Thank you so much. I do appreciate the opportunity to share some thoughts with you that I hope will prove helpful in your assessment of the biological opportunity to address climate change and clean growth.
The intersection of innovation and biological management of carbon has been the focus of my entire professional career. My reflections today represent not only my own work, of course, but also learnings accrued through my work at Queen's University; the BIOCAP Canada Foundation, which was a national, federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that operated in this specific space from 1998 to 2006; Alberta Innovates-BioSolutions; the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporation, which is also in Alberta; Bioindustrial Innovation Canada, which is a current, not-for-profit, federally funded innovation investment organization; Genome Canada; and my own consulting company, as well as through consultation and collaboration with another consultant, Jamie Stephen of TorchLight Bioresources.
Rather than doing a PowerPoint presentation, I'm going to burden you with reading, after the fact. I've shared some things with your clerk.
Let me begin by saying that Canada is a vast country. It grows more biomass per capita in its forests and agricultural lands than does any other country on earth. This biomass comes in the form of trees and crop plants, composed of carbon molecules. As you've heard, biomass can be converted into virtually any product that may be manufactured from fossil fuels. But unlike those things that are derived from fossil resources, biomass is renewable. It extracts carbon from our overloaded, overheated atmosphere and it converts it into biological forms through photosynthesis, which you learned about in grade three.
The natural growth cycles of forests and farmlands provide ample opportunities for carbon management, both through the plants themselves—which, if managed well, will enhance their level of carbon sequestration—and also through the management of soils, which represent a more significant pool than does terrestrial carbon, the carbon that you can actually harvest and manage from forests and agricultural resources, so that below-ground carbon is very important.
In a recent paper that I wrote for the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute, I was able to show that Canadian agricultural soils have the potential to restore all of the carbon lost through tillage and intensive crop production by fairly simple management practices and, particularly, attention to the microbial health in the soils.
Lands in western Canada that have been managed, for example, through reduced tillage or no tillage—which you may have heard about—have become net sinks of carbon over the past 15 years, and other regions across the country have similar potential. More than half a megatonne of CO2 equivalent could be added in 10 years by this management strategy alone, and additional carbon could be stored below ground through the addition of stabilized biocarbons such as biochar—which you may have heard about—through the process of biological carbon sequestration.
The cost for this type of management is relatively low, and it could be incented through carbon markets such as those that exist in Alberta or through support for the tools that are needed by agricultural producers to make it happen. Of course, the business of agriculture is to grow commodity crops and livestock to meet domestic and foreign markets, and of course forestry, as you've already heard, is largely focused on the production of dimensional lumber and pulp, so much of the biomass that's produced in Canada is already committed to ongoing economic enterprises.
If we consider only the residues from the production of forest biomass and agricultural commodities, along with urban waste streams, there remains a remarkable supply of biomass resources with which we can do some of these innovative things. In a 2003 Industry Canada report, we were able to show that waste streams alone—not touching the forests in any other way—could provide about 20% of Canada's energy needs, while drastically reducing the emissions from non-renewable resources.
So how can we best use the resources that are distributed across the country? You've heard that it's a mile wide and an inch thick, and that's not a bad analogy. We need to meet those twin goals of reducing greenhouse gases and stimulating the economy. I'm certain that you're very well versed on this committee with Canada's greenhouse gas emissions profile. Canada has a unique character. We're vast, we're cold and we have a resource-based economy. It results in a greenhouse gas emissions profile that demonstrates the largest and fastest-growing emissions in three areas: transportation, space heating, and process energy for natural resource extraction, recovery and processing. Biomass has the unique capability of being able to be used in each of these areas to reduce Canada's overall emissions.
We have a light-duty transportation sector with our cars and our SUVs. We're already moving well down the path towards electrification, although that particular approach is more difficult for the heavy-duty diesel-powered transportation fleet for industrial engines and for the aviation sector. We have a pre-commercial research and development area in both of those sectors, in the diesel fleet and in aviation fuels, and biofuels could have a significant role for both of these in reducing tailpipe emissions. A policy push from government in this direction would create the market tools needed to build out this approach. It's very important to focus on the need for Canadian-developed biofuels to prevent simple importation from other sectors such as Brazil or the U.S.
The second area I mentioned was space heating based on solid biomass fuels. You just heard a lot about the pellet industry. That is just one area of solid biomass fuels, but it does offer a very significant opportunity. The technologies are mature. They're extremely well proven around the world. They're appropriate for rural and remote communities, which need them to get off diesel fuel, and they're often sited in the midst of unused forest resources. They serve to secure good-quality jobs and economic development wherever they're deployed.
A study released just this week in Ontario focused on Ontario's potential to use solid fuel heating through distributed heat systems to address both the forest industry decline, in which more than 36,000 jobs have been lost since the economic downturn, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the province. This strategy could bolster forest health by removing over-age trees and stimulating better carbon sequestration in the growing forest. It could make a reduction in Ontario's net emissions that is quite significant.
Although it's a little bit cheeky, I would like to wrap up my comments by offering you a bit of advice. Given the huge urgency to address greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, it is important not to let perfection be the enemy of the good. Much of the bio clean-tech technology we have available to us to use is mature, and it's in use in other places around the world. There will always be room to improve technology through research and further development, but we don't actually need to make huge investments beyond the deployment investments. Gordon mentioned the challenge with getting the boilers that are being used extensively in other places in the world certified for use in Canada. That would be the typical sort of thing I'm talking about.
Both agriculture and forestry are industries that work with very small margins of profitability. They should not be expected to support the greenhouse gas reduction needs of the country without appropriate recognition. I would just like to remind you that there are no low-cost feedstocks. In most cases, the lowest-energy feedstock we have for energy is coal, so if we want to get off coal, we need to recognize that there will be some additional operational costs.
The federal government has an important leadership role to play, and it wouldn't necessarily be that difficult. If I take a look at the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the federal government—emissions from the federal government itself—about half are associated with heating government buildings. Obviously, some are here in Ottawa, but the rest are spread out across the country, largely in military installations that already work on distributed heat. Changing the fuel source would become a very simple way to reduce your emissions by half.
Finally, we need to be absolutely fastidious about the sustainability of both our agricultural lands and our forest resources so that they can continue to provide these kinds of benefits for future generations.
Thank you very much.