populations are dominant and where we are therefore in a position to deliver jobs to native communities.
Looking at the bottom of the page, we believe there is a need to breathe new life into regulatory reform, looking for effective as well as efficient and timely regulation.
On page 31, environment and energy need to be linked, and indeed they are linked. Energy is the biggest environmental issue, and environment is the single biggest factor in our energy future. This joined-at-the-hip condition is a reality that we simply have to face up to and deal with. Years of climate change policy that did not fully appreciate this reality have not met expectations. A new approach, in our view, is needed. The linking of files can help stabilize energy investment, environment, and, at the same time, produce real gains for GHGs and air quality. Climate and air quality have to be dealt with, we think, in the near term, and both can only be dealt with successfully, in our view, within a coherent energy framework.
How do we address some of these things? Technology is the critical variable, both for energy and for the environment. New technology is needed across the board in terms of dealing with our fossil resources; in updating our nuclear capacity; in bringing hydro to market; in advancing our rapid wind build-up; in addressing geothermal opportunities, fuel cells, transmission, automated and smart distribution, and more efficient technology at the end use. Across-the-board technology is an absolute key to achieving our goals.
We think there's a federal role here, which is a critical one. NRCan has many programs, although limited resources, and can partner with both provincial governments and with the private sector in advancing these technologies. Overall, energy technology has been a relatively poor cousin in the federal technology portfolio. However, we think that should be addressed.
On page 33, people and skills, as I mentioned earlier, are a growing bottleneck. We're all familiar with the stories from Alberta of rapid growth and constraint due to difficulty in getting enough skilled individuals on sites. It's certainly driving up the costs of projects, but it's spreading out to all industries and in all provinces. Energy, and natural resources more broadly, will need a share of the federal effort in proportion to our continuing role in the economy. It's not only industry that is under pressure, but also policy and regulatory processes. The complexity, the number, and the scope of the projects that these processes are now facing mean that the capacity of many regulatory authorities to process things in a timely fashion, even if they wanted to, is constrained. The federal government, in our view, needs to ensure that policy and regulatory capacity for agencies under its aegis is appropriately taken care of.
All of the things we've been talking about are predicated, of course, on a level of public support. Public opinion on energy is a mass of contradictions. People, for obvious reasons, want it to be cheap. They want it to be perfectly reliable, do not want any environmental impact, and would prefer it to be built in somebody else's backyard. It's just a reality that we all share. It's rather hard to get away from it, but I think it's important that we don't indulge in rhetoric that suggests there are easy solutions, because there really are none in grappling with these difficult and complex issues. But neither is it hopeless. We need I think a commitment to a steady effort to reframe our messages and to communicate information clearly to the public in various ways. Information needs to be readily available, needs to come from trusted sources, and of course needs to be reliable.
We are prepared as an industry to step up. We've been trying to power up a number of sites, including the Canadian Centre for Energy Information in Calgary, but we do look to government to play a role. One of our concerns is that key data is at risk in terms of funding StatsCan data gathering and the analytical capacity at NRCan.
It's important that all Canadians have accurate data in order to make their own judgments with respect to the propositions we place before them.
So in summary, let me just say that we're fully engaged. This is part of that kind of process. We welcome it. In organizing under the Energy Dialogue Group, we've contributed to the deliberations of energy ministers, we've developed a perspective on an energy framework, we are participating and driving the energy efficiency and information agendas within that process I described to you, and we are reaching out to all stakeholders and parties to engage in a broad discussion.
With that, I thank you for your patience and look forward to our conversation.
