Welcome back, Stories for the Future listeners. I've had a break over Christmas, but now I have so many great episodes lined up and this vision of seeing the energy transition from as many different perspectives as possible is really coming to life. Welcome to Stories for the Future. This is a podcast that aims to make you feel excited and hopeful about amazing possibilities ahead of us.
My name is Vesl Meiklavnesparge and I'm on a mission to discover how we can all live good lives, have interesting jobs, take care of our planet, and look after everyone who lives here. I believe that everyday people have the power to shape the future. Together we can create a world that we're all excited about. Join me on this journey as we explore these ideas. And remember, the future is in our hands and I'm confident we can make it really good. Today's guest is Professor Brad Hayes.
And this is a man with a view on the energy transition, which I think is really important. Brad isn't just a geologist with decades of experience. He's also someone who's deeply engaged in finding practical, balanced ways to navigate this massive shift in how we power our world. He's been vocal about the need for something we don't hear. Enough energy literacy, because let's face it, we're all really quick to debate the pros and cons of renewables versus fossil fuels.
But how many of us actually understand how energy works and what it takes to keep the lights on, so to speak? Brad is all about cutting through the noise, stepping away from the usual polarized debates and focusing on what actually works. So if you've ever felt overwhelmed by the complexity of the energy transition or just maybe tired of the all or nothing arguments, this episode is for you. So here is my conversation with Professor Brad Hayes. Welcome so much to Stories for the Future.
Brad, I'm so happy to have you here. Hello. It's a pleasure to join you today. And just to get started, where are you based and what is it that you do? I'm based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I am a geoscience consultant. I work in the subsurface.
I have a PhD in geology from the University of Alberta and I've been applying that knowledge for the last, let's say 40 plus years, primarily initially in the oil and gas industry, but I have found in the last 10 to 12 years that there's a much larger call for the skills and the data that we built up over the years in other energy related areas as well. And so doing a lot of work in carbon capture and storage and exploration for lithium and helium and geothermal energy and related areas.
So it's become quite a diverse area. And as a consultant, there's so many interesting things to do that I. I can't seem to get around to what my wife wants me to do, which is to retire. Yeah, I can see that.
But your, your background and the way that you work, I think is so interesting for this, this season of my podcast, because you're kind of, I see you kind of on the middle of that bridge that I'm trying to work on, like between oil and gas or fossil fuels and renewables, and just in the middle of this energy transition in a way.
And I feel that I've seen you a lot lately, and the reason for that is that I've now started taking this course on Coursera where you are the lecturer, and this is provided by the University of Alberta where you're a professor, and it's called 21st century energy transition. How do we make it work? So. So pretty relevant for this season of the podcast, I have to say. And this course is so good. I learned so much, and I'm kind of shocked about everything I didn't know.
And I will definitely link to it in the show notes so that people can take a look. Great. But it makes me think, because we hear so much about cutting emissions and the need for changing our energy sources, but how much do people actually understand about energy itself and the energy transition? And you have written about this earlier and I know that you care about this topic.
So why do you think energy education is so critical at this moment in time and to make smarter decisions, whether you are in oil and gas in renewables, or whether maybe you're just a part of the general discussion, you know. Yeah, well, that's a very interesting question, and I think you kind of hit upon it when you talked a little bit about the mooc, in that there are so very many things to learn about in energy. And indeed, when I was working on.
On putting this course together and in collaborating with other researchers in various energy areas, I was very surprised too, at how much I didn't know before, even though I've been working in energy for my entire career and, and realize that, you know, what a broad, what a broad topic energy is and how important it is to all of us.
I mean, energy security, which people have different definitions for, but it's basically enough energy for everybody that they can afford in order to live a reasonable modern lifestyle. That's the most important thing there is for everyone. We really can't do anything else with our lives if we don't have energy security.
