Transcript
Transcript: Canada's Unsung Energy Heroes: Geothermal
[00:00:00 A montage of images of industry and energy production across the country.
Text on screen: Canada's Unsung Energy Heroes: Geothermal.]
[00:00:06 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.
Text on screen: Emily Smejkal, Research Fellow, Ultradeep Geothermal Cascade Institute.]
Emily Smejkal: My name is Emily Smejkal. I am a professional geologist, and I work as a research fellow at the Cascade Institute.
[00:00:14 Text on screen: What is geothermal energy?]
Emily Smejkal: So, geothermal energy is the naturally occurring heat that is generated by the Earth's core and the decay of elements in the Earth's crust. It literally means "Earth heat". Geo means earth; thermal means heat. Geothermal energy.
[00:00:31 Text on screen: How can it be accessed?]
[00:00:38 Image of an auger drilling into the ground.]
Emily Smejkal: Geothermal energy can be harvested by drilling a well into the ground and circulating water through that well. That water is then brought up to the surface where it is either used directly to heat buildings, or it can spin a turbine and generate electricity.
[00:00:51 Text on screen: What should Canadians understand about geothermal energy and its potential role in our clean energy system?]
[00:01:03 Image of a study paper, as described, overlaid by a map of Canada depicting potential in-place geothermal energy.]
Emily Smejkal: Canada has a massive geothermal potential. A 2012 study by the Geological Survey of Canada indicated that we have over a million times the energy required for our current electricity generation sitting right below our feet.
[00:01:11 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.
Emily Smejkal: The potential in Canada fits into two buckets. We have shallow geothermal energy. This is the type of geothermal energy that is harvested very near the surface with wells that are typically only drilled down to a couple hundred metres.
[00:01:28 Aerial view of Parliament Hill while under current construction.]
Emily Smejkal: Centre Block of Parliament, the new renovations happening there for the Welcome Centre, is installing one of these systems that will heat and cool the building for them.
[00:01:36 Text on screen: What geologic features in Canada are favourable to geothermal energy?]
[00:01:41 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: Shallow geothermal energy can be installed essentially anywhere in Canada that we don't have permafrost, so the entire country is available for use with shallow geothermal for heating and cooling.
Deep geothermal energy is a little bit more complicated. Canada is a massive country. We have a ton of different geologies across that massive country, and each of those is going to require a different technology for us to harvest geothermal energy out of it.
[00:02:07 Aerial view of Canada's west coastal region; Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: So, starting on the West Coast, we have volcanoes, and we have hot springs, so we can actually access this using something called conventional geothermal. And this is what Iceland – the geysers – and Italy have used for a very long time to generate electricity. How this works is geologists look for existing underground reservoirs of hot, salty water, and then they use the heat energy from that hot, salty water to generate electricity.
[On] Canada's West Coast, these technologies exist. We could be using this energy now, and it has a massive potential to add secure baseload power to a grid that is in need of additional sources.
Moving east from British Columbia and away from the volcanoes, we move into the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.
[00:03:02 Aerial view of Canada's Sedimentary Basin region.]
Emily Smejkal: This basin runs through the Northwest Territories, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and it is home to most of Canada's oil and gas.
[00:03:11 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: Besides oil and gas, there's also a lot of hot water in the sedimentary basin. We could use that hot water to generate heat and electricity.
Now, because we are further from the volcanoes, that heat energy is actually located deeper in the earth, so we are going to have to drill deeper wells into the sedimentary basin in order to get the energy we need to generate electricity. That means that it's probably going to cost more in Western Canada, in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, to develop geothermal energy for electricity. But we're seeing technology innovations internationally that are happening right now with technologies adapted from oil and gas that are driving down the cost of drilling and making this type of geothermal and these types of systems more accessible.
[00:03:59 View of Canada's Canadian Shield region.]
Emily Smejkal: Central and Northern Canada are primarily dominated by the Canadian Shield. These are some of the oldest rocks in the world, and they don't have existing hot water under the surface.
[00:04:11 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: That means if we want to harvest geothermal energy from them, we're going to have to look to new technologies that can artificially create pathways for that water through that hot, dry rock. These technologies are currently being demonstrated in Utah, and in Germany. And while they're in the very early stages, with continued innovation, they could be applied in the Canadian Shield for us to harvest the Earth's energy for heat and power.
