Evidence of meeting #98 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was models.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Ms. Romero, I'd like to ask you a few questions, as well.
You talked about real-time data in your presentation. As an industry, I think you provide an awful lot of data, whether that is to municipal, provincial, or federal jurisdictions. Everybody wants information from you. Do you believe that the data exists for industry to make better solutions, if it were consolidated?
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
Yes, if the data was consolidated and understood, or if it was calculated in the same way. I think this difference between provincial and federal data is important. What's so nice about our industry is that every single measurement point in our plants and facilities is reported to somebody. They are completely open. However, the way in which they're calculated is not always the same, so the way it goes to provincial governments...and we standardize the calculations. Those things are important. Our operations data and all of those things are reported monthly. From a real-time point of view for that kind of access, it's there, although it's not as easy to find as it should be for people like Kathleen.
As industry, our issue is the way in which it's used or received. If it's not understood at the source, it can be misinterpreted as well, especially when it goes into modelling of different types, because people have to make decisions and it's not necessarily transparent as to how it's done. We can definitely do a better job of the consolidation of that kind of data.
When we talk about real-time data for large industries, like ours, that's easy, but it's the real-time data for innovation of the small companies.... The majority of our businesses in Canada are actually SMEs and the data that they generate on the innovations and improvements that they're doing with respect to new technologies or even their operations data, that data is basically invisible.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
For small companies, I would say that the burden of providing that data would be significant—
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
It is.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
—as a percentage of their overall cost of operating. Do you see a way forward for companies like that to provide data at a reasonable cost to them?
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
Even a small company, if it's operating, is going to have done a heat and material balance—sorry, I'm an engineer, too.
You can't operate efficiently without generating data. It's how you share that data easily and how it can be received easily that actually makes the difference. It's by having those kinds of central repositories that it can actually be aggregated.
It's not difficult. Every operation is going to have done a synopsis of their performance, at least in that month if not weekly, and now most of us actually have process control of something or other. Data is live, so you can make those kinds of decisions at basically any point in time, and we are getting much more predictive.
When I was on STIC and we were looking at data and trying to create the “State of the Nation” report, which is not dissimilar to a lot of the things here, it was a question of where to find that data but also how to talk about where you're going. All of the data is aged if it has come through Statistics Canada. It's a fantastic resource, but it's aged.
Now with the pace at which we innovate, if you're trying to say, “This is where Canada stands” or “This is where we have the capacity to grow,” you need to see what people are working on today. If, as Kathleen said, the new aluminum process has reduced emissions to close to zero, which is what it sounded like, and you don't have that in your modelling for where Canada is going, your modelling isn't accurate and it creates a much bleaker picture of where we are and what we do as a country.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
I have more questions, but I think the chair is going to tell me I'm out of time.
Liberal
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you, and thank you all for being here today.
I want to start with Ms. Vaillancourt and talk about data sharing and openness of data. We've heard a lot about this in past sessions here and today. I know from my previous life working on ecosystem analysis that it was extremely frustrating at all levels trying to get at data, whether you had to pay exorbitant amounts to get it or whether, as Ms. Romero mentioned, it was coming back late and incomplete.
There are also interprovincial differences. I know that in British Columbia I could get some mapping data easily. Some cost a lot of money. I could go to the United States and get anything free and quickly. In Alberta it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a map of the municipal boundaries in Alberta.
I'm just wondering if you could talk about the need for some agreement on data sharing within Canada and how that would advance this problem we have with energy data. Then I'll follow up with some other problems, but I just want to get your comments about whether that would help us along the way.
President, ESMIA Consultants Inc., and Representative, Canadian Academy of Engineering
Yes. Transparency is also something we have discussed and heard a lot about. It's a real need. For us, it would also be a good way to say that our models are documented, because right now we grab information here and there from so many data sources that each time someone asks me if my database is documented, I say, “No. I have no time.” They ask, “Where did you get this data?” I say, “Here and there.” Having a central place where you have all this data transparent and public would facilitate things.
The issues in the industrial sector I think are due to confidential data, especially when there's one industry that is only in one province. They don't want to make their data public because you will know that it's coming from them. However, we have done many projects with the industry, so we get their data but we, in turn, cannot make it public. Sometimes we cannot even reuse it for the next project.
How can the industry be convinced to make their data public? I'm not sure, but they can definitely benefit from the results of the analysis. If we show, for example, the potential of this new aluminum technology and the huge role it can have in greenhouse gas reduction scenarios, it's positive for the industry. If the industry knows more of what we are doing and the usefulness of the results we can provide, I'm sure they will be more willing to share their data.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
To Ms. Romero, about the proprietary nature of some of this data, we have COSIA where innovation ideas and results are shared, but there are also cases of companies wanting to hold on to certain amounts of data. I just wonder if you have an idea of how Canada compares, for instance, with the United States on proprietary data, and how the United States deal with energy information, and what we can possibly do in Canada to ease that situation.
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
Personally, I don't work a lot in comparison to the U.S., or to Canada. But I do, in my job, evaluate countless technologies on an ongoing basis.
Inevitably, when somebody wants to share something with you, they want you to sign an NDA. The very first thing I say is, no, tell me everything that's in the public domain and convince me enough that I want to sign an NDA. The reality is that for the majority, if their patents are in place, all of their data is already public. If they've been out telling the story about the technology, they already have a whole suite and, mostly, the financial data and performance data is already public. If you have a professor who is already published, their data is public.
