I think the way we look at this tax credit is that, first of all, you have this technology that continues to disappoint. Wherever it's used, we're promised a whole bunch of emissions reductions and that a certain percentage of the carbon is going to be captured, and typically that has come in much lower than expected. A lot of projects have had quite a few billions go into them and then have not made it very far or have had to be cancelled. Here, we have a very expensive way of addressing things.
Right now, the oil and gas industry is incredibly profitable, and we believe it should be cleaning up its own act. This can be done through regulatory means and shouldn't be subsidized with public funds when really where we should be putting the billions is in deep energy retrofits. We know that's going to benefit Canadians across the country and that it's going to help bring down emissions. We should be helping people get into electric vehicles, as this budget this does help to do, and we should be deploying more renewable energy.
This is a very expensive tax credit for a technology that is still more conceptual.... I know that there are some operating projects, but if you look at the projections of where the world was supposed to be with carbon capture utilization and storage to where it is now, there's such a big gap, and that's because the technology has proven to be more complicated. We don't see that taxpayers should be the ones subsidizing this so that we can keep having oil and gas production, when really what the world needs to do is, as all the science shows.... For instance, there was a recent study in Environmental Research Letters, which came out on May 17, saying that nearly 40% of the already developed fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground for us to have a hope of staying within 1.5°C.
That would be a quick overview of our thoughts on CCUS.