Finally, on the East Coast, Canada's Atlantic provinces sit in a sedimentary basin very similar to Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. Here we have existing sources of hot water in the subsurface, but we would have to drill deep to get the heat we would need to make electricity.
[00:04:57 Aerial view of Nova Scotia's Springhill Mine community.]
Emily Smejkal: But Nova Scotia's Springhill Mine is actually already using the water that exists in the subsurface to heat their community.
[00:05:05 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: So they're already accessing geothermal energy for heating in their community from a flooded mine.
[00:05:11 Text on screen: What are the conditions we need for geothermal energy to scale in Canada?]
[00:05:15 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: For geothermal energy to scale in Canada it's going to take a multi-pronged approach. So, if we look at the West Coast, we know that there's conventional technologies that can unlock that resource right now. But geothermal has a very different risk profile than a lot of other renewable energy sources.
[00:05:38 Image of a solar farm.]
Emily Smejkal: If you're going to build a solar farm, you know how much sun you have, you know how long the sun shines each day, you know how much a solar panel costs, you know how much your surface land costs.
[00:05:46 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: It's very easy to do the math and figure out how much your upfront capital and your resource investment is going to be for that type of renewable. Geothermal actually has a risk profile very similar to that of other subsurface commodities like oil and gas, or brine-hosted lithium, or some critical minerals. In geothermal, our risk is very front-end loaded. We have to actually physically drill the well to unlock and to discover if there's enough energy down there to make heat and electricity. This tends to dissuade private investors.
So, for geothermal, the drilling is usually the most expensive portion of the entire operation. Not only do you have your highest risk at the front, you also have your most expensive operation capital at the front. So, if we're looking at what could activate and scale up geothermal where we have our best resource on Canada's West Coast, we've seen some international examples that have worked really well.
One of those examples is from the Netherlands, where they use drilling insurance. Developers pay 7% of their drilling costs, and if their well fails and they don't find the energy they were expecting, they get 80% of their costs covered by insurance. In Iceland, they use something called forgivable loans, where if the well fails, the government will cover the loan up to 50% for the drilling costs. We've seen things like this work really well internationally for helping companies get over that initial high-risk, high-capital front, and then that in turn attracts private capital to the projects that they can then leverage to complete them.
So, the second piece of the puzzle, if we look at the rest of Canada where we have to go deeper and use new technologies to unlock geothermal energy, we're going to need some tech innovation and some R&D.
[00:07:48 FORGE's homepage, showing maps of Utah with the well sites marked, and aerial images of the wells.]
Emily Smejkal: One of the most successful international examples of this would be the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, or FORGE.
It's a pair of wells, based in Utah, funded by the Department of Energy. And these two wells are single-handedly credited with unlocking one of the next generation of geothermal technologies that's currently being commercially developed right next door.
[00:08:10 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: This is the type of geothermal technology that Canada could use deep in our Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, and potentially even in our Canadian Shield as costs come down. So, if Canada wants to truly scale up geothermal countrywide, we will need public support in research and development and potentially an open and public test site to fund and allow for innovation in this space across the country.
[00:08:35 Text on screen: What regulatory measures can unlock Canada's geothermal future?]
[00:08:40 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: Regulations are the very first building block to getting any kind of infrastructure project developed anywhere. Only 3 provinces— Alberta, BC, and Nova Scotia— have geothermal regulations in place. So these 3 provinces have a path for geothermal development all the way through from drilling your initial well and getting your subsurface rights, through to power plant or heat development.
The rest of the country is in various stages of fragmented development for regulations. The Yukon Territory and Saskatchewan are in the early stages of developing their geothermal regulations, and Saskatchewan has permitted a geothermal project, although it has been through their oil and gas regulatory system, they do have a pathway that seems to be working. The rest of the country has policies around supporting geothermal energy or is still in the education phase of the regulatory journey. One of the key things, though, as Canada tries to develop these regulations, we don't want to create more red tape. We want these regulations between provinces and territories to be harmonized, consistent, so that as we're looking at that scale-up across the country, developers can move from one province to the next and know the timeline and expectations required by the Canadian regulatory system.
[00:10:01 Text on screen: How can Canadian expertise in oil and gas drilling translate into geothermal leadership?]
[00:10:06 A study titled "The Future of Geothermal Energy", as described.]
Emily Smejkal: The International Energy Agency actually estimates that 80% of the skills, expertise, technology, and supply chain needed for geothermal energy already exists in oil and gas.
