Honourable members of the natural resources committee of the House of Commons, Mr. Chair Leon Benoit, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today.
I submitted a paper to you before coming into this session, and it is too long to read in seven minutes, so I'm going to pick out the highlights from that paper. Hopefully, you will have a chance to read it later on.
The people of Canada are very blessed. We're endowed with such a vast natural resource space, and we have a relatively small population in such a very large land mass. We use 2.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent per year at this point in time, and that will grow by 34 million barrels of oil equivalent by 2025, taking us to 2.9 billion barrels of oil that we will need in equivalency by 2025.
We have this incredible standard of living because we are such a blessed nation. We have it because we have the resource for ourselves and have sufficient resources to export to our neighbours. So Canada is a very blessed country, but this doesn't mean we can sit back on our laurels and say, this is fine, and we have a very rosy future in front of us. We can't do that.
We have to do exactly what this committee is doing right now, and that is trying to understand and plan and manage a reasonable and sustainable mix in our energy supply for the future. Currently, we're using approximately 30% from oil, 27% from natural gas, approximately 8% from coal, 6.5% from nuclear, and 28% from hydroelectricity. You can see from those numbers that 65% of our energy is coming from fossil fuels.
The fact of the matter is, to make this sustainable we have to increase our renewable resources. We're very blessed with the hydroelectricity that we have, but we have minimum ability to increase that hydroelectricity. We're working very hard on our solar, but we only have 120 megawatts of installed solar power at this point in time. Even in wind, on which we're working very hard, we have 3,320 megawatts of wind. That is only 0.2% of our energy requirements in the country. It is very small. We also have ethanol as an alternative, at 5.8 million barrels of oil, which is 0.27%.
If you took the total of wind, solar, and ethanol and said that you were going to just supply the increase in demand from now until 2025, you would have to increase these by 300% every year until 2025. That's an incredible investment in renewable energies that we have to make in this country. Clearly, we need to do something about fossil fuels as we go along that path towards a renewable society.
I think that to look at unconventional sources of supply is very important. Obviously, we have the coal bed methane, which is unconventional, and we have all heard about the shale storm that has taken this continent, and we're very much looking at the fact that we have 160 billion barrels of oil and that approximately 20% of it will be recoverable. There are all the kinds of issues we're dealing with in order to make that happen, with new fracking and other methods of exploiting that resource.
What I'm here today to talk about is what I believe is the incredible opportunity we have in this country to have energy security at the same time as environmental security: that we can use our unconventional resource called carbon dioxide to increase our energy production. I believe that we have this asset called carbon dioxide, which we're emitting to the atmosphere for absolutely no reason. It is destroying our image; it is giving us a dirty-oil image, which I agree we don't deserve, but unfortunately we already have it. It's easily solved by collecting that carbon dioxide from the oil sands in particular. That's what my strategy is for Alberta: to take the carbon dioxide from the SAGD boilers and use it for enhanced oil recovery production from conventional and heavy oil in central and south Saskatchewan and Alberta.
We have 170 billion barrels of oil in the oil sands. It will be produced, as everybody has said around this table today—we all agree it's going to be produced. We're going to be emitting by 2025 more than 60 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from all of that production. Why would we let that asset go into the atmosphere, when it can be used?
We all know that 80% of the oil sands is in situ production—it's not open-pit mining—and that in situ production requires steam to be injected into one of the horizontal wells, and that it is once-through steam generators that we use to make that steam. Those generators produce carbon dioxide. Those are the emissions I'm talking about.
Why not use that carbon dioxide for unconventional production, which I call enhanced oil recovery? Some people in the industry call it miscible or immiscible flood. Simply, what you're doing is changing the viscosity of the oil so that it will swell and you can recover it.
In conventional oil in Alberta, the estimates are that we could increase our production by 3.5 billion barrels of oil.
On page three of the paper I gave you, I must tell you that I put an “m” instead of a “b”. In this industry you always have to make sure you get your Ms and your Bs straight, because they create quite different numbers.
So it's 3.5 billion additional barrels by using this asset that we're letting go into the atmosphere called carbon dioxide. Why would we do that? It doesn't make sense. We need to collect it and use it.
The same applies to the heavy oil that we have in central Alberta and in particular in Saskatchewan. There's another one billion barrels of oil that we can produce using carbon dioxide by injecting it into those oil fields.
So we have a unique opportunity, and one of the things I would like to bring to the attention of the committee, and I've done that, is that we have a centre of excellence on carbon dioxide in Regina. This is one of a few centres of excellence in the world. I think it's something we need to be very proud of. Our company uses that technology. It can be exploited in Saskatchewan and in Alberta to collect the carbon dioxide from these once-through steam generators and take out this additional oil that Canada can use for our own security.
We need to do the renewables and we need to increase our nuclear capabilities; I agree with that. But there is absolutely no reason that we cannot have clean fossil-fuel production. That can be done by taking the carbon dioxide from the oil sands. It has a high impact on the prosperity for Canada.
I would like to invite the members of this committee to come out to Regina and to look at the centre of excellence we have on carbon dioxide and at how we can make it a real win-win for Canada on all levels.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. I look forward to your questions.