Thank you and good day. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you.
Over the last eight years, my family and I have founded three projects in an effort to try to do our part to help position Canada as the North American leader in addressing the climate change challenge and fighting the energy poverty emergency.
The first project, which we founded in 2015, is the Calgary Airport-Banff Rail—or CABR—project, which will be North America's first hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions passenger rail system, and the first entirely new intermunicipal dedicated track passenger rail system ever built in Canada.
As background, my wife, Jan, and I have lived in Banff for the last 26 years and grew increasingly concerned about the impact that personal vehicles were having on Banff National Park. Returning passenger rail to Banff would be the obvious transformative solution, but the government was not in a position to develop it, so my wife and I decided to lean in and see if the private sector could create a reliable high-frequency system that would run on a new dedicated track we would build within the CPKC rail corridor.
To advance the project, we first worked with CPKC to lease the Banff train station, and then entered into an MOU to lease the space within the corridor to build the track. We structured the project as a public-private partnership, and brought in as our development partner the infrastructure arm of CDPQ.
We have secured the support of the four mayors of the municipalities along the route. The federal government, through the Canada Infrastructure Bank, has been a wonderful partner and agreed to fund 50% of the capital cost. We are currently collaborating with the Alberta provincial government on a study to optimize the rail connection at the airport. If all goes according to plan, we hope to begin construction within 24 months, with a three-year build, so that CABR can be in service in late 2028.
The second project, which we started three years ago, was Banff National Park Net Zero 2035, an effort to make Banff North America's first net-zero emissions community. We created the initiative as a result of Jan and I working with the transition accelerator to determine that the transportation emissions by visitors and residents in Banff National Park were 105 metric tons each year, by far the largest of any national park in the world. For perspective, compare that to Zion National Park, the U.S. national park that most closely resembles Banff National Park in visitation. Banff has 63 times the per-visitor transportation emissions.
It was clear that Parks Canada on its own was not able to reduce the impact of the personal vehicle. We saw the opportunity to transform Banff National Park from worst to first through the collaboration of leaders from business, academia and government. The Banff National Park Net Zero 2035 initiative's short-term priorities include advancing such projects as pedestrian-only zones within the town and replacing personal vehicles to popular points of interest in the park with shuttle link systems. A medium-term priority is converting Banff's space heating needs to hydrogen, using innovative technology to convert natural gas to hydrogen at a community-level facility. As we like to say, “If Banff can't become net zero by 2035, Toronto doesn't stand a chance by 2050.”
The third project we founded in 2017 was Strathcona Resources Ltd., which will likely be one of the first oil companies in North America to deploy carbon capture and storage at scale. By way of background, Strathcona was created by Washington state's clean energy fund, a private equity investment business that has, among other professionals, me and our three sons. We have grown the business over the last six and a half years into Canada's fifth-largest oil company. Strathcona's business plan will help fight the energy poverty emergencies to organically grow production over the next eight years from 185,000 barrels a day to 325,000 barrels a day.
Strathcona has principally grown by consolidating three core areas by acquiring 10 smaller subscale businesses into a single operating entity. Each of these smaller entities lacked the financial capacity to fund the necessary capital investments required to be able to reduce CO2 emissions. Strathcona's thermal assets, which currently produce 9,000 barrels a day, are located in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. This provides us the opportunity to sequester the CO2 directly into reservoirs beneath those facilities, unlike the Athabasca oil sands, which had to build a CO2 pipe to southern Alberta.
Strathcona has the potential to reduce its emissions through CCS by 2030 by 60%, and ultimately to reduce them up to 90%. Strathcona has already taken the first regulatory steps in implementing CCS, receiving some of the first permissions to drill test sequestration wells in both Alberta and Saskatchewan. Strathcona's full implementation of CCS is waiting for a finalized fiscal regime from the federal and provincial governments.
I'll be glad to take your questions.