Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and my thanks to the members of the committee for allowing me to be here today. It's a real pleasure.
First, I'll try to describe a little bit of the mix of renewables available to us. We have three real sets of needs. We have needs for industrial and home heating. We have a need for personal and mass transit. We have a need for electricity generation. Different renewables match different needs in different ways. Biomass is really the only renewable energy source that can meet all of those needs. It's perhaps for that reason that we haven't taken advantage of it as much as we might, because there are competing interests in using biomass for energy right across Canada.
Currently, biomass for energy only takes up about 2% or 3% of our total primary energy supply. In China, biomass accounts for up to 10% of the total primary energy supply. Even the United States uses more biomass for energy than Canada. That speaks to an opportunity for this country. We have biomass. We have a lot of it. There are opportunities for us to do more with it, to meet our own energy needs and perhaps the energy needs of others.
As for renewable electricity generation, China produces more than any nation right now, about 645 terawatt hours as of 2009. The U.S. is at about 464. Canada is at about 375. It's terrific. We have 35 million people. We are producing more renewable power than any other nation on a per capita basis. That has made us complacent. I think that we can look at ourselves and say it's a job well done. We have done a great job of developing renewables. Almost all of our renewable power is hydroelectric. Very little of it comes from any other source. Compare that with the situation in the United States or any other country, where other forms of renewable power have been developed to a much greater extent. There is a great opportunity here. There are many things that we can do.
Renewable electricity breaks down across Canada without hydro. Every single province, every region, is doing different things. We have a multiplicity of approaches in our country, and that reflects our loose federation. It reflects the power of the provinces to determine how they might put together their electricity portfolio. It means that we might be able to do better by harmonizing our approach to renewable electricity generation.
One place that Canada falls down is in the generation of renewable heat. In this department, Sweden is the big leader with 127 petajoules, followed by Finland, with 54 petajoules. China generates 12 petajoules. Canada generates only 2 petajoules. We are not grabbing everything that we could from the biomass that we're consuming, even for electricity generation. We are losing an opportunity. This is a piece of low-hanging fruit. I know that we have tried in the past to implement programs to support renewable heat or biomass to heat. I think there are more opportunities we could work on in the future.
Biorefining is a complex subject, with many technologies. We've heard a bit about the biorefining approach from some of my colleagues here. We've heard about biomethane and how we might be able to go after different forms of energy.
All I wanted to show you is that this is a really complex area. There are a lot of options, a lot of technologies are being developed—opportunities but also challenges because we are not a big country and everything will be very difficult for us to develop.
I've drawn some little dotted boxes around some of those technologies. They really represent different technology pathways that different Canadian companies are pursuing. We have champions pursuing each of these different boxes. The committee has heard from Enerkem, which is a terrific example of a Canadian company pursuing the gasification catalysis and ultimately liquid fuel pathway with quite a bit of success.
We have some opportunities to work within these different boxes. Canada has a lot to provide on the value chain side of things. We are good at handling biomass. We have a long tradition of it in the forest sector and the agricultural sector. We can capitalize on that.
I'd like to thank the government for the establishment of BioFuelNet, which is a new network of centres of excellence. It was funded last year, and we're now working toward the end of our first year of programs. We have research programs going on in all these areas. Over the next five years we will be identifying some of the real opportunities, and we will be linking them to market opportunities. The technology is moving forward, and we're excited to say that.
As we move forward there are a few places where the government can really play a key role. There are ways we could use heat better, and it is a low-hanging fruit. It is an easy win, so to speak, if we can start to capture some of that, and it will support deployment of the biorefinery because it will add more value to the energy generation/fuel generation side of things.
We can build on our strengths. We have a number of pulp and paper mills. We have capacity that is underused or is in danger of being shuttered. Certainly we have had lots of capacity shuttered over the past decade or two. We might be able to use that capacity to support new initiatives. We will need help to move from the lab scale, from the pilot scale, into those facilities. We're looking forward to being able to do that.
I'm going to echo something Scott said earlier, which is that we would like to consider new mandates in the future for renewal content in chemicals and fuels. It is not to say that we have to keep ramping up ethanol content in gasoline. We could look at other fuels like aviation fuels.
Lately I have got excited about the idea that we might be able to link mandates to our oil and gas sector. Could we use a mandate that would direct the industry to use a certain proportion of renewable power in the development of conventional energy resources to develop infrastructure and capacity that could help move forward other Canadian sectors as well? I think we could do that without crippling the conventional sector. We could do that and build on some of our strengths.
Something we are going to need—and the last speaker addressed this to some extent—is clarity on metrics of success. Are we aiming for greenhouse gas emission reductions? Are we aiming to create jobs? Is this all coming down to cost? Are we looking for the dollars or the megawatts that are being delivered?
We can optimize systems to do each of these things. It would be good to have a better sense of what our metrics of success should be.
With that I will wrap up. Thank you very much, committee members.