Because if we don't have that, if we don't have some electricity and heat or cooling for our homes and enough energy to grow food and so on, then we're spending all our time trying to find it and we're not doing anything else. So it's been really, I think, important for me to learn the ins and outs of energy and to try to communicate them in this MOOC to help people understand energy security is the most important thing really that we can think about.
And once we've acquired or achieved energy security, then we've got the time, the money, the ability to put efforts into other really important things, social issues, environment, particularly environment around emissions and things like that. We have to do that all from a basis of having energy security. I just have to jump in here and tell you that this course is really, really great. The more I learn, the more I understand.
I didn't know this course has recently been updated and I can't wait to dig into the updated version. Since I'm such a big fan of Coursera, this platform where the course is located, and I use it a lot, I have become an affiliate. So I will share that affiliate link in this to this course in the show notes and highly, highly recommend it. And you think that we often start in the wrong end, often when we debate this? Well, I think that we, I don't think we pay enough attention to energy security.
And what we end up doing almost by default is dictating energy policy by formulating policy around other things. So for example, we are dictating how we use energy, how we produce it, by trying to mandate levels of emissions, for example, greenhouse gas emissions.
And so what we end up with is people saying, well, we won't allow this type of energy in this area, or we'll promote this other type of energy simply by the criterion of, well, how much does it produce in the way of emissions without thinking about is that energy going to be adequate to actually support the people that live in those places and what are the other potential effects of the types of energy that we're talking about producing?
True. So speaking of skills and education, something I care deeply about is how the energy transition is affecting people on the individual level. So all the geoscientists, for instance, today, many of them work mostly with projects tied to oil and gas. Still, how do you see the role of geoscience evolving in the energy transition? I think this is something you work closely with.
It's Something I really do care deeply about, particularly in my role as an educator at the University of Alberta and a lecturer in, in other places.
You know, geoscientists or students looking to, to enter a new career or, or understand what they should study in high school or or university are increasingly not choosing geoscience because in many cases there are negative thoughts around the oil and gas industry or they don't want to be associated with the industry because of different things that people have said about it.
And yet we need those geoscientists because we still are producing oil and gas and we will need to produce oil and gas for decades to come. The other thing that's really becoming apparent that it's difficult for, as we see fewer geoscientists come into the trade, is that we need geoscience for alternative energy supplies as well.
So as I mentioned before, I spent a lot of my consulting work now in supporting geothermal energy or supporting exploration for lithium in deep saline brines that occur in oil and gas basins, or in exploring for helium, which is a critical mineral or critical element in many high tech industries. Carbon capture and storage is another important area.
And if we move outside of sort of traditional oil and gas type geology, our mining geologists are also seeing difficulties in finding enough people coming in. And yet we need to mine so many more critical minerals to support the various technologies for alternative energies that are growing throughout all areas of the world. So it's, we will need, we do need geoscience more than ever.
We're using many of the same skills, particularly the skills we've learned in oil and gas and the immense amount of data that we've gathered to help us do these new things. And yet people are not being encouraged to, to become geoscientists and, and that's a problem for us. Yeah, can, can you see that already in your, like in Canada that you get this gap. Skill. Skills. Gap, yeah. Geoscience and particularly different types of engineering that are associated with resource industries.
And you know, the, the oil and gas industry in Canada and I think worldwide as, as well has created a number of their own problems. You know, it's been a very cyclical industry. There's been booms and busts, several of them over the course of my career. And it's been very discouraging for new graduates.
At certain times they'll go to university, they'll think that, you know, this is a great field to be in, and then they'll get, they'll graduate and find out that there are no jobs because there's a downturn at this time. And so it's become very, it's become difficult even in good times to join in the industry.
And now what we see is that as we see new helium companies, for example, startup in Canada using the data sets and the skills that we've gained in oil and gas, well, there's not enough new hires around to start populating those helium exploration companies or those lithium exploration companies. And so, you know, folks that have been around a long time like me, I can still do some consulting work to support it.
