Energy policy of Canada
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article requires authentication or verification by an expert. Please assist in recruiting an expert or improve this article yourself. See the talk page for details. This article has been tagged since May 2008. |
Canada is a significant producer of natural gas, petroleum, coal and electricity, and is a major supplier of oil, gas and electricity to the United States and coal to Asia, Europe and Latin America. However it is both an importer and exporter of coal, petroleum and petroleum products because its major coal and oil fields are far removed from its industrial centers, and many of its oil refineries cannot handle the types of oil produced in Canada.[1]
Electric power generation in Canada draws on hydroelectric, nuclear, coal and natural gas, with a small but growing contribution from wind power.
Contents |
[edit] History
Historically, wood fires and human muscles provided the bulk of energy in Canada. When foreigners think of Canada the log cabin and campfire even spring to mind. The arrival of the horse from Europe by way of Mexico substituted animals for humans in the transportation system, initially to the benefit of the native people, but later to their disadvantage. Subsequent developments in energy sources, like coal and petroleum, paralleled and in some cased preceded those in the United States. In 1846, Abraham Gesner built the world's first refinery producing kerosene from coal in Nova Scotia, and in 1853 moved to the United States to build more refineries there.
When the four original provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario joined together to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the fathers of Confederation wrote a constitution that (in theory) created a country with a strong central government and relatively weak provincial governments. They did so in reaction to the recent Civil war in the United States, where (in theory at least) the states are very powerful and the federal government is weak. In doing so, they assigned control over and ownership of natural resources to the provinces. In 1870 the British government transferred the territory controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company to the new Canadian government control, a vast area of 4 million square kilometres which included most of the modern provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. At the time, the largest industry in it was the fur trade, which was under federal control, and the Canadian government was unaware of the enormous mineral wealth it held, particularly the massive quantities of fossil fuels toward the western margins and the hydroelectric potential of the rivers flowing into Hudson Bay. As a result of future developments, this gave the governments of the provinces, particularly that of Alberta, far more wealth and power than the founders originally intended.
[edit] Coal
[edit] History of Coal In Canada
Coal was subsidised in Canada from 1887. The mines of Cape Breton were involved in this tarriff protection to help it compete against American coal entering Ontario via the Great Lakes. Cape Breton coal was dug underground then shipped to Toronto and Montreal. The vast industries of the east, including steel mills, were fuelled with this coal. While there were difficulties and strikes, coal powered Canada into the Second World War. There were several Royal Commissionsinto coal: one in 1947 and other in 1965.
Federal involvement in Cape Breton, continued with the Cape Breton Development Corporation, or Devco which was in reality a large subsidy. The completion of the trans-Canada pipeline, nuclear reactors and the Hibernia gas fields have finished coal in Nova Scotia. On the other side of the country, Vancouver Island is covered in coal: there are coal fields in Cassidy, Nanaimo, Campbell River and Fort Rupert. Coal was mined at Nanaimo for one hundred years from 1853-1955. Coal was fed in ship's furnaces, railroad engines, and industry. In BC's interior coal was mined at Merritt, Coalmont, Fernie and Hudson's Hope. The development of coal mines in the west is integerally mixed with the building of railways--the Canadian Pacific Railway was directly involved with the Fermie mines. A separate railway--the Crow's Nest Line-- was built to move coal from the Rockies to the smelter at Trail. Alberta's bedrock is literally a layer of coal--coal underlays much of the Rocky Mountains. Historically, there were underground pits in Lethbridge, Pincher Creek, Canmore and Nordegg.
Currently, there are large coal electric plants in Canada--one in Genesee, AB, is large, and there are several others in the Toronto area.
[edit] Coal in Modern Day Canada
Canada has the tenth largest coal reserves in the world, an enormous amount considering the sparse population of the country. However, the vast majority of those reserves are located hundreds or thousands of kilometres from the country's industrial centers and seaports, and the effect of high transportation costs is that they remain largely unexploited. As with other natural resources, regulation of coal production is within the exclusive jurisdiction of the provincial governments, and it only enters federal jurisdiction when it is imported or exported from Canada.