[00:10:18 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: Canada is a global leader in subsurface technology development in oil and gas. That knowledge can be easily adapted and ported to supporting a geothermal industry as well. In fact, Canadian expertise is actually already leading a lot of geothermal projects globally. There is an oil sands lab that has developed a high-temperature tool that's actually been deployed in the geysers. Our oil-sense technology typically operates around 220°C, well within the range of what most geothermal technologies are looking for today.
So, we're seeing multiple crossovers between geothermal energy and oil and gas, and most of the drilling breakthroughs and technology breakthroughs that we're seeing happening right now in Germany and in the United States are driven by the adaptation of oil and gas technology to the geothermal industry.
[00:11:16 Text on screen: How can geothermal energy impact energy vulnerable communities in Canada?]
[00:11:21 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: That's a great question. I think geothermal energy has an incredible role to play in Canada's energy vulnerable communities. There are 280,000 people in our country who live in communities that rely solely on diesel for heat and power. This typically has to be brought in seasonally, and it makes these communities incredibly vulnerable to any supply chain disruptions, severe weather events, it makes them fully dependent on this trucked-in imported energy source. There's also over 800,000 other Canadians who live in energy poverty. That means that you spend more than 10% of your household income on your energy bills.
So, together we have over a million Canadians who are in the position where they could use reliable, secure, and affordable energy. Geothermal has the advantage that it can be placed exactly where it's needed. So the community itself could have a geothermal energy plant for heat and power placed immediately in it. This minimizes the need for transporting fuels and it minimizes the need for transmission for electricity.
[00:12:36 Image from the Cascade Institute of data displays superimposed over power line towers above a lit city.]
Emily Smejkal: Modelling that we've done at the Cascade Institute looked at an enhanced geothermal system hypothetical buildout in Western Canada.
[00:12:44 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: We modelled that a buildout of enhanced geothermal energy in Western Canada not only would raise the GDP of those provinces, but it would actually decrease consumer electricity costs. So, geothermal has the opportunity not just to provide heat and power exactly where it's needed, but also to potentially lower utility bills for energy across the country, not just those who are sitting in vulnerable communities.
[00:13:14 Text on screen: How can Canada turn its underground potential into sustainable, secure energy?]
[00:13:19 Emily Smejkal appears full screen.]
Emily Smejkal: Geothermal energy is a sleeping giant. It's sitting right below our feet, and it is just waiting for us to wake it up. There is a multi-pronged approach that Canada could take, ideally in tandem, to activate our geothermal energy resources and let them contribute to us being a secure, sovereign, and prosperous energy superpower.
The first of which would be to build a roadmap for geothermal energy for our country. This would not only bring visibility to this invisible underground resource, but it would allow the country to prioritize the lowest-hanging fruit, the best projects, and investigate which technologies are going to be most important for Canada's geologies and where our strengths lie, what we could adapt easily from our expertise in oil and gas, and how we could move that to be a global leader in innovation in geothermal technologies.
This roadmap would probably look similar to the Small Modular Reactor roadmap that the federal government put out a few years ago that has launched that industry in Canada. Geothermal energy could use the same sort of visibility, attention, and planning put into it to developing this resource. In tandem with that, Canada's West Coast has geothermal power available to it right now with technologies that are already available.
I've talked about the risk profile for geothermal and how it's complicated and it needs public support in order to launch. If we look at the examples from Iceland and Netherlands, they've leveraged public funds, backstopped by government, to allow developers to raise private capital and launch their geothermal industries.
Finally, if Canada wants to build off of our already leading R&D in oil and gas, we could build a Canadian-based test centre, similar to FORGE, that would allow for our technology developers to test in real-world field Canadian conditions. If we were able to do all these three things in tandem going forward, we would have a map for how we could develop this resource and what potentially it could add to the Canadian energy ecosystem. We would have a project that would de-risk this technology for Canada and prove that it works here. And we would have innovation driving the industry forward and allowing us to export our expertise globally.
So, geothermal energy, while it's unknown and it's not been harvested in Canada yet, offers an immense potential for our country to add to our energy superpower. While Canada's geothermal industry is still in the early stages of development, we have the expertise that gives us an advantage to build it. With the right regulatory and economic support from both the federal and provincial governments, Canada could turn this overlooked sleeping giant into a source of secure and sustainable energy.
[00:16:20 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[00:16:25 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
