Good afternoon.
My name is Nicolas Pocard. I am the director of marketing and strategy at Ballard Power Systems.
Ballard is a technology company based out of Vancouver, British Columbia, that has been developing fuel-cell and hydrogen technology for the past 40 years.
Today, I would like to highlight the key role that hydrogen will play in the decarbonization of the economy in Canada, especially when it comes to heavy-duty transportation. We believe that if you want to meet the objective of carbon neutrality by 2050, we are going to need hydrogen heavy-duty mobility to achieve those targets. By that, I refer to the trucking, rail and marine industries, where hydrogen fuel cells provide a path to decarbonization. In addition to that, we believe that the maturity and the leadership that Canada has in hydrogen fuel-cell technology represents a unique economic opportunity, but we need to maintain that leadership. We need to invest in the deployment and in the R and D of fuel cells in Canada. We need to keep that.
We have started to see outside of Canada countries in Europe making major investments in hydrogen, and we see the same thing in the U.S., China, Japan and Korea. We are looking forward to the soon-to-be-announced hydrogen strategy that the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation should be announcing very soon, but we want to make sure that this strategy is backed up by support in order to deploy technology in Canada, as well as supporting R and D to maintain that technological leadership.
We strongly believe that Canada must join the other countries that have recognized the fundamental role of hydrogen fuel-cell technology in the decarbonization of heavy-duty transportation, as it represents a unique economic and job opportunity in Canada. We believe it's possible to achieve a target of 10,000 fuel-cell buses and trucks in operation across Canada by 2030. This also represents a really important investment in the value chain. Energy—hydrogen in this case—is being produced from the natural resources of Canada, from wind, solar, hydro or, in the Prairies, using natural gas converted to blue hydrogen and carbon sequestration to ensure the local production in Canada of low-carbon hydrogen. As well, it goes through the entire value chain. A fuel-cell vehicle is an electric vehicle and includes all the equipment we produce here in the value chain, from the fuel-cell system, the power train and the different integration. This represents a unique economic opportunity, as well as a way of achieving those targets of decarbonization.
Thank you.