Natural Resources committee  If you wanted to fully decarbonize your gas stream, there wouldn't be enough forestry residue. You'd have to reduce the amount of natural gas you're using, produce renewable natural gas from a variety of feedstocks, including forest residue, and likely supplement it with hydrogen.

Natural Resources committee  From a greenhouse gas reduction perspective and a cost perspective, it is preferable to be using forest residues. That being said, the value of biofuels could rise such that you might be looking at other feedstocks that have less of a positive greenhouse gas impact.

Natural Resources committee  The federal clean fuel regulation, in my opinion, is unlikely to be sufficiently strict between now and 2030 to require agricultural or forestry residues to be part of our bioenergy system. There's enough abatement from first-generation biofuels, from electrification and from carbon capture and storage to comply with that policy over the next nine years.

Natural Resources committee  I think it would be trending toward the requirement in British Columbia or California, for example. Instead of about a 13% reduction in life-cycle carbon intensity of fuels, it would be moving toward a 20% reduction.

Natural Resources committee  We've seen nationally, if we're just talking about the collection and delivery of feedstock to production facilities, that it could be on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 jobs nationally, roughly speaking. I can look for some numbers and perhaps send you something off-line if you'd like.

Natural Resources committee  It would be over the next 20 to 30 years.

Natural Resources committee  Sure. What I mean is that the goals of those policies are not mutually exclusive. You can use revenue recycling in any number of ways to try to mitigate the economic impact on certain segments of the population. You can use changes to your tax policy to do the same. You can use other sorts of policies to mitigate that.

Natural Resources committee  In the work we've done, we see that by 2050 you'd need something pretty close to a zero-emissions electricity sector, which means that using natural gas, even efficiently in a combined-cycle power plant, is not compatible with that. You can decarbonize the gas stream. You could inject renewable natural gas or even hydrogen, and then there are modifications that would be required to make that turbine still operate with a high amount of hydrogen in it.

Natural Resources committee  Certainly, I don't think greenhouse gas reduction and poverty reduction are mutually exclusive. You may need to implement separate and unrelated policies to ensure that you're not unduly affecting people on low incomes or seniors on fixed incomes. In terms of rural living, there are some real opportunities within a bioenergy system to increase employment in those areas.

Natural Resources committee  Government procurement could be a very useful tool to create the early market conditions that help this industry or sector get going, but to fully scale it up, I don't think government procurement would be necessarily the correct tool. You'd want to be addressing the carbon intensity of the wider pool of fuels the way that the clean fuel regulation does.

Natural Resources committee  I agree, actually. I think there is a significant opportunity for clean energy production and for economic development in the forestry sector. I personally feel that it would be of equal importance to hydrogen, so in that sense a federal strategy could be a helpful thing. That said, to drive the growth of that overall sector, I still believe it's better to set the policy that would create the market conditions to make it happen in the long run, in the big picture.

Natural Resources committee  In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, we have absolutely. The analysis tools that we use cover the full economy and all energy used within the economy. They don't show that we somehow run out of energy. The question is not how much energy we have; it's whether we can use energy without causing environmental damage.

Natural Resources committee  I think policies like the clean fuel regulation are very helpful. That said, the clean fuel regulation, to get to a point where we're using those wastes, would need to be stronger. We need to be thinking about where it's going after 2030. Something more in line with where California and B.C. expect to be with their similar policies by 2030 should do it.

Natural Resources committee  My opinion is that the greenhouse gas benefit of exporting LNG is transitory. You're absolutely right that burning gas is less emissions-intensive than burning coal. However, I have not seen a very long-term study—to mid-century—in which the world is trending towards very deep greenhouse gas reductions along with a large or growing role for natural gas in any energy system.

Natural Resources committee  Transportation cost is a big element of any bioenergy system. The estimate I gave that maybe 15% to 20% of our current fossil fuel liquid energy consumption could be replaced with bioenergy produced from residues from forestry and farming takes into account both sustainability criteria and technical criteria, as well as, to some extent, production cost.