But what those industries need are new and dynamic thinkers that, that can build on what we've learned in the past. And I think you said something which I think was interesting when we talked before. I can tend to think that okay, oil and gas will die out with the generation that knows everything about oil and gas, you know, but that is not actually true. We need people knowing about subsurface geoscience related to oil and gas for quite some time.
And it's not, you can't just like leave it now and don't, don't not educate any more people in that either. Yeah, that's certainly true. And one observation that I've had that's really relevant to that is that a client of mine recently was looking to establish and understand a storage reservoir.
Now they're using it for natural gas storage, but exactly the same kind of reservoir that one could use to store hydrogen in the future or do compressed air energy storage, which is an interesting emerging technology. And you know, they, I was able to bring to the table the things that I had learned 30 and 40 years ago in the oil and gas industry about the details of these specific reservoirs to help them understand how this particular field, you know, gas, gas storage unit would perform.
And we're able to do some modeling and optimize how they use that storage reservoir. And yet most of most of oil and gas work in Canada over the last 10 to 20 years has been in other types of reservoirs, particularly in the so called tight gas reservoirs or shale gas reservoirs where we do quite a bit of different work.
So this, these conventional reservoirs that were the mainstay of the oil and gas, gas industry 20 to 30 years ago are now becoming really important again as people look at alternative applications like storage. And yet there's not too many folks like me left that are still working that remember you know how those things work. Right? Interesting. As I mentioned in the introduction, you're the president of Petrel Robertson Consulting, it's really hard to say.
And you lead a Team of geoscience professionals. So how does that mix of clients look like for you today? Do you see the energy transition kind of before your eyes in the work that you take on? How is that? We do and it's really interesting to interact with people and their, you know, their new ideas that are, that are coming out.
As they say, we are now, you know, being approached or even helped to start up junior companies that are exploring for these energy different energy related commodities like lithium and helium. We've responded to requests for proposals to understand geothermal potential in different areas.
There was a really interesting project that was being contemplated in the city of Toronto a few years ago and they were developing a new area along the waterfront and they wanted to look at the potential to heat that all the buildings in that area. Geothermally a central heating facility, which I think is a pretty common concept in Europe but is not, not been undertaken very much at all in North America. So this was a, this was really interesting to, to look at trying to address their issues.
You know, they needed to find out how deep would we have to drill to get the geothermal energy, how, how much heat would there be, what would, what would we have to do with the reservoirs? And, and ultimately this particular project did not work simply because the geothermal resource just, you just couldn't produce enough heat in that area for any kind of reasonable amount of money to, to satisfy the requirements of the new development.
It's unfortunate, but see we, we used a lot of the skill sets we've got for, from drilling and oil and gas reservoir evaluation to help answer those questions. So, so we're seeing, you know, we're seeing really interesting applications here. And another, another example I've got is there is a, is a mostly depleted gas field in northeastern British Columbia. It's called Clark Lake and it was discovered back in the 1960s and it's produced a huge amount of natural gas.
Well, now we're consulting to clients that want to do two things in that reservoir. They want to use much of the contained hot water for geothermal power generation. And that's a First nations led initiative which is extremely interesting to provide them with technical support. And we've got another, another client that wants to use that same reservoir in a different location for carbon capture and storage.
And in the meantime there's still a conventional gas producer taking the last vestiges of gas out of that reservoir. So it's really important to, to use all of that information that we started collecting 50, 60 years ago to understand, you know, how can we best use the hot water, the reservoir, the gas resources of Clark Lake as efficiently as possible to produce as much energy as we can with the fewest environmental impacts.
Yeah, so I just recently had a sustainability professional from Equinor on the podcast and among other things, we talked about a lot about the dilemma of balancing profit and sustainability in the big energy companies. And maybe that what is missing is innovation in economic models and regulations, not so much in technology. So what are your thoughts on this?