Over 90% of Canada's coal reserves, and 99% of its production, are located in the three Western provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. Of these, Alberta alone has 70% of Canada's coal reserves, and 48% of the Texas-sized province is underlaid by coal deposits. British Columbia has one of the thickest coal deposits in the world, the Hat Creek deposit, which is 550 metres (1800 ft) thick. There are also smaller, but substantial, coal deposits in the Yukon and Northwest Territories and the Arctic Islands, which are even further from markets. The Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have coal deposits that were historically a very important source of energy, and Nova Scotia was once the largest coal producer in Canada, but these deposits are much smaller and much more expensive to produce than the Western coal, so coal production in the Atlantic provinces has virtually ceased. Nova Scotia now imports all the coal for its steel mills and power plants from other countries like Colombia. At the same time, the Western provinces export their coal to 20 different countries, particularly Japan, Korea, and China, in addition to using it in their own thermal power plants. Elk Valley Coal mine is the second biggest coal mine in the world.
Ironically, the region between New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, a distance of thousands of kilometres which includes the major industrial centers of Ontario and Quebec, is largely devoid of coal. As a result, these provinces import almost all of the coal for their steel mills and thermal power plants from the United States. Unfortunately coal from the Eastern United States is high in sulfur content, and this has contributed to a serious air quality problem, particularly in heavily populated Southeastern Ontario.
[edit] Petroleum
[edit] First fields
In 1858 James Miller Williams dug (rather than drilled) the first oil well in North America at Oil Springs, Ontario, preceding Edwin Drake who drilled the first one in the United States one year later. By 1870 Canada had 100 refineries in operation and was exporting oil to Europe.[2] However, the oil fields of Ontario were shallow and small, and oil production peaked and started to decline around 1900. In contrast, oil production in the United States grew rapidly in the first part of the 20th century after huge discoveries were made in Texas, Oklahoma, California and elsewhere.
In 1914, Turner Valley became the first significant oil and gas field found in Alberta. Eastern Canadian investors and the federal government showed little interest and the field was developed primarily by subsidiaries of U.S. companies. It was really a gas field with a small amount of light oil condensed in the gas, but due to the lack of regulations, about 90% of the gas was flared off while producing the oil, an amount that today would be worth tens of billions of dollars.
[edit] The Turner Valley Era: 1914-1946
The Alberta provincial government became upset by the conspicuous waste so in 1931 it passed the Oil and Gas Wells Act, followed in 1932 by the Turner Valley Conservation Act. However, some of the producers had the legislation overturned in court, the federal government refused to intervene, and the burning of surplus gas continued. However, in 1938 the provincial government established the Alberta Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board (today known as the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board) to initiate conservation measures, and this time they succeeded.[3]
This body was the regulator of oil and gas production in Alberta, and therefore of most production in Canada. As the provincial regulatory authority with the most experience in the industry, it became a model for the other oil and gas producing provinces - indeed, it has been used as a model by many national petroleum industries around the world.
[edit] Major discoveries (1947 on)
By the end of World War II, Canada was importing 90% of its oil from the U.S. The situation changed drastically in 1947 when, after drilling 133 consecutive dry holes, Imperial Oil decided to drill into a peculiar anomaly on its newly-developed seismic recordings near the Edmonton suburb of Leduc to see what it was. It turned out to be an enormous oil field. Returning quickly to their seismic recordings, geologists realized that these peculiar anomalies were everywhere in the province and, unlike previous Canadian oil discoveries, the new Alberta oil fields were deep, big, and numerous. The Alberta oil rush began.
