Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to present to the committee, and I apologize for not being in Ottawa. I don't quite have David's excuse.
The advantage or disadvantage I have is being at the tail end, and certainly I concur with a lot of the statements that have been made, and I certainly concur with David and the viewpoints that he has raised.
I would like to make a few, if you like, clarifying comments here with regard to what we're looking at. The first of those comments is that enhanced oil recovery is extremely important, and, as Mr. Hassan said, it does provide a mechanism whereby there can be some return on investment. It should be noted, though, that enhanced oil recovery and probably many of the others, whether it's enhanced gas recovery or enhanced coal-bed methane, will be limited opportunities, and they certainly will not represent the major opportunity and certainly the major means of preventing carbon dioxide from reaching the atmosphere. So we have to be looking very hard at using what we learn from the enhanced oil recovery community to take us down the road of geological storage in saline aquifers, as is being practised currently in the North Sea, and in In Salah, with BP, in Algeria. This will be the large opportunity, and this does mean that there will be a cost to the consumer and to industry to implement that.
The second point I'd like to make is that it's not just an economic cost that we need to be looking at. Moving to carbon dioxide capture and storage will have a significant impact on the rate at which we use fossil fuels. If I look at the current SaskPower proposal, and SaskPower, the provincial utility here in Saskatchewan, is proposing to build what will amount to possibly the first fully integrated plant with CO2 capture built from the ground up, the increase in coal consumption will be about 50%. So as Dave Hassan commented, in order to turn the stack from going up into the atmosphere and moving that CO2 down into the ground, it will require a very significant increase in the size and fuel consumption of the power plant in order to maintain an electrical output, in this case of about 300 megawatts.
So I think these are points that we need to bear in mind as we move forward.
Having said that, the SaskPower project is extremely exciting, in that, as David Keith said, we have a very definite need to move from research and from pilot-scale, small-scale storage operations into the arena of full commercial demonstration. Without the demonstration, we're certainly not in a position to do the research that industry needs to drive down the costs further. I do believe there is an opportunity to drive down the costs further, but we need this demonstration. We need to see this actively in the field.
A few months ago there was a meeting held in Kananaskis bringing industry leaders together to talk about the opportunities and to talk about the challenges to the development of these commercial large-scale opportunities. There are certainly lots of opportunities in Canada, particularly in Alberta and Saskatchewan in western Canada. Many of those opportunities go south of the border.
One of the points that came out of that meeting was a need to look more broadly. Again, as David raised this, we're looking at a global issue. These opportunities are not restricted to Canada, and we need to have our policies, programs, and research programs in place to try to build off the opportunities that exist on both sides of the border, and indeed elsewhere in the world.
Again, sort of promoting from a university perspective, one of the issues in the future is that while we have significant intellectual capacity in Canada at the moment, and certainly there are companies—such as EnCana, Penn West, Apache, and others—to look at and undertake these projects, we will be facing a shortage of qualified people very rapidly, if we move out into the broader-scale adoption and implementation of these technologies. One of the areas we need to build is getting qualified people and having universities train people to meet the upcoming industry requirements for this.
I don't want to belabour any of the points that have been very eloquently made up to this point. Government certainly has a key role to play in providing the right direction and policy, and again I agree with David in terms of helping out in the private sector to drive the research agenda.
One of the points that came out very much from the industry people attending the Kananaskis meeting was that we should take lessons from the garbage disposal industry. At each step of the way, there have to be incentives to capture, transport, and store the CO2.
As we look at the opportunities, and particularly as the federal government starts to look at the opportunities, challenges, and how we move forward, I urge you to look at a number of models that take into account the costs and make sure that the appropriate incentive is there to allow us to develop this industry at scale.
It's a recognition of the increased fossil fuel consumption and the overall impacts of this. The enhanced oil recovery is a learning opportunity, and we should use it as such. We need some firm policy direction, as David was saying, and we need the people in order to implement these technologies out into the future.
Finally, there are opportunities that cross borders, and we should make sure that the policies and programs are in place to allow us to take advantage of those cross-border opportunities.
With that, I thank you.