Are like, are the big oil and gas companies, or should we say energy companies, are they slowing down the transition, do you think, or are they just kind of stuck in this constant dilemma between profitability and of course, the need to provide energy, as you said, and the increasing pressure coming from climate change and environmental issues. And what would it take for them to be seen as part of the solution instead of the part of the problem, do you think?
Well, that is really interesting question. I mean, big oil companies, oil and gas companies, I mean, they are corporate entities to begin with. Their primary responsibility is to their shareholders to provide, you know, reasonable returns for the money that's invested. And if they don't do that, the shareholders will go off somewhere else, presumably, and do other things. So there is that, that driver that they need to be profit driven, just like every other corporation in the world.
But as you say, yeah, they're getting pressure to reduce their environmental impacts to produce other types of energy. And indeed, there's been a great deal of work done and I'll speak to the Canadian case because that's what I know the best. You know, companies in Canada are spending tremendous amounts of time and money and hiring sustainability professionals and so on to try to do what they do while minimizing environmental impacts and improving sustainability.
So, you know, there's lots of things that go into that one can be as efficient as possible in producing oil and gas. So a big driver throughout the history of the oil industry in Canada, which has been based largely around heavy oil and bitumen deposits in the north, has been around reducing the amount of energy we need to get that bitumen out and turn it into a saleable product.
And so it's been a big driver to reduce what they called the steam oil ratio, reduce the amount of water that needs to be heated up to make steam to basically melt the bitumen and turn it into oil. And companies have made tremendous strides over the last 20 to 30 years in, in reducing that ratio using, they use solvents, they, they map the reservoirs and model them very effectively. They have quite a number of different technologies they developed. And it's been very interesting.
And of course, a lot of it has been driven by efficiency and cost reduction. It, of course, it's environmentally beneficial at the same time. So that's a, that's a win, win, win all around. But, but at the end of the day, they're still burning a lot of natural gas to produce steam to produce their oil. There have been a number of efforts in the last five to 10 years now to look very seriously at sequestering carbon dioxide associated with burning that gas to create the steam.
And six of the biggest oil companies in Canada that produce heavy oil in northern Alberta have banded together to form a group called the Pathways Alliance. And they're looking at a number of different initiatives. One of them is to capture the carbon dioxide at their facilities, to put it in a pipeline and transport it southward to a place where they can actually sequester it underground. And, and so that's, that's been going on.
They're also looking at other things, as they say, like sharing technologies on new solvents to reduce the steam oil ratio or looking at the potential to start up small nuclear reactors to produce the heat instead of using natural gas to produce the heat. So there are a number of different ways that they are looking to reduce environmental footprints, including emissions. But at the end of the day, again, as you said, it comes back to profitability.
It's easy for them to do these things if it increases their efficiency and lowers their overall costs. If they're doing something that is, is a, a sheer cost like sequestering CO2, because they don't, they don't produce any product or they don't get, you know, they don't have anything they can sell when they sequester CO2, well then it becomes difficult. How do we justify this? How do we pay for this, for this reduction of greenhouse gas emissions using ccs?
And that's something that's still being discussed and negotiated at the provincial and federal government levels. And so what we really do need is cooperation between the oil and gas industry and different levels of government to ensure that things like carbon sequestration, reducing the carbon footprint can be accomplished in a way that doesn't destroy the profits of the oil and gas companies and accomplishes the environment, environmental benefits that we want.
And again, you know, the word, the word profit can't be regarded as evil here, although some, some people think that way. But again, the fact of the matter is, if the companies are spending too much money in doing things like sequestering carbon Dioxide. Then their product, product becomes too expensive, they become unprofitable, they go out of business. And that doesn't serve anybody because the demand for oil globally will continue and people will simply go other places to get their oil.
And a lot of those other places are much less environmentally sensitive in how they produce their hydrocarbons than countries like Canada and Norway that are very sensitive to the environmental effects of their work. I think this is. It's so interesting, but also really difficult because this is something, you know, it's something that we hear a lot in Norway. And I have heard that you have exactly the same kind of argument in Canada that we produce in a lot in a better way.