The large discovery at Leduc in 1947, and a string of even bigger ones which followed, rapidly backed imported oil out of the Canadian prairies and produced a huge surplus of oil which had no immediate market. In 1949, Imperial Oil applied to the federal government to build the Interprovincial Pipeline (IPL) to Lake Superior, and in 1950 it was completed to the port of Superior, Wisconsin. Many people questioned why it was built to an American port rather than a Canadian one, but the federal government was more interested in the fact that oil exports made a huge difference to Canada's trade balance and completely erased the country's balance of trade deficit. By 1956 the pipeline was continued via Sarnia, Ontario to Toronto and became, at 3100 km, the longest oil pipeline in the world. In the interest of increasing oil exports, extensions were built to Chicago and other refinery locations in the Midwestern United States during the 1960s. In the other direction, in 1950 the federal government gave approval to build a pipeline west, and in 1953 the 1,200 km Transmountain Pipeline was built from Edmonton to the port of Vancouver, British Columbia with an extension to Seattle, Washington. One of the unusual features of these pipelines was that they did more to improve the energy security of the United States than Canada, since the Canadian government was more interested in the country's trade balance than military security.
[edit] National Oil Policy (1961)
After the big discoveries of the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. noticed that Alberta was protected from invasion by the wall of the Rocky Mountains to the west, the vast boreal forest to the north, and the bottomless swamps of the Canadian shield to the east, but was highly accessible from the vast industrial areas of the U.S. Midwest to the south. Its landlocked location was easier to defend from foreign attack than the United State's own oil fields in Texas, Alaska and California. As a result, the U.S. gave preference to oil imports from Canada, and for the purposes of energy policy treated Alberta as if it were a U.S. state. Since this resulted in producers in Alberta receiving better treatment from the United States government than the Canadian government, producers asked the federal government for access to the Eastern Canadian oil market. Oil producers in Alberta calculated they could deliver Alberta oil to the refineries at Montreal for a cost equal to or only slightly higher than the price of imported oil. However, the Montreal area refineries and the Quebec government balked at the restriction, so the result was the National Oil Policy of 1961. This drew a dividing line at the Ottawa River and gave Canadian producers exclusive rights to the areas to sell oil to the west of the line. Refineries to the east of the line could continue to process imported oil.
There is a common misapprehension in eastern Canada that the National Oil Policy resulted in higher gasoline prices for those areas west of the Ottawa Valley than those receiving imported oil. In fact the differences in gasoline price depended on market conditions and usually amounted to a fraction of a cent per litre. In reality, Alberta producers were capable of meeting the price of international oil at Montreal. The misunderstanding results from the fact that the refineries at Montreal were operated by the subsidiaries of multi-national corporations, and while their parent companies had much lower operating costs in Venezuela and the Middle East, they forced their subsidiaries to pay full world price for the oil they delivered to Montreal. Thus, while Imperial Oil, for instance, charged approximately the same price for gasoline in Montreal as in Toronto, regardless of whether it was made from domestic or imported oil, its parent company (Standard Oil of New Jersey, now known as Exxon), was a partner in Aramco in Saudi Arabia, where production costs were much lower. As a result, the lower costs increased the profits of Exxon rather than lowering prices for customers of Imperial Esso. In addition, because they were realized in third-world countries, these profits were taxed neither by the government of Canada nor (because of some special features of U.S. tax law) the United States. However, Montreal refineries would always point out that foreign oil was "cheaper" than domestic oil, while avoiding mentioning that it was cheaper for their owners, but not for their customers.
[edit] Energy crises (1973 and 1979)
In 1973, this cozy situation changed abruptly when the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) embargoed oil shipments to the United States and its allies. This resulted in 1973 energy crisis and the rapid quadrupling of the price of imported oil, which suddenly made imported oil much more expensive than domestic oil. The Canadian government suddenly realized security of supply was important. In September, 1973, the federal government formally ended the National Oil Policy, announced the extension of the inter-provincial oil pipeline to Montreal, froze prices for domestic crude, and sought to control export prices. Ottawa announced this move towards national self-sufficiency in oil so that supply problems in the United States would not automatically raise prices for Canadian consumers. The pipeline extension was completed by 1976. However, the measures started a long battle between the government of Canada, and the government of Alberta which owned most of the resources the federal government was trying to control.
