Energy Policy

$100 a barrel oil was hit recently, and the prospects of ever seeing $60 a barrel oil is laughable. Fortunately we happen to be situated on a fair amount of natural gas and oil, and a huge amount of more difficult to extract oil.

We stand to make a lot of money out of this if we play it well, and we certainly do. We exported $41 billion worth of crude oil last year, $28 billion of natural gas, and $22 billion of LNG, coal, and electricity.

Unfortunately, these are limited and very valuable resources that we happen to use a lot of ourselves. A vast majority of homes have natural gas piped in for heating and cooking purposes, and obviously we use a lot of gasoline in our cars. As well, we import $23 billion of crude oil mostly to eastern provinces and $13 billion of gasoline (our refinery capacity is not high enough to refine all our oil).

There are a problems with our current energy policy as I see it, one being that we are sitting on a strategic resource that we just throw away to other countries on the cheap, Uranium. Why is nuclear power only 20% of our domestic energy supply? We are lucky to have vast hydroelectric resources that are clean and provide a lot of energy, but we still burn up oil and gas to provide for 25% of our domestic electricity use. It makes no sense that Alberta doesn't have a nuclear generating station, because they use so much natural gas to extract oil from the tar sands when they could easily use electricity instead. BC gets most of their electricity from hydroelectric, but they could benefit from a reactor, and Ontario has a coal power plant that generates tons of pollution that could readily be replaced with a nuclear plant.

I was thinking that the Green Party would be the best party to vote for a better energy policy, but after reading their website it says that they are against nuclear power. To be honest this completely baffles me, as it is a virtually pollution free source of energy that produces no emissions.

In theory I support renewable energy sources, but I am also a realist, and there's no way we can convert our whole energy supply to renewable energy before oil production starts to decline, and we need some sort of in-between. Either way, I think Canada needs to give more thought to our energy policy, and take a hard look at our use of energy resources.

Your thoughts?

You bury it 1000 meters in the ground up in the northern parts of the Canadian Shield.

The first question to settle about natural resources is the distribution of royalties. If you extract uranium and build nuclear power plants without solving this question, some terrorists will try to blow up your plants.

The nuclear fuel storage problem is way over done. After 40 years of running 22 reactors Ontario Hydro's spent fuel stock would fill seven professional hockey rinks to the top of the wooden fence only. That's all it is. If there was more of the stuff you could build an effective recycling plant, next generation.

Nuclear seems to be a very good compromise here. Environmentalist can whine about radioactive waste, but it was always there even before it went to the nuclear plant. If you really wanted to get rid of the waste in it's natural state, you simply dilute it throughout the country side. But anyways, why would you do that? Like the poster above me said, breeder reactor can use all of the waste for energy. The amount of supply goes up 50 fold (enough to last 10000 years).

As for the natural gas issue, they use it because it would be too expensive to build power lines into the area. Keep in mind while oil prices have gone up alot, per Joule of energy, natural gas is still relatively cheap.

Hyrdoelectric dams are an easy clean energy source. However, environmentalsits don't like dams easier(despite the improvements in accomidating river life). You probaly won't ever see any more dams popping up in the West.

You mention using renewables to replace the drop in oil production. Electricity and transportation fuels are two different things. You really can't put the two in the same category. For transport, you need a huge increase in battery capacity or a dramatic increase in fuel cell price and efficiency. And again, people need to understand that your fuel is a mean to store energy, not to ultimatly give more energy than it produces. With that, you can use the grid to generate the transport fuel.

Of course, that is far away. The best thing you can do is get hybrids with all electric options(go 55 km on pure electricity). The next step would be rotary engines, which are 3x more efficient. There is a professor at my college who is working on one right now. Looks very promising if he can get investors or a company to give him the time of day.

Right now, natural gas is $40 for the same energy content as a barrel of oil, I honestly don't see this lasting for long, especially if we use it to extract oil from tar sands.

I agree, transport fuel and electricity serve different uses, but they certainly don't have to. Personally I think using oil in our cars is probably one of the worst uses, and I eagerly await electric cars, more specifically any sort of high-density electrical storage medium. A nuclear-electric power grid supplying vehicles is the best alternative scenario, so crude oil can be used in the applications that are harder to replace, like feedstock for fertilizer (which sustains our high food yields) and polymer plastics.

I hope your professor gets the funding he needs, because innovation is the key factor in keeping Canada afloat.