BC: Canada's clean energy giant
British Columbia is becoming world renowned as Canada’s clean energy powerhouse. Energy is now by far our largest single source of provincial revenue and our fastest growing industrial sector. We have massive deposits of clean, natural gas and tremendous potential in clean, renewable energy of all kinds – wind, thermal, run-of-river hydro, solar, tidal and bioenergy. A critical key to our economic future is conservation and investment in clean energy and new energy technologies that will help the world solve its problems. We can lead the way.
Harnessing this potential is our opportunity. We must grasp that chance now, for the benefit of the generations that follow. As the world searches for low-carbon energy alternatives to dirty coal power or nuclear power, we can show them how it’s done. Just as we built this province by capitalizing on our enormous potential in large-scale hydro power, so too can we create new opportunities for sustainable jobs in every region by opening up our new opportunities in energy. That’s what our Clean Energy Plan is all about. www.energyplan.gov.bc.ca
Since 2001, revenue from oil and gas has increased by nearly 60 per cent. It’s now more than three-times than the average in the 1990’s. The industry has invested almost $30 billion in that time, creating 34,000 direct and indirect jobs. Capital investment is up by 61 per cent, at over $5 billion. Thanks to government policy and some enormous new discoveries, oil and gas land rights sales soared to $2.66 billion last year – double the previous record high set only a year earlier.
Confidence is the key to that investment. And key to that confidence has been responsible taxes, new royalty regimes to encourage summer drilling and “tight gas” exploration, new investments in resource roads, streamlined approval processes, and a government that welcomes and encourages that investment.
A BC Liberal Government will continue to build upon that foundation and the estimated 52 trillion cubic feet of conventional gas and 650 trillion cubic feet of unconventional gas that we have in BC. If all of that gas were recoverable, it would be enough to heat 650 million homes for 15 years. That would reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from coal and other forms of power by hundreds of millions of tonnes.
We will work with Northern communities, including First Nations, to open up BC’s energy potential in the Horn River, Montney, Bowser and Nechako Basins. We will give those residents the opportunity to open up a new Northern energy corridor that could carry liquefied natural gas from the Peace River to Asia, via the Port of Kitimat.
Pending a thorough environmental assessment, we will decide whether to build a new energy corridor from across the North that could foster billions in investment and create thousands of construction jobs, new wealth for Northern communities including a new supply and distribution centre in the Northwest and new Port development for Kitimat that would complement the new container facility at Prince Rupert.