A second energy crisis occurred in 1979, when the Iranian revolution caused Iran to cease oil exports and led to the 1979 energy crisis. This caused an even higher spike in the price of imported oil, causing it to rise an additional 150% and provoked the Canadian government to introduce the National Energy Program (NEP).
[edit] National Energy Program (1980-1985)
Introduced by the Liberal government under Pierre Trudeau in 1980, the controversial National Energy Program (NEP) gave the Federal government control over petroleum prices, imposing a price ceiling and export duties, in an effort to control costs and ensure supply for consumers.
The federal government had two major challenges in creating a truly national energy program. The first problem was that Canada is both an importer and an exporter of oil. It imports oil from offshore sources such as Venezuela and the Middle East into its Eastern provinces, while simultaneously exporting oil from its Western provinces into the United States. While it was popular in Eastern and Central Canada, the program incurred strong resentment in Western Canada where oil and gas production are concentrated. The second problem was that the provincial governments, rather than the federal government, have constitutional jurisdiction over natural resources, and in fact, the Government of Alberta actually owned most of the oil in Canada. This provoked a head-on confrontation with the government of Alberta, since any reduction in oil prices came directly out of Alberta government revenues. The conflict was made worse by the fact that the Alberta government had constitutional mechanisms available to it by which it could remove oil from federal taxation and shift the costs of oil subsidies onto the federal government. This drastically increased the federal government deficit.
In addition to the conflict with the Alberta government, the National Energy Program had a number of other serious flaws. The most serious was that it was based on a world price steadily increasing to $100 per barrel. In fact, world oil price declined to as little as $10 per barrel in the years following. Since the federal government based its spending on the larger figure, the result was that it spend a great deal of money in subsidies that could not be recovered in taxes on production. Another problem was that, due to proximity to the U.S. market, companies had opportunities to make money by playing differentials in prices. For instance, refiners in Eastern Canada would import oil subsidized down to half the world price, refine it into products, and export the products to the U.S. at full world price. Airlines flying between Europe and the U.S. via the polar route would take off with as little fuel as possible, and stop briefly in Canada to fill up before continuing on to their destination. Trucking companies operating between locations in the Northern U.S. would detour their trucks through Canada to refuel. None of these transactions was illegal, or even unusual considering the integrated nature of the economies, but all had the effect of transferring billions of Canadian tax dollars to the balance sheets of (mostly foreign owned) companies. A third flaw was that the NEP assumed that future oil discoveries would be made in areas under federal jurisdiction, such as the Arctic and offshore. In fact, as it turned out, most of the major oil discoveries in Canada had already been made, and the expensive subsidies given by the federal government to companies exploring in federal jurisdiction were a waste of money. All of these flaws resulted in large, and unexpected, increases in the federal budget deficit.
The final result of the NEP was that the federal government failed to keep fuel prices low, while incurring very large financial losses, and alienating the voters in its fastest-growing provinces. In the subsequent election in 1984, the governing Liberal party was soundly defeated. The winning Conservative party delayed dismantling the policy for another two and a half years. This delay contributed to the creation of the Reform Party of Canada. Subsequent federal governments have avoided introducing similar policies.
[edit] Petro-Canada
In 1975 the Liberal government reacted to the 1973 oil crisis by creating a federally-owned oil company, Petro-Canada. Initially, its assets consisted only of the federal government share of the oil sands company Syncrude and the arctic oil explorer Panarctic oils. However, the government quickly expanded it by buying the Canadian assets of foreign-owned oil companies, such as Atlantic Richfield in 1976, Pacific Petroleums in 1979, Petrofina in 1981, and the refining and marketing assets of BP in 1983 and Gulf Oil in 1985. Outright seizure of oil companies on the Latin American model was inadvisable, because the oil pipelines supplying Toronto and Montreal run through the United States, and the U.S. could have responded by shutting off all oil to Canada's industrial heartland.
