Grey hydrogen, just so everybody is aware of it, is hydrogen typically made from natural gas where there is nothing done to manage the CO2 that is emitted in that process. That's the way most hydrogen is produced today.
That is not what we are about in the CHFCA. We recognize that's a key tool, but what we are promoting and what we are focused on is CO2 produced without GHG emissions.
There are many ways to do that. One way is to simply capture those CO2 emissions, as is being done in Alberta, and then safely and permanently sequester them. There also is technology to avoid the production of CO2 and produce things, such as elemental carbon, that don't lead to GHG emissions. There are also, of course, ways to produce hydrogen, as was mentioned earlier, from waste materials, from waste wood products. There are also technologies to produce it from any type of clean power, and as long as the power is clean, the resulting hydrogen is produced without GHG emissions.
All of those are necessary. They all need to be scaled up significantly. In different parts of the country, it's going to make sense to use one or the other. In Quebec, with its surplus and low-cost clean power, it makes sense to use that to make hydrogen. In Alberta and in B.C., with a large amount natural gas and an ability to sequester, perhaps it makes more sense to use fossil fuels with carbon management. However, all of them achieve the same end result. They make hydrogen available and without producing GHG emissions as a result.
We feel that they all need to be encouraged. We need a lot more hydrogen to enable Canadians to decarbonize transportation, heating and industrial processing. The focus should be on how we spur investment in all these areas.
I point to the recent announcement by ATCO and Suncor that was mentioned earlier. That's a hugely significant project: 300,000 tonnes a year of hydrogen. I had some quick discussions with Fortis, and I understand that's about a third of the total natural gas demand in B.C. today. I could be corrected if I'm wrong on that, but that's the scale of that project. That amount of hydrogen being produced with private sector investment is able to deliver that range of emissions reduction, potentially being used to reduce one-third of the total GHG in B.C.
There are technical challenges, but there are no fundamental technical barriers to doing that.
Similarly, we can be looking to scale up other forms of hydrogen production in other parts of the country.