I think there's a huge fallacy around what is actually not public. When it comes to operating data, as I said before, there is not an operating point in a plant that isn't reported in Canada, and it's not just in oil and gas. I've worked in natural resources my entire life across this entire country. We are such a transparent country in our reporting, so this fallacy of what's not in the public domain is actually a fallacy.
What it isn't is aggregated well and transparent for people to be able to use. That's the difference.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Back to Ms. Vaillancourt, I just want to switch from the data sharing to the data standardization part, and ask how difficult it is now between both the different data sources you have to go to instead of having one, and how you often have to massage that data for months to get it to be right. Again, I've worked between provinces and it's hell.
Maybe you could comment on that, and how a national standard for data would help things.
President, ESMIA Consultants Inc., and Representative, Canadian Academy of Engineering
Yes, that's necessary as well because this is the way we start. I always, personally, prefer to start with national data sources that cover all provinces first, even if there is a lot of missing information, and then I complete the national with provincial sources. At least, I start with a uniform platform for all provinces, but there is so much information that is missing.
The problem comes when you have to do a project for a specific province. We are working with the Quebec government right now to help them to achieve their target on greenhouse gas emissions for 2030 and 2050, and I had to recalibrate the whole model on their emissions inventory, which is not the same at all as the Canadian one. I have almost reallocated and renamed all my sectors and I almost had to prepare a new model just for this, which doesn't fit anymore with the rest of the Canadian model. It's very difficult.
Liberal
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Goheen, you said earlier in your remarks that the U.S. spends $120 million on the energy information agency, and we should somehow target about one-tenth of that.
That just seems totally underfunded to me. This doesn't seem like an exercise that's scalable by population. It seems to be something that's more scalable by the amount of work that needs to be done. We want the same data products. We have virtually the same number of operators. Our energy sector is about 10% of our GDP, and theirs is about 5% of theirs.
Do you want to revise that comment, or make some additional comments?
Executive Director, Canadian Academy of Engineering
I'd be happy to.
It's not a study I've undertaken, so perhaps I spoke out of turn.
Executive Director, Canadian Academy of Engineering
As they say, order of magnitude would probably be a good estimate, so it would be somewhere between one-tenth of the U.S. budget and 10 times the U.S. budget.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Okay, fair enough. I just wanted to clarify. I didn't want the analysts to be confused that this might be an assessment, because this is one of the questions we have.
Another question we have is how to fund it.
I just want to turn to you, Ms. Romero. You mentioned in your remarks a great statistic, that in 2016, 75% of all clean-tech research in the country was funded by the oil and gas sector. It goes to some of the points that were made in the media yesterday by Premier Notley against the leader of the federal NDP, Jagmeet Singh, about how if you don't realize that the economy and the environment go hand in hand, you're going to fail at both.
Is there some way to extract some of this clean energy spend, some of these research dollars, or some contribution from industry so that we can appropriately fund an organization, with maybe more around $50 million to $70 million a year, that could help harness the value of all this data, warehouse it appropriately, and create the data tools that Canadians and industry need to compete?
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
As industry, we are contributing to the Canadian economy. Obviously, we would be happy to be able to contribute more. I think one of the things to realize when you look at funding for this is that it probably isn't new money that you need to find. My guess is that you have almost every single organization doing some version of this and spending money on it.
By making a central group and removing this role from the countless areas in which it is done, I think you probably wouldn't be far from the dollars required to do this. Obviously that needs to be done.
But certainly, for example, just in the supercluster funding, there is a percentage allowed to do this work. My guess is that, rather than it being done separately by each supercluster, if you went to NRC, NRCan, and provincial groups across the country, you'd see that everybody is doing some version of this but in an isolated platform, each with developers. If you could pull this together and pull those monies, then with whatever additional new monies are there, all of us who benefit from this would have to figure out some way....
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
I did see in some of the earlier testimony we had that something like 86% of the time of researchers in the data energy field is spent just trying to get the data. Their productive work is only about 14% of the time. They have a factor of savings there maybe of 5:1 that they could leverage for their work. They are still going to have to spend some time at it, but there are probably some savings.
This is what you talked about with consolidating and rationalizing across government to centralize this service.
Vice-President, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, and Chair, Clean Resource Innovation Network
Even in terms of rationalizing, we have ASTM standards on how we calculate a whole bunch of other things. I'll be an engineer again, but why can we not have standards for the way in which these things are calculated? It would make Kathleen's life so much easier, and then we'd also know that we're being told the same story time and time again.
Right now, I hear things that don't make sense to me because things are calculated from different bases. There's just so much opportunity, and all of that is waste. If you can narrow that and take the waste out of the system, I'm not sure there's a lot of new dollars here.
Liberal
Nick Whalen Liberal St. John's East, NL
Okay.
I'm not sure if in your prepared remarks you got entirely into the story of Titanium Corporation and their work regarding methane emissions from the oil sands. I'm wondering how an energy and information administration within Canada could assist a company like Titanium to do better work or just assist Canada in better monitoring whether or not it's achieving goals. How precisely would such an agency, in this particular example, help?