Federal ownership brought Petro-Canada into conflict with the provincial governments which had control over the largest and lowest cost oil production in the country. They objected to federal intrusion into their constitutional jurisdiction, and tried to block federal incursions. For instance, when Petro-Canada attempted to buy Husky Oil in 1978, the Alberta government surreptitiously got control of Husky stock through Alberta Gas Trunk Line, and successfully blocked the takeover. When Petro-Canada quietly acquired an interest in Westcoast Transmission and Pacific Petroleums later in 1978, the government of British Columbia tried unsuccessfully to unwind the deal after the fact.
Federal investment in Petro-Canada turned out have many of the same problems as the National Energy Program. The federal government grossly overestimated the future price of oil, and consequently paid excessively high prices for the oil assets it acquired, which subsequently fell considerably in value. Its assumption that big new oil discoveries would be made in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coast turned out to be incorrect. Petro-Canada has since abandoned all the wells Panarctic drilled (bulldozing most of the equipment into the tundra) and the discoveries it did make off the Atlantic coast were fewer, more expensive, and took longer to develop than expected. Hibernia did not produce oil until 1997 and Terra Nova until 2002. The government also expected Petro-Canada to force down what it considered the high price of gasoline to consumers, but Petro-Canada's oil production was more expensive and its oil refineries less efficient than those of the competing multi-national companies, and it found itself losing money on all aspects of the oil industry.
When the Conservatives replaced the Liberals in power in 1984, they began to reverse the nationalization process. In 1991, they passed legislation allowing privatization and began selling shares to the public. The Liberals returned to power in 1993, but had lost interest in having a national oil company, and continued the privatization process. In 1995 the federal government reduced its interest to 20%, and in 2004 sold the remaining shares. Petro-Canada has done better since privatization. The oil price increases since 2003 made its high-cost production profitable, and consolidation of its refining operations to fewer but larger refineries reduced its downstream costs even as prices increased.
[edit] Non-conventional oil
Canada has oil sands deposits greater than the world's total supply of conventional oil at 1,700 billion barrels (270,000,000,000 m³) to 2,500 billion barrels (400,000,000,000 m³).[4] [5] Of these, 175 billion barrels (27,800,000,000 m³) are producible at current prices using current technology, which makes Canada's proven oil reserves second only to Saudi Arabia. Production costs are considerably higher than in the Middle East, but this is offset by the fact that the geological and political risks are much lower than in most major oil-producing areas. Almost all of the Canadian oil sands are located in Alberta. The Athabasca oil sands are the only major oil sands deposits in the world which are shallow enough for surface mining.
Commercial production began in 1967 when Great Canadian Oil Sands (now Suncor) launched the world's first major oil sands mine. Syncrude opened the second major facility in 1978. The third, by Shell Canada, started in 2003. The oil price increases of 2004-2007 made the oil sands much more profitable, and by 2007 over $100 billion worth of new mines and thermal projects were under construction or on the drawing boards. Royal Dutch Shell announced that in 2006 its Canadian oil sands operations were almost twice as profitable on a per-barrel basis as its international conventional oil operations and in July of 2007, it announced it would start a massive $27 billion dollar expansion of its oil sands plants in Alberta.
Cost of production in the oil sands, from raw tar sand to fractionate in the pipe feed, was $18 dollars per barrel; now with improvements it is in the 12-15 dollar range. Rapid price increases in recent years have greatly contributed to the profitability of an industry which has traditionally focused on reducing operating costs, and continues to do so. Critics argue that the focus on operating costs does not sufficiently address environmental issues - for example, "ravaged landscapes, despoiled rivers, diseased denizens, and altered atmospheric chemistry."
Oil sands operations differ from conventional oil in that the initial profitability is somewhat lower, but the geological and political risks are low, the reserves are vast, and the expected lifetime of production extends for generations rather than just a few years. Governments have an incentive to subsidize the start-up costs since they will recover their initial subsidies from tax revenues over a long period of time. From the standpoint of federal-provincial revenues, they also differ in that the federal government will receive larger higher share and higher return on its incentives than it would from conventional oil, while the provincial share, although substantial, will be proportionally smaller. Consequently, there has tended to be much less intergovernmental conflict and more agreement on how these projects should be handled.
