Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Honourable members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to be here today, along with my colleague from Natural Resources Canada, Graham Campbell, who, as was mentioned earlier, is the director general of the Office of Energy Research and Development.
Together, our organizations are the main engines of energy, science, and technology at Natural Resources Canada. As you can see from the slides, this has been going on for quite some time. This is our 100th anniversary of energy, science, and technology, serving the government and people of Canada.
We are here at your invitation to talk about the exciting and emerging topic of clean coal and how it can help to green Canada's electricity supply.
I'd like to get right into it. Why clean coal? If you look at the first slide, I have come up with five points. One is that at present, Canada has almost 17,000 megawatts of coal-fired electricity-generating facilities located in six provinces. We depend on coal to provide a large percentage—18% of our national supply of electricity—and coal is an important part of the energy mix in all of these provinces, but especially in Alberta, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan, where coal is the dominant fuel for electricity generation.
Another reason is that Canada has large proven reserves of coal. By one estimate, we have over 200 years' worth of proven coal reserves, and maybe even 1,000 years' worth.
The third point is that it's inexpensive and that the price of coal is much less volatile than, let's say, natural gas.
The fourth point is that this huge resource presents a major challenge, however. Conventional coal-fired power plants contribute significantly to emissions that cause smog and acid rain. With clean coal technology, this fuel can be used in an environmentally acceptable manner.
Finally, the Canadian Electrical Association expects that over the next 20 years, Canada will require 20,000 megawatts of new capacity per decade to meet load growth and replacement of the retiring generating units. So it is important that clean coal technologies be developed in time to replace the existing capacity.
What is clean coal? Modern coal-fired power plants using today's commercially available technology are already much less polluting; however, in light of climate change, clean coal power generation requires that CO2, carbon dioxide, generated during combustion is also captured, compressed, and safely stored deep in geological formations. When we speak of clean coal, we are referring to capturing nearly all of the greenhouse gases and the remaining emissions from coal-fired electric power plants. We call it near-zero emissions.
Several transformative technologies have been identified in our technology road map to achieve this, including post-combustion capture, which is the capturing of carbon dioxide from flue gases using an absorbing material to selectively absorb the CO2. The relatively pure CO2 is later released from the absorbing material when the material is heated. The CO2 is then compressed and stored.
The second major technology is oxy-fuel combustion, which is burning fuel in oxygen instead of air, resulting in a highly concentrated stream of CO2 that is then compressed and stored.
The third main technology is pre-combustion capture, or integrated gasification combined cycle. This involves conversion of coal to a synthetic gas. That synthetic gas is composed of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is separated through a high-temperature filter and compressed and stored. The hydrogen then goes on, of course, to be burned in the gas turbine, which is a turbine very similar to an airplane engine. Steam comes out of that, which pushes a steam turbine. So both turbines generate electricity.
Clean coal research is ongoing throughout the world, but the focus has not included the utilization of low-ranked coals, such as the Canadian sub-bituminous and lignite varieties. An opportunity exists for Canada to take a leadership role with respect to these types of coals, to provide utilities with a powerful option to meet Canada's energy needs and create a highly exportable technology. Canada's development of these new technologies not only improves our own air quality, with all the related health benefits, but also contributes to the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
NRCan has been working with industry for over 13 years to develop the basic technology for oxy-fuel combustion of coal, coal gasification, and the new technology you may have read about recently, thermoenergy integrated power system, or TIPS for short, which is a new form of oxy-fuel combustion. Our scientists are the world's leading experts in developing clean coal technologies.
Ultimately, this technology is expected to produce not just electricity, but also a panoply of chemicals, including hydrogen, all from coal and all with low emissions.
Regardless of the technology that is chosen to capture the CO2, this gas will have to be safely stored in geological formations. Do we have enough capacity in Canada to store all this CO2? The answer is that we have plenty of capacity. We have up to 800 years' capacity at today's rate of production.
NRCan's leadership in this file extends to CO2 capture and storage as well. Our sister laboratory in Devon, Alberta, has been supervising the federal investment in the Weyburn-Midale CO2 monitoring and geological storage project in southeast Saskatchewan, where we are studying the injection aspects of geological storage in scientific detail.
We have also recently completed Canada's clean coal technology road map, which identified clean coal technology pathways for capturing CO2. I brought copies with me today for your convenience, but it can also be downloaded from our website.
This road map represents the collective wisdom of over 120 stakeholders and practitioners, including the technology suppliers and the utilities as well as government stakeholders. It defines the most likely technology pathways to achieve Canada's need for clean coal by 2025.
I would like to conclude my portion of the presentation by saying that our department has already started to move forward on this technology road map. Canada and Alberta have established the Canada-Alberta ecoENERGY Carbon Capture and Storage Task Force, an external panel of experts, to assess the economic, technical, and regulatory hurdles that lie on the road to large-scale implementation of this technology. This technology is necessary for clean coal. They will report back with recommendations later this year, in November.