Other countries don't have the opportunity Canada has. Compared to other nations, like the United States and Europe, we have large biomass resources. We leave a lot of biomass resources on the ground as a result of our forest and agricultural sectors. In other countries they have already been using that as biomass.
They don't have the reserves we do, so they've been focusing on biomass crops, developing new crops that are specifically grown for energy. We've never done that in Canada. In fact, it hasn't been done in agriculture. Examples are switchgrass, miscanthus, and willow. They can be produced with minimal input. They're perennial crops and can produce a large biomass. To put it in perspective, one tonne of dry biomass has the same energy content of about three barrels of oil.
There are many biomass crops in Canada in many parts of agriculture that could produce 10 tonnes of biomass per hectare, so that's 30 barrels of oil per hectare. If you start looking at that, we have 30 million hectares of agricultural land in Canada. We could switch some of that agricultural land to biomass crops and bring some pasture land into biomass crops. There are seven million hectares of agricultural land that have gone out of production in the last 30 years or so that could be brought back into biomass crop production.
One could talk about 120 million tonnes of biomass per year of sustainable production with minimal inputs. That one technology, which is going to take decades to achieve because it's transformational, would provide approximately 20% of Canada's entire energy needs. We are talking about a major opportunity here.
That is the strategy the Americans are talking about and moving very strongly toward. It's a strategy the Europeans are talking about it.