If global oil prices remain high, it is likely that Canada will become one of the largest oil producers in the world in the next few decades. If so, there will be environmental issues, resulting more from the vast scale of the operations rather than the toxicity of the products. The oil sands deposits are roughly the size of Florida and the operations would drastically alter the landscape, which until recently was largely wilderness. In addition, concerns have been raised about water supplies, since the mines and steam projects would use a large portion of the flow of several major rivers. The most serious problem in the short term is an acute labor and housing shortage which has driven vacancy rates in the oil sands area to zero and wages to extremely high levels. However, given the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue expected to be generated by the oil sands in the next few decades, it is likely that future projects will be approved regardless of the problems.
Also 19 deposits of oil shales have been identified in Canada. The most explored deposits are in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. These are not as large as those in the Western United States, and will probably remain undeveloped in the foreseeable future since they are much more expensive and much smaller than the oil sands.
[edit] Natural gas
During the first half of the twentieth century, those who applied for permits to export Alberta natural gas often made the painful discovery that it was politically more complex to export gas than oil. Canadians tend to view oil as a commodity. However, through much of Canadian history, they have viewed natural gas as a patrimony, an essential resource to husband with great care for tomorrow. Although the reasons behind this attitude are complex, they are probably rooted in its value for space heating. This trend goes back as far as an incident at the end of the nineteenth century, when Ontario revoked export licenses for natural gas to the United States.
By the late 1940s Alberta, through its Conservation Board, eliminated most of the wasteful production practices associated with the Turner Valley oil and gas field. As new natural gas discoveries greeted drillers in the Leduc-fuelled search for oil, the industry agitated for licenses to export natural gas. In response, the provincial government appointed the Dinning Natural Gas Commission to inquire into Alberta's likely reserves and future demand.
In its March 1949 report, the Dinning Commission supported the principle that Albertans should have first call on provincial natural gas supplies, and that Canadians should have priority over foreign users if an exportable surplus developed. Alberta accepted the recommendations of the Dinning Commission, and later declared it would only authorize exports of gas in excess of a 30-year supply. Shortly thereafter, Alberta's Legislature passed the Gas Resources Conservation Act, which gave Alberta greater control over natural gas at the wellhead, and empowered the Oil and Gas Conservation Board to issue export permits.
The federal government's policy objectives at the time reflected concern for national integration and equity among Canadians. In 1949, Ottawa created a framework for regulating interprovincial and international pipelines with its Pipe Lines Act. Alberta once again agreed to authorize exports. The federal government, like Alberta, treated natural gas as a Canadian resource to protect for the foreseeable future before permitting international sales.
Although Americans were interested in Canadian exports, they only wanted very cheap natural gas. After all, their natural gas industry was a major player in the American economy, and American policy-makers were not eager to allow foreign competition unless there was clear economic benefit.
Because of these combined factors, proposals for major gas transportation projects carried political as well as economic risks. Not until the implementation of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (signed in 1988) did natural gas become a freely traded commodity between the US and Canada.
[edit] Constitutional issues
Canadian energy policy reflects the constitutional division of powers between the federal government and the provincial governments. The Constitution of Canada places natural resources under the jurisdiction of the provinces. The provincial governments own most of the petroleum, natural gas and coal reserves, and control most of the electricity production. This means that the national government must coordinate its energy policies with those of the provincial governments, and intergovernmental conflicts sometimes arise. The problem is particularly acute since, while the energy consuming provinces have the bulk of the population and are able to elect federal governments which introduce policies favouring energy consumers, the energy producing provinces have the ability to defeat such policies by exercising their constitutional authority over natural resources.
