By Josh Hall

FINDING HARMONY

Experts say oil and gas shouldn’t be threatened by renewables

Oct 27, 2019 | 11:14 AM

There is optimism among those in Alberta’s renewable energy sector despite an unstable political landscape and this province’s attachment to oil and gas.

At the Renewable Energy Fair at Red Deer College on Saturday, industry experts were on hand to share how companies can take advantage of the industry’s evolving technology; from electric vehicles to hydrogen-fueled trucks.

Calgary-based Summit Nanotech Corp. is currently working to extract lithium from the Leduc formation, where its CEO Amanda Hall says there are 3.6 million tonnes of the metal, one of the largest deposits in Canada. Though lithium is not itself a renewable resource, it is used in the batteries which store energy for things like electric vehicles and solar panels.

Instead of the ore solely being sent to Chinese battery manufacturers, Hall says Alberta actually has everything needed to begin manufacturing those products here at home, but there’s a snag.

“The government of Alberta’s regulatory system has to catch up to that mentality. We need to have regulations in place for minerals that aren’t so restrictive,” Hall says, describing the current political climate as scary.

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“Federally, we’re getting tons of support. We have a provincial government now that wants to cut costs and balance the budget, which is great, but that means cutbacks. You need to infuse capital into a sector to get it to grow, the same way we did with the oil and gas industry when it first started out.”

Hall admits, however, that catalysing a new sector should not come at the expense of balancing the province’s financial books, or funding things like health care.

Any company like hers should eventually be able to stand on its own two feet financially, she says. Summit received a federal grant for $920,000 in 2018, as well as a smaller amount from the province’s Alberta Innovates program, which has since been cut by the United Conservatives.

In Red Deer, CBI Solar faced adversity this summer after the province’s removal of the Renewable Electricity Program (REP). The company was forced to scrap around 10 work contracts and lay off employees after interest declined with the lack of a rebate.

Jenna Dell, CBI’s system designer, says the company has bounced back somewhat. Despite uncertainty due to the changing political climate, she believes the renewable energy sector can thrive at the same time as oil and gas.

“It’s not just solar that will be the fix for everything, it’s more about diversifying, so keeping oil and gas, but adding solar and wind, and combined heat and power to add to everything we already have,” Dell says. “Maybe for some people, oil and gas is holding them back, but there have been CEOs of oil and gas companies that are on board, and have said climate change is a real issue that we need to deal with.”

Summit’s Hall adds that Albertan companies and Albertans themselves must quit resisting change.

“If you took every oil and gas worker in the province and gave them a job in clean tech, they would be happy because they could support their families, learn something new, teach their kids, and everything would be fine, but,” she admits, “that’s not going to happen overnight.”

Rene Michalak with ReThink Red Deer, the organization which hosts the annual fair, says everyone has a part to play.

“We’re trying to start from a position of appreciation and gratitude for what got us to this level of affluence in our society and this point in the timeline, honouring and respecting what oil and gas has and continues to provide for us,” he says. “But we also have to appreciate that it can’t just be an all eggs in one basket scenario anymore. We’re not trying to say no more oil and gas or only renewables, but that it’s a mix we’re trying to find the balance of.”