Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all, witnesses, for joining us, and those on the telephone, thank you for listening and being there.
My first questions revolve around the deck put out by Dr. Preston from NRCan. Page 5 in the deck talks about remaining challenges.
Dr. Preston, you rightly repeat that CCS projects face very high costs, and you go on to say that industry is unlikely to absorb this risk alone.
When I read that, because you follow that comment up with “Inadequate Incentive for Technology Investment” presently in place, it reminds me of the accelerated capital cost allowance measure announced in the budget, which is seeking to phase out ACCA for oil sands investments in eight years—not two years, not three, four, five, six, or seven years, but eight years—which had a lot of people asking why it couldn't have been phased out earlier and, for example, made available for CCS.
You also talk about higher-cost penalties required for emitting, to create the necessary incentive for widespread deployment. That actually fits very nicely with the IPCC report released in Bangkok just a week or 10 days ago. In response to that report, the head of the Climate Change Secretariat in the UN, having examined Canada's new plan, said that our cost of carbon was not going to be anywhere near where it needed to be under the plan to, for example, deploy this very technology.
Can you comment a little bit on...or perhaps even some of the front-line economic vested interests in this technology? Help me understand. What's required here? How fast do you need this to make this economic?