I want to maybe broaden the discussion to include Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta, northeast B.C., and wherever we have a robust oil and gas industry.
MP Barlow, we just talked about abandoned wells. Abandoned wells, or end-of-life wells, have actually been cemented. There's been money spent on them to put them to rest. Before they get to be abandoned, they're producing, so one of the easiest things to do is co-production. Have your cake and eat it too. Have the oil and gas still being produced and—as opposed to using the waste water as a waste and having to pay money to dispose of the waste hot water—actually use that hot water.
You can pipe hot water and keep its heat anywhere from three to 10 kilometres, but of course the piping costs would be fairly high, or you can bring people to your wells. If you think about these oil and gas wells, they're already on farmers' fields. They're not in urban centres. They're in the agricultural areas of our country. Asking the agriculture industry to do more with what is already on their land to begin with, through co-production, would be a wonderfully low-hanging-fruit activity. It would increase the economy of the wells. Now they're not just selling oil and gas, they're probably selling CO2 credits as well as the heat, and also perhaps paying the farmer some more royalties or rent for the infrastructure on their land.
Before we get to the abandoned ones, though, what happens with an oil and gas well is that if a company goes bankrupt—and there's lots of that going on right now—or even if the well itself waters out and it's the end of the life, they become suspended and possibly even orphaned. Those wells are still viable candidates, but the ownership or the economics can slip below zero. They're now negative. The idea of bringing the suspended and orphaned wells back to life by using them as renewable heat wells, or perhaps even electricity wells, just allows that infrastructure to be repurposed and those employees who are already working on the well to go back to their jobs.
Abandoned wells are a subset, but they're actually probably the hardest thing to do. They could be done once we get a vibrant industry going, with the co-production and the suspended and orphaned wells, which are growing in numbers as well—I think now we probably have more suspended wells than we do abandoned wells. Attacking that allows us to reimagine and rethink infrastructure.
Again, we can use those exact same workers. For sure, we can do it in Alberta—and we thank MP Jeneroux for having the foresight to represent that initiative—but it also can be used in Ontario, Saskatchewan, northeast B.C., and anywhere we have the oil and gas infrastructure right now.