Madam Chair and honourable members, thank you for the opportunity to attend today's meeting.
My name is Ryan Krogmeier. I am the senior vice-president of supply, trading and refining at Parkland Corporation. We are a Calgary-headquartered Canadian multinational company with a presence in 25 countries, including Canada and the United States, and those in the Carribean and Central and South America. Every day we serve over one million customers through our consumer brands, which include Chevron, M&M Food Market, Ultramar, Pioneer and many others.
We also own and operate a refinery in Burnaby, British Columbia, that currently supplies about 25% of B.C.'s transportation fuel and 30% of Vancouver International Airport's jet fuel. We were the first in North America to use our existing refinery infrastructure to coprocess such renewable feedstocks as Canadian canola and tallow alongside conventional crude oil to produce fuels that have less than one-eighth of the carbon intensity of conventional fuels.
Earlier this year, we announced plans to increase our low-carbon leadership by building a stand-alone renewable diesel complex within the Burnaby refinery and exploring the possibility of producing sustainable aviation fuel. Once completed, these projects will help reduce related greenhouse gases by approximately two megatonnes per year. This is the equivalent of taking more than 700,000 cars off the road, or approximately 25% of B.C.'s passenger vehicles.
The North American fuel market is very integrated, meaning that Canada competes with the United States for investment and supply of biofuels and low-carbon fuels. Today, Canadian producers stand to be at a competitive disadvantage with our counterparts in the U.S. due to governmental incentive imbalances between the two jurisdictions.
The Inflation Reduction Act's passage expands several provisions that incentivize the production of biofuels, such as the blender's tax credit and a producer tax credit. Furthermore, the IRA creates a new credit for the use of sustainable aviation fuel. Given that no comparable incentives exist in Canada at present, the impact of these tax credits in the United States places Canadian producers of low-carbon fuels at a competitive disadvantage. They allow American producers to create low-carbon fuels at a lower net cost, possibly to export into the Canadian market and sell at a lower cost, and they consequentially discourage demand for domestically produced low-carbon fuels.
A supportive incentive environment is needed to ensure a level playing field for domestic low-carbon fuel production and to ensure that compliance with domestic regulations, such as the clean fuel regulations, is not done entirely via imports from other markets. Relying on importing low-carbon fuels would also hinder growth within several Canadian industries, including agriculture and forestry, whose feedstocks are used in the production of low-carbon fuels that contribute to our nation's emission reductions.
With these considerations in mind, I would like to table the following recommendation. The Government of Canada should rapidly pursue new support mechanisms for low-carbon fuel production domestically, including the introduction of equivalent low-carbon fuel producer tax credits in budget 2023. Tax credits should apply to all low-carbon fuels produced, blended or coprocessed in Canada for a period of at least 10 years, and should acknowledge the additional supports needed for Canada to produce sustainable aviation fuel. These tax credits or equivalent supports would not only encourage the development of low-carbon fuels in Canada, but also provide investment clarity and certainty for domestic producers and the associated supply chain.
In closing, we encourage the committee to carefully examine the economic implications of the Inflation Reduction Act for Canadian producers of low-carbon fuels. We were pleased to see in the government's fall economic statement the acknowledgement that these incentive imbalances between the two jurisdictions will pose a competitive challenge to Canadian companies and the recognition that additional measures will be needed in budget 2023 for biofuel producers. We look forward to further details on these measures.
Thank you again for your time. I welcome any questions you may have.