Section 92A of the Constitution Act, 1867 assigned to the provincial governments the exclusive authority to make laws in relation to non-renewable resources and electrical energy, while Section 125 prevented the federal government from taxing any provincial government lands or property (although the three prairie provinces were exempted from these provisions as a condition of their entry into Confederation until the Natural Resources Transfer Acts of 1930). On the other hand, the federal government has the power to make treaties with foreign countries. This has important implications for treaties involving energy production, like the Kyoto Protocol, which the Canadian government signed in 2002. Prior to signing it, the federal government failed to consult the provincial governments, who have constitutional jurisdiction over, and in many cases own, most of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the country. Since they were not involved in the negotiations, the provinces largely ignored the issue. The result is that, while the federal government committed Canada to reducing greenhouse gases by 6% from 1990 levels, by 2004 they had risen by 27%.
[edit] Electricity
- See also: Wind power in Canada
The electrification of Canada, was spurred from the US. The Niagara electrical power plant spurred industrial development in Southern Ontario. Soon major rivers across Canada had hydro schemes on them. The Canadian electrical grid was closely connected to and supplied large amounts of energy to the U.S. electrical grid. Many provinces have had a provincially-owned monopoly power generator, such as Ontario Hydro, Manitoba Hydro,Hydro-Québec and BC Hydro. These concerns embarked on vast building schemes in the postwar years raising some of the largest dams in the world.
Ontario, Canada's most populous province, generates some 9,600 MW annually, over half of that coming from one dozen nuclear reactors. Ontario also has coal, natural gas, and hydro facilities. However, Ontario is in a pickle as it must replace 80% of its generating capacity in the next twenty years--the old stations have time expired and the nuclear reactors are overstressed. A huge debate rages whether to go largely nuclear or go with renewables. Either way the bill is going to be in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars which will be reflected on the electric bills.
With the introduction of the Standard Offer Contract Program by the Ontario Power Authority on November 22,2006. Ontario has become the first jurisdiction in North America to pay generators of renewable electricity. The Ontario Standard Offer Program is similar to a program in Germany that has resulted in Germany becoming the world leader in renewable energy.
[edit] Uranium
- See also: Nuclear power in Canada
Canada is a leader in the field of nuclear energy. Uranium mining in Canada took off with the Great Bear Lake deposit furnishing some material for the Manhattan Project. Today Cameco and Areva are major produces of uranium for nuclear power. Cameco mines the world's largest high-grade uranium deposit at the McArthur River mine in Northern Saskatchewan.
ZEEP was Canada's first nuclear reactor built in 1945. Canada set up its NRX research reactor at Chalk River Laboratories in 1947. In 1962 the NPD reactor in Rolphton, Ontario was the first prototype power reactor in Canada. From this the NRC and the AECL developed the CANDU reactor. Ontario Hydro's first production power reactor was constructed at the Douglas Point in 1956. Eighteen reactors were then built in the following four decades in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick.
[edit] Renewable energy and carbon neutral energy
There are many options for tidal, biomass, wind, solar, and geo heating in Canada.
[edit] Energy conservation in Canada
After the 1973 Oil Crisis, energy conservation came into vogue with smaller cars and insulated homes. Appliances were improved to use less energy. Also, out of this initiative came several debacles--these included the Urea-formaldehyde Insulation disaster and the ongoing Leaky Condo Scandal.
[edit] References
- ^ [1] CAPP website, accessed 2007-04-05
- ^ [2] Petroleum History Society - Canadian Beginnings
- ^ Calgary & Southern Alberta - The Turner Valley Oil Era
- ^ The Oil Sands Story: The Resource. Oil Sands Discovery Centre. Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum, Fort McMurray branch. (2007). Retrieved on 2008-04-07.
- ^ World Proved Reserves of Oil and Natural Gas, Most Recent Estimates. Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government. U.S. Energy Information Administration (2007). Retrieved on 2008-04-07.
[edit] See also
- Canada and the Kyoto Protocol
- Alberta electricity policy
- Ontario electricity policy
- Science and technology in Canada
[edit] Further reading
- Froschauer, Karl. White Gold: Hydroelectric Power in Canada UBC Press ISBN 9780774807098
- An Energy history of Canada
- Energy Policies of IEA Countries -- Canada (2004) OECD/IEA. ISBN 92-64-108017
- The Great Oil Age
