Mr. Speaker, the question really fits very well with what I have been proposing. I wanted to see conditions that would have linked themselves to greenhouse gas emissions for the development of the biofuels industry.
In other words, we would have some condition that would give a priority to those biofuel production lines, those uses of biological energy, to produce fuel so that the incentives would be tailored to the greenhouse gas reductions.
To move to 5% ethanol in our gasoline we are going to have to grow about 4.5 million tonnes of corn or else we are going to buy it from the United States. The studies that are done by BIOCAP Canada, a very respectable study, suggest that corn ethanol from the United States or corn products from the United States actually have a negative greenhouse gas life cycle production. In Canada it is slightly better at 21%.
Biodiesel on the other hand from canola is probably the most attractive option when we are talking about the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through the use of a particular product. So when we talk about canola, we are talking about a product that actually does have some of the characteristics that we are looking for in a product. We can see a net offset of CO2 of 57%. That is reasonable but it is still not as good as perhaps using bioenergy simply as a heating product where we are going to get a greenhouse gas reduction closer to 90% to 95%. Those are good numbers. Those are really solid numbers.
Therefore, when we think of the bioenergy industry, yes, we should think of it in terms of greenhouse gas reductions and we should be very careful about what we are doing with it so that we do achieve the goals that we have, and we do move ourselves toward Kyoto compliance.