Natural Resources committee  The quick answer is yes. A price on carbon can drive innovation because it creates new opportunities. It makes processes that today don't look viable suddenly look viable because there's an additional revenue stream, an additional way to balance the books and to turn your IRR, your internal rate of return, to something that's attractive to finance.

Natural Resources committee  As I was saying before, if the price of carbon is applied in such a way that it penalizes an industry, it could kill the industry. If the industry is characterized by very, very high emissions, introducing a price on carbon, particularly if it's introduced fast, without any warning, could kill the industry.

Natural Resources committee  If you can find an industrial process to use the heat, then I think that's great and we do have some programs to support that. For community heat, for district heating, we don't have a national system in place. There are some opportunities for that. Using heat in extraction of oil or of gas, that's also a place where I'm not sure if the writedown would apply.

Natural Resources committee  We're seeing a lot of promise with thermo-chemical technologies. These are the technologies that companies like Enerkem have moved forward, using gasification. They use heat to break the biomass down. They produce a lot of heat during production, so it's very important for us to find a use for that heat.

Natural Resources committee  Electricity policy tends to be handled at the provincial level, so we're dealing with provincial utilities and provincial governments that come up with their own targets and their own programs to support renewable electricity. We've seen that in Ontario. We've seen that in other provinces across the country.

Natural Resources committee  That's right. If you look at the way that biomass to electricity is incentivized in Ontario, there is little uptake. It's largely because the heat component doesn't receive a value. People may use it, and people do use it, in certain applications, but there's no value attached to it and there's no real driver, and that's a problem.

Natural Resources committee  Yes. You could proxy the cost of the heat or the cost of the electricity in terms of the carbon load, for instance, or the environmental impacts, and if there were a carbon price, as we've talked about, that would tilt the balance again. Until a carbon price comes, one of the other ways to move these technologies forward would be to recognize the heat value, as I say.

Natural Resources committee  A really useful measurement is in jobs. But it's not just direct jobs; it's also indirect employment. I know that my colleague from the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association will have some stats on this, but for every ethanol plant that's in place, there are hundreds of farmers, if not thousands, who are supplying corn, and that is their income.

Natural Resources committee  I think implementing a plan to move one of these technologies forward would help with employment, there's no doubt about that. Once you start to support a technology, support its use, the use of the products, support the rollout of different spinoffs and ancillary services, you start to see this sort of ecosystem develop.

Natural Resources committee  One idea that I would like to put out is that a way to break this problem down is to consider the country by region. In the east we have a lot of people, we have chemical processing capacity, and we have big markets. This might be the place where we work towards a biomass to a liquid fuel or a biomass to chemical option.

Natural Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and my thanks to the members of the committee for allowing me to be here today. It's a real pleasure. First, I'll try to describe a little bit of the mix of renewables available to us. We have three real sets of needs. We have needs for industrial and home heating.