Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Tom. I'm Graham Campbell. I'm with the Office of Energy Research and Development at Natural Resources Canada. I believe we're coming back to the committee on May 14 for a discussion on clean coal in general. But, Mr. Tonks, just briefly, gasification is one of the t

Natural Resources committee  Thank you very much, John. On slide 7 I'll pick up the briefing from there, Chair. While there are certainly incremental gains to be made in the performance of today's technologies, we believe that a fundamental change in technology is needed to make significant progress towa

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Tonks. We've been following the FutureGen project very carefully since its beginning. Just a thumbnail sketch, it's essentially a project to generate hydrogen for the purposes of furthering the hydrogen economy plus electricity. It includes CO2 capture and storage

Natural Resources committee  I should have mentioned that. I apologize. Typically, they're looking at a better quality coal that they have to work with in the U.S. And the core technology to the FutureGen project is gasification technology. So there are similarities, certainly, to our interest in gasificati

Natural Resources committee  What I've indicated as well in the deck, sir, is that it's roughly 13% of our total portfolio, which tries to cover renewables and end-use technologies in three broad areas: transportation, industry, building, etc. It's a question of allocation of resources over a number of very

Natural Resources committee  Not necessarily as clean as it could be. We're telling the committee today about a couple of technologies, gasification and oxy-fuel, that have long-term potential. But there's been recent construction in Canada of an intermediate step along the technology pathway. It's called

Natural Resources committee  We don't have the figures here today.

Natural Resources committee  Yes, we could provide them to you.

Natural Resources committee  I think I'll leave the answer I had previously, sir, and that would be that we have to balance. We have balanced, and that's the amount of money we've decided to allocate. We had promised to provide you figures on the different proportion across the other areas. If the committe

Natural Resources committee  We call it the leverage, and it's typically between 3 and 3.5 to 1.

Natural Resources committee  Could I add to your first question, sir? We're aware of six gasification projects operating at the moment across the world, none of which operate with Canadian coals and none of which have capture and storage with them. In terms of oxy-fuel, there's a German company called Vatt

Natural Resources committee  If I might, just before we go on, slide 15 in your deck is the schedule of what we call “retirement” or “replacement” of coal technology. So the utilities are facing this curve, in other words, and as this capacity comes off line, it will have to be replaced. So as John has said,

Natural Resources committee  One area of interest to our group is the integration of renewable energy sources into grid supply. In the province of Quebec, for example, wind energy has come on in large measure. It is used in combination with hydro. When the wind is blowing and the generation is there, you sav

Natural Resources committee  In my presentation, I spoke about our international ties with other countries, particularly China, India and South Africa. These are countries where economic activity and electricity consumption are growing rapidly. That is why we are very interested in sharing with them informat

Natural Resources committee  That's right. At the same time, Canadian businesses could tap into those foreign markets.