Thank you. Good morning and good afternoon, members of Parliament and members in our audience. It is a pleasure to be here today.
I thank you for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for the low-carbon and renewable fuels industry in Canada. My name is Robert Artibise, and I'm the vice-president of technology for an international hydrogen fuel cell stack engineering and manufacturing company named Unilia Fuel Cells.
Fuel cell technology can and is being used in many applications. At Unilia, our focus is on medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicle electrification. I'm an engineer by training and have been working directly in the automotive fuel cell industry for over 20 years.
The focus of my comments today will be on the impact of scale-up. Over the past 25 years, fuel cells have gone from research and development to deployment. As a new company to the industry, Unilia is led by a team of experts who are industry veterans. The average fuel cell experience for an employee at our Burnaby, British Columbia, location is between 15 years and 20 years.
This knowledge, coupled with the passion to deliver products, has enabled Unilia to grow from establishing a company in September 2017 to commissioning a state-of-the-art product and technology development centre in Burnaby, British Columbia, in March 2020, as well as having a fuel cell stack production facility in Shanghai, China, and Guangdong, China, capable of an annual production of 5,000 stacks per year. After launching our first product line last summer, in 2020, Unilia will be delivering our thousandth stack later next week.
In September 2020, Unilia was proud to announce that Refire purchased an equity stake, making Unilia part of the Refire group of companies.
Since founding Refire in 2015, the company has supplied over 3,000 fuel cell systems to over 40 partners and customers. More than 2,700 operating vehicles are powered by Refire and are on the road today in 17 cities globally. The total combined vehicle mileage has surpassed 60 million kilometres. The vehicles in service are in a wide variety of applications, from a 4.5 ton truck doing short-haul deliveries, to 40 ton trucks doing heavy-duty applications, to 10.5 metre buses and 12 metre buses. Currently, Refire has 915 buses in operation today.
Unilia would love to deploy our fuel cells and technology in Canada and across North America. The ideal hydrogen strategy would be one where we could build a production facility in Canada to serve the North American market.
There are many government policies in Canada that support decarbonization and hydrogen as an energy storage system. These include Canada's net-zero commitment, putting a price on carbon, the clean fuel standard and light-duty, zero-emission vehicle standards in British Columbia and Quebec, which have driven up the retail hydrogen refuelling stations in those two provinces.
Government funding that supports decarbonization and hydrogen as an energy storage includes the $2.75 billion that Infrastructure Canada has put towards the zero-emission bus fund, the $1.5 billion that Canada Infrastructure Bank is putting towards infrastructure rollout, the $0.2 billion in the fuelling infrastructure fund and the $3 billion that the strategic innovation fund has put towards a net-zero accelerator.
I still think there are some gaps that are hindering deployment and adoption of hydrogen and fuel cell applications in Canada. These are the supply of clean, low-cost hydrogen in main hub areas. This exists in Edmonton, but it's needed in other locations, like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Another is project funding approvals. We're seeing lots and lots of projects being proposed, but we need projects granted.
Today my recommendations to the standing committee include a guaranteed demand for fuel providers by issuing credits based on installed capacity. This strategy was previously included in the B.C. low-carbon fuel standard and has been adopted in California to entice greater private sector investment for larger-capacity refuelling stations. Other recommendations are for net-zero emission requirements for vehicles in Canada, net-zero emission requirements for heating fuels in Canada, and guaranteed project funding approvals, using a target system by funding dollars per megatonne of carbon. This can be adjusted on an annual basis as the usage of this funding system goes up or down.
I thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm happy to answer questions and discuss any comments you might have.
Thank you.