Thank you, Mr. Lloyd. That's a great question and one that we talk about quite often.
You have to make sure, in the transition to cleaner energy resources, that you are absolutely focused on customer affordability, and when you set climate policy and realize that you have to reduce the amount of carbon that you emit as a society, there are only so many options that you have. What we typically talk about is the balance of those options between things like renewable natural gas and hydrogen from a fuel perspective that you can transport in a gaseous phase, and electricity. What you have to compare is not necessarily the cost between, say, renewable natural gas and natural gas—methane in B.C.—coming right out of the ground, but to compare that to the other opportunities, which are going to be things like carbon capture utilization and storage or electricity.
It's really shifting the paradigm of what you compare those costs to, and yes, you're absolutely right, when you look at the cost that we see for renewable natural gas now, it is in that $20 GJ number range that you brought up. If you look at the cost of gas coming right out of the ground, it is in that same range that you talked about, which is, depending on the market conditions, anywhere between let's say $2 and $5 a GJ.
That's the picture that we have to see clearly so that we can make those trade-offs and make them cost-effective for our customers. At the end of the day, what you're looking at is comparing renewable natural gas as a heat source delivered to our customers, burner-tip costs, to the same thing that they would need to get electricity from, say, renewable or hydro—whatever that clean energy is—transmitted to those customers for that same purpose. That's how the economics have to be compared.