Canada: A secure North American energy partner
The first essay by Pete Carrels in June 2009 focused on the plans to build a South Dakota refinery associated with tar sands petroleum. The second by Tom Huffaker appeared in July 2009 and stated the case for tar sands production and refining from the standpoint of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers. What follows is the Canadian government's perspective, presented by Consul General Martin Loken, Canada's senior representative in the Upper Midwest, based at the Consulate General of Canada in Minneapolis.
By Consul General Martin Loken
The United States and Canada have always had an unparalleled relationship as neighbors, friends and allies.
Nowhere is that relationship more evident than in the extent of our two countries’ commercial relationship: More than seven million U.S. jobs were supported by trade with Canada as of 2005, Canada buys 3.6 times more from the United States than does China and close to $2 billion in goods and services cross the Canada-U.S. border every day.
And, with the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, Canada is the largest—and most secure—oil supplier to the U.S. market, ahead of Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Mexico, as well as the United States’ largest supplier of natural gas and electricity. Our integrated energy infrastructure of virtually borderless transmission lines and pipelines is at the heart of our region’s economic health.
It is also at the heart of our region’s environmental health. Our energy relationship, valued at nearly $133 billion in 2008, is vast and creates a shared responsibility to deal with the accompanying environmental challenges. Our leaders have recognized this with the creation of a Canada-U.S. Clean Energy Dialogue to strengthen our collaboration on advanced energy research and to help address climate change. This dialogue is a natural extension of the extensive bilateral coordination in the development of our environmental and energy regulatory policies.
For some, this dialogue should embrace an approach that advances the elimination of fossil fuels from our energy mix, to be replaced with renewable alternatives. Others see these alternatives as having promise for the future only, given their high costs and lack of scalability. A real solution lies somewhere in between, recognizing the challenge of aligning energy sources with ever-growing global energy demand. The United States is on target to increase energy use by 11 percent between now and 2030. We’re going to need all the energy we can get, and while lower-carbon and renewable fuels will play an increasingly important role—Canada is on track to generate 90 percent of our electricity from noncarbon-emitting sources by 2020—fossil fuels will remain the bulk of our energy supply into the foreseeable future.
We need to develop new energy sources and prudently use the nonrenewable ones we already have. This includes Canada’s oil sands.
Canada has enormous oil reserves—an estimated 176 billion barrels—and our oil sands currently produce more than one million barrels of oil per day, mostly bound for the United States.
There is no doubt that this production has an environmental cost. But Canada’s federal government and the province of Alberta carefully regulate that production. Extracting a barrel from the oil sands can emit more greenhouse gases per barrel than extracting some lighter crude oils, but that difference has narrowed significantly, with a one-third reduction in GHG emissions intensity from 1990 levels. And, as recent independent studies have shown, when oil sands production is compared to heavier crude oils from far less secure sources than Canada, the emissions difference can disappear altogether. Through GHG reduction targets, as well as strict requirements on land and water use, we are managing the whole production cycle.
Our dialogue will help with the essential transition to a low-carbon economy. Together, we will work on the development of carbon capture and storage technology, getting leverage from nearly $3 billion in Canada already committed to this work. We will expand our joint efforts on energy efficiency and renewable technologies. We will address our energy security together, as we have in the past. Our shared challenge, as oil sands production attests, is to manage our production and consumption wisely. In the move to a low-carbon economy, Canada will remain a safe, secure and reliable supplier of energy to the United States.
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