I think we will try to hold to the five minutes. I'm a speed-talker and a speed-reader. We'll weave in the story of some of the first nations along the Kinder Morgan pipeline as well, just to keep it relevant for this morning.
Bonjour. The Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, CanGEA, would like to thank the committee for today's invitation to discuss the need for national geothermal data.
We'd also like to acknowledge that we are on first nations traditional territory. Many of our members are first nations themselves or are part of the supply chain, or are working with first nations on their traditional territories.
We're a member-based association and represent the full supply chain of the industry. We're also the front line when it comes to accessing geothermal energy data. In reading the transcripts from other witnesses, we see that many have supported the idea of a national energy organization, a data organization, and we do as well. We'd like to spend our time with you today discussing the benefits of geothermal energy data.
I'm on slide 4, for anyone following along.
Our members are actively developing or are part of the supply chain and projects all across Canada. That includes Yukon, the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Nova Scotia.
In particular, for the town of Hinton, the village of Valemount, the Simpcw First Nation, and at Borealis GeoPower, where I'm part of the management team, these different areas, villages, towns, first nations, and companies are all developing geothermal projects along the Kinder Morgan pipeline. We'll do our level best to ensure that the pipeline is as green as possible in its energy needs, in both power and heat.
CanGEA also recently assisted the Government of Nunavut with a better understanding of the benefits of geothermal and why they should also have favourability maps.
To go to slide 5, as you've heard from us before, geothermal is in some ways the least understood renewable energy. The resource itself is like oil and gas or mining, in that it has many different types of source rock. If you'd like to ask questions about geothermal in particular during the Qs and As, we can take those then. I'll just keep moving along to slide 6. This fact makes mapping the resource and resource estimates of high value to the industry and requires reservoir engineers, as well as geologists and geophysicists.
We are complicated. We have a lot of data and, obviously, a lot of data needs. The different rock reservoirs also dictate the power plant technology—the drilling and completions approach—and that then affects regulatory and permitting approaches. Again, many users—or the developers themselves—and governments rely upon this data.
Some of the features that CanGEA has to support national geothermal energy data include the creation of a Canadian national geothermal energy database. We have done that—not the Geological Survey of Canada. CanGEA currently hosts the Canadian national geothermal database. We also developed a Canadian code for public reporting for companies wanting to list on the Toronto Stock Exchange in order to keep the inherent trust and investor confidence high.
Geothermal favourability maps have been prepared by CanGEA for Alberta, British Columbia, and Yukon. We influenced the one in Nunavut, which should be released soon. We've also helped Nunavut understand that even though they may not have geysers, volcanoes, and hot springs like some other parts of Canada, because of their cold weather and the delta temperature between the cold weather and the heat inherent in the ground, even Nunavut has geothermal potential through its delta temperature.
My favourite slide is slide 7, and for an odd reason: we expect that 2018 will be the last year that there is no geothermal power in Canada. We believe that there's one project in British Columbia, in the village of Valemount, and also some in Alberta that have the potential to produce power in 2019, with Saskatchewan's following closely in 2020 or 2021.
As shown on slide 8, most geothermal-producing countries have ample publicly available data, what I'll call metadata. In our submission, we use the United States as an example of the value of the prospector tool and also of favourability maps. It's this metadata and this ability to search maps and publicly available websites that really add value to the industry.
In our country, it's actually unusual, compared to other geothermal countries, that oil and gas and mining data is logged with the government. Other industries can go into that information and actually see what the temperature is and what the rock is. These are pre-exploration tools for the geothermal industry, so we can leverage other industries a great deal, given the data that is available. If it were more easily accessible and organized, obviously that would cut costs and make projects go a lot quicker.
I'm at slide number 9. In our country, the data gaps are very clear. We'll go through a few of them.
First, there is a lack of the feasibility maps. I mentioned that only a few territories and provinces have them. We'd like to see the rest of the country have those as well.
We'd also like to see more federal support for energy funding. In particular, the Geological Survey of Canada does not yet have a mandate to support geothermal energy, yet it's the most well-positioned to be a partner in developing the industry and supporting it with hosting the data, and also in coming up with the metrics around how data should be collected.
We feel that metrics such as dollar per megawatt or dollar per megawatt hour are not picking up the benefits of geothermal. Geothermal has a very small footprint. It also has ancillary benefits such as heat. Because we're basal, we contribute power or heat 24 hours a day. These types of extra benefits aren't picked up when you compare geothermal against a natural gas peaking plan or wind or solar project if you're just using a dollar per megawatt metric. We encourage the use of a variety of metrics. The United States uses something called avoided cost metrics. Those are the ones that truly compare apples to apples, and not apples to oranges.
We're also looking at more awareness of what geothermal energy is. I quickly went through a slide earlier that talked about the different types of source rocks. There is still a lack of understanding between geo exchange, which is a very shallow type of geothermal energy that's used to heat homes, versus more proper geothermal that CanGEA represents, which is drilling typically one to three kilometres, much like oil and gas, into rocks to access steam or a hot water resource.
I'm going to skip ahead to slide 12 and talk about how, on government websites, particularly Environment Canada and NRCan themselves, geothermal is not mentioned, ping-ponging back to CanGEA being the front line. We don't receive funding to be that public awareness data source. We'd like to partner with the Geological Survey of Canada, and certainly with Environment Canada and NRCan, to at least be depicted on the website so that when the general public goes searching for information, there is a government face to this and not just an industry face to the industry.
I want to read into the record our four recommendations:
One, the Geological Survey of Canada should receive funding and a mandate to support geothermal exploration and development: the metadata, the maps, the database, and support programs.
Two, increase the number of risk-reduction programs, such as a prospector tool that the United States is using for geothermal developers. We've included a case study in our brief.
Three, evaluate renewable projects using levelized cost and levelized avoided cost models that really compare apples to apples and the features of the energy, not just the dollar per megawatt installed, which can be misleading in our case.
Four, raise public awareness and knowledge on geothermal energy and heat.
Those are our specific recommendations for the national data submission. However, we have four general industry recommendations as follows:
One, continue the excellent progress we've made so far with this committee's help and with the finance committee, in co-operation with NRCan, to allow geothermal projects to claim similar tax benefits. I would point out that it was this committee and other committees like yours that functionally changed our industry in 2017, and we're deeply grateful for that. When you go back and look at all the different projects that are being developed now, it's directly because of some changes that were made in rooms such as this, so I convey our thanks to you.
Two, move the Government of Canada towards becoming net zero from a procurement point of view for power and heat. Obviously the geothermal industry would like to participate in that.
Three, continue the direct government contributions to geothermal projects. Let's get some of these off the ground.
Four, initiate more federal geothermal heat programs. The renewable heat is still a yet-to-be-supported initiative on the larger scale. Electricity has been supported greatly over the years, and we're looking to now move beyond just electricity to renewable heat as well.
Thank you for your time today.