Thank you very much to the committee, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources.
My name is Josipa Petrunic. I am the president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, CUTRIC.
CUTRIC is a technology innovation consortium. All we do is design, develop and launch electric bus, fuel cell bus and autonomous electrical technology projects.
This committee's focus is on energy-oriented natural resources. Those are supplies that Canada is rich in. We all know that. From our perspective at CUTRIC, Canada's natural resources include electrons produced from renewable hydro power, solar and wind and non-emitting sources such as nuclear and renewable natural gas, all of which are extremely strategically important in a globalized world.
Just as bitumen was impossible as a market fuel in the 1960s and 1970s until the federal and provincial governments invested heavily, alongside industry and technology innovation, in the development of technologies like SAGD—steam-assisted gravitational drainage—that help us today to extract thick petroleum supplies from the previously inaccessible depths of the earth, so too will renewable electricity and renewable hydrogen benefit from ongoing and upcoming public investments in innovation and technology.
In my remarks today, I'm going to make two recommendations. Both of them are based on the fundamental position that energy is energy. Whether energy is produced and carried in the form of a hydrocarbon molecule, an electron or a hydrogen atom, energy is energy. If, as Canadians, we want to stay an energy superpower of the future in the 21st century, then we do believe that the federal government has two critical roles: One is as a convenor and one is as an investor in the energy supply sector of the future.
The first recommendation I'd put forward is that Natural Resources Canada in particular should be playing a national convenor role between all provincial and territorial ministries of energy. Over the past six years at CUTRIC, we've led a national power providers working group, which brings together utilities in the nation looking to see how they can become power providers of the future.
We published a major national report last year on this very issue. We discovered a few really important things.
First off, we have some really important critical first movers: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Hydro-Québec and Nova Scotia Power. These are vertically integrated utilities that help to develop new commodity and demand pricing mechanisms for electrical energy supplies that directly address transportation pollution and greenhouse gas emissions—in particular, in the transition out of oil and gas as our prime fossil fuel transportation mode.
These energy producers in particular struggle with some of the regulatory frameworks they work within. What we've discovered is that BC Hydro is a first mover in the country. It certainly has the kinds of programs that others are going to want to copy. BC Hydro has created both an overnight and a demand charge rate, both of which are specifically designed to support the electrification of buses in Vancouver and across British Columbia.
These regulatory innovations should be shared with all 10 ministers of energy across the country and territorial energy leaders in the north, but in our current Confederation, electricity is a provincial jurisdiction. It's not the job of British Columbia to convince Saskatchewan, Ontario or Nova Scotia to follow its lead, but it is the job of Natural Resources Canada to do so in a convenor role, to helpfully convene and coordinate the sharing of these best practices, along with provincial electricity jurisdictions, in the pursuit of low-carbon fuel production.
My second recommendation to the committee today is focused on innovation investments in hydrogen. Natural Resources has expanded and can expand further a suite of innovation programs to assist in price point reduction for public fleets like transit that will use renewable hydrogen over the next five years.
We know that over the past decades we have invested heavily in innovation in the oil and gas sector; I mentioned SAGD technology as a great example. Similar kinds of investments are going to be required in ensuring that the price point for green and renewable hydrogen drops to diesel price parity over the next five to seven years. It is possible, but currently, renewable hydrogen at small volumes of under 1,000 kilograms per day, which supports about 30 fuel cell electric buses, is about four times the price of non-renewable diesel.
It's not surprising, since diesel benefits from a pre-existing massive and well-established distribution supply chain and millions of kilograms of demand per day, but if we are keen to ensure green hydrogen can compete over the long term and keen to position Canada as an energy superpower of the future, then most certainly there is a role for Natural Resources to engage in the subsidization of the price of renewable hydrogen—for public fleets specifically—in Canada over the next five years. This is going to help us overcome the gap in price between renewable hydrogen and diesel for public fleets, creating a marketplace that will naturally accommodate for-profit freight operators in the future and ensuring that diesel and renewable hydrogen price hit parity by 2030 in a liberal, globalized market economy.
In closing, Natural Resources Canada has played a pivotal role in innovating the oil and gas sector in the past and still does today. That's why we're an energy superpower, but the same kinds of investments are now needed in the energy industry of the future, in the interests of all Canadians.
Thank you for your time. I'm happy to answer any questions.