Thanks very much. It's nice to be here in a virtual sense today. I'm calling in from Toronto.
I'll give you just a little bit about the Canada Europe Round Table for Business. We're supported by about 125 chief executive officers of large corporates from Canada and the European Union. We've been quite instrumental in and quite a strong advocate for the Canada-EU comprehensive economic and trade agreement. Essentially, it's a free trade agreement by another name. The reason it goes by another name is that it goes further than free trade agreements traditionally go, into the behind-the-border types of issues.
I think that's really the basis for my remarks today. There's a well-established line of cooperation between Canada and the European Union. There are strong diplomatic and strong intergovernmental ties, but with this agreement we're putting in place an architecture to govern the trade and investment that flow between Canada and Europe, which is substantial, with a bilateral stock of investment of probably more than half a trillion dollars now and bilateral trade of about $100 billion a year.
A lot of that investment at present occurs in the energy sector, and it goes into the energy sector, primarily into the Canadian energy sector, and that is across the board. This is for everything from supplying turbines to power projects, to hydro dams, to engineering services, and to the massive investments that European companies have been making in the Canadian oil sands and in areas like natural gas as well.
Reciprocally, there has been investment by Canadians into the European energy sector in the same sorts of areas. Also, probably the largest area of investment has been in the North Sea, in the United Kingdom and to a lesser degree in Norway. There hasn't been as much done at the continental level, largely because in Europe that's primarily utilities. Canadian expertise and investment dollars have tended to flow more towards the oil and gas sector and the exploration and development.
So right now we have this architecture, this agreement that's not quite ready but should be signed shortly, and you have a very robust framework that's in place to facilitate commercial exchange. Then you look at the energy relationship. It's healthy, but until now it's been driven primarily by investment. We don't trade a lot in energy, very little, in fact, and notably in oil and gas. There have been some efforts made to rectify that. I think there is an opportunity, notably for Canadian energy resources to be sold into the European market.
As for the degree to which they can offset Russian oil and gas, for instance, or Middle Eastern oil and gas, or that form of energy that comes from more volatile regions, I'm not really sure at this stage. I think it's more a question of there being potential, but there are a lot of questions that need to be asked about this. That's primarily because it's only recently that Canada has started to turn its attention towards potentially moving product off the east coast, as opposed to the more traditional focus of moving oil and gas either south into the United States, within the continental market, or a fairly big push to move it eastwards into East Asia, which is a very lucrative market.
However, there are some projects that have come up as a result both of having problems getting to those traditional markets and because of economic opportunities. One is Mr. Sorensen, who I know will talk about the LNG project and the potential to export gas off the east coast and into the European Union. Also, there's the Energy East project of TransCanada Pipelines, which is, if realized, a very significant project. I think it would be something like 500,000 to 800,000 barrels of oil a day. I assume that a lot of it could be destined for the European market. That would be interesting as well.
However, there's something to take note of, and that is, while we're talking about the concept of exporting energy potentially into the European Union, and I think for the purposes of this discussion, it sounds like we're talking about the European Union. I know that Ukraine is not a member of the European Union, but I would assume that if we were going to be exporting energy over to Europe and the region, it would be entering into the European Union. Europe has been promoting in some corner something called the fuel quality directive, which is a policy to in essence penalize, with tariffs, fuel that comes from sources deemed to have a higher carbon content than other sources. Targeted by that, at least ostensibly targeted by that, are the Canadian oil sands.
I know that the Canadian government doesn't look kindly on this policy. They believe it's discriminatory. It's run into some issues and is going through a bit of bureaucratic stalemate. We don't know where this fuel quality directive is going to end up, but I just point out here that there are a lot of unresolved issues if Canada is going to be a serious supplier into the European market. While there is potential for gas and there have been projects announced on that front that are less contentious, on the oil piece, should even the energy east project be realized, there are other forms of oil export into the European market.
On the one side there is that economic potential, but then on the flip-side there's no clarity yet around how Canadian oil would be treated, notably if it was derived from the oil sands, once it arrives into the European Union, into the European market.
To sum up, we have a very strong relationship, a much stronger commercial relationship than people believe, even in Canada. It's of a magnitude similar to of our relationship with the United States. It's not quite as great as that, but it is very substantial. About 30% of investment into Canada comes from Europe, and about 30% of our investment out of Canada goes into Europe. We trade a lot and we have this free trade agreement.
So we have a foundation to deepen our relationship, including in energy, but we don't have the infrastructure in place and the record of delivering product into the European market. The policies that are being pursued on the European and Canadian sides are at times somewhat divergent.
Those are the things that raise questions. So to sum up, there is lots of potential. I'm not saying it's something that we can't do. However, it would be more of a medium to longer-term initiative, and there needs to be further clarity over how Canadian energy products would be treated if the capacity is developed to export them into the European Union.
Thank you.