Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I, too, appreciate your comments, Dr. Raymont. You gave us a very comprehensive look at a number of topics. I'd like to focus a bit on the tar sands, though.
You mentioned the problem with natural gas. Expanding the tar sands may leave Canadian homes at a point where they have to import natural gas into Canada. It's a toss-up there in terms of our ability to balance the systems we have here. Certainly the problem of natural gas goes back. There are thermal issues with natural gas, but there is also the production of hydrogen, which is essential in this tar sands process. It's not easy to replace hydrogen with other elements, and I don't think it's easy to replace it without increasing the carbon balance.
You've offered up a number of selections there. The nuclear issue we talked about earlier, and that's a carbon-neutral issue. But to produce enough hydrogen for one 60,000-barrel-a-day tar sands plant, you need a 600-megawatt nuclear plant. Those are the figures available through Alberta Energy on the web. You can take a look at them.
Basically, if we're expanding a field of one million barrels, you're going to use a lot of reactors up there to provide that much energy to make hydrogen through electrolysis. That's not acceptable either.
There are issues around this that need to be carefully looked at, and not simply crystal-balled. They need to be looked at in terms of the actual numbers that are involved in the transformation.
On the sequestering of carbon dioxide, the people who came in here yesterday talked about $60 per tonne to take it off the stack. You then have to move it to where you can store it, and then you have to store it. There are three phases in that sequestration.
A very good MIT study identified what it would cost to convert the best coal plants around the world to carbon sequestration. Basically, we saw a doubling in the cost per kilowatt hour from those plants. The doubling of that cost put those plants in competition with, say, wind.
You've said wind is not very good because it's intermittent. You also pointed out that Quebec is interested in this. Well, Manitoba is also very interested in wind, because it has hydro storage. Alberta has put a limit on its wind power at 900 megawatts, although it has applications for 3,000 megawatts. Yet Alberta is sitting right next to British Columbia, which has adequate hydro storage for any amount of wind. So it's more a question of organization and agreement, rather than technological issues around wind.
So there are other answers there, and I'd like you to comment on some of the things I've said here.