So. So if we don't do it, then it will be done in a worse way other places. But it's so easy to. If you're sitting on the kind of the activist side, so to speak, it's so easy to see that argument as defending the opportunity to just keep making profits. And it's, as you say, it's so dangerous, I think, to just equal profit to bad. This goes directly into my next topic or question because I often talk about the danger of always thinking in extremes.
Black or white, good or bad, either or, you know, so. So I was really excited when I read this one of your articles. You have so many great articles about finding the middle ground. Because it feels like the energy transition is often framed as all or nothing. It's either fossil fuels or it's renewable. It's not anything in between. It feels sometimes. But is there a smarter middle path we should be walking? How do we bridge those extremes?
And maybe also you could share a little bit about how you see those extremes. Yeah, it is very interesting. I mean, there are very extreme viewpoints out there. And of course, today, when it's so easy to. For anyone to communicate using social media and other platforms, we hear a huge variety of opinions and some of them are very polarized opinions. This really, really impacted me. Recently I attended a conference near Calgary here in Banff, and it was called the Energy Simulation School.
And it brought together researchers from a variety of universities, some of them in Canada, some in the Netherlands and Scotland and so on. And all of these people were engineering people that are looking to understand how to produce oil and gas and related products in the most sustainable, least impactful ways. And we saw presentations from some of the researchers.
They brought a lot of their graduate students along, which is really interesting because these are people, most of them quite a bit younger. They've got a degree, probably an engineering degree. And they're looking to understand what they can do in terms of their research and in their careers to actually improve sustainability and improve the way we, we get our energy.
So we actually talked to them, I and a couple of other lecturers talked to them about the energy transition and about, you know, what we need to look for in the world today. There was an excellent documentary run by one of my colleagues at the University of Calgary who talked about all of the competing concerns among energy security, emissions control, environmental issues and things like that. And it showed a great number of perspectives.
And he went around the world talking to people that had seen their homes washed away in a flood or who were suffering because they couldn't get enough energy and all these different perspectives. And I thought that was a really, really interesting and powerful documentary.
Yet when he promoted it or talked about his experiences at the school, and I kind of backed him up on LinkedIn, he got attacked by people on, on the, if you want to call the opposite extreme, people that say there's fossil fuels are great CO2 as plant food, we don't really need to worry about them. And they dismissed all of the other concerns about climate change and environment and things like that.
And it was such an extreme viewpoint and so extremely opposite to, I guess you want to say, the other extreme, which is that climate is the, is the biggest problem. It's the only problem everything we do has to address. Reducing emissions and, and helping to solve the problem of climate change. You know, neither one of these extremes is appealing to people that aren't at that extreme.
I mean, I think the vast majority of people in the world live in the middle where they are concerned about environmental issues. They also understand that they need energy security and that it's a balancing act to try to achieve both security and environmental impact reduction at the same time. And it's a long, it's a long process. It's a complex process and the process is very different from place to place to place. You know, it's, it's.
You can sit in, in Norway or in Quebec or in British Columbia and say, hey, I get all my electricity from Hydro and it's pretty green. And what do you guys do in burning coal or gas? And, and here I sit in Alberta on this kind of dusty, icy, flat plain with some beautiful mountains, but only in the extreme western part of the province. We don't have hydroelectricity, we don't have enough water, we don't have enough relief. It's not a solution for us.
We're too far north to have a lot of solar power and we have some wind power in some places that we actually have built a fair bit of capacity for. But at the end of the day, you cannot survive here without natural gas powered electrical generation. We shut down coal generation to reduce emissions, but we rely on natural gas and the sun sometimes when it's shining, although not at this time of year, and the wind when it's blowing, which is highly variable.
So again, the issues, the solutions are in the middle. They're very complex and yet we've got people talking on the extremes that are essentially being very destructive. They won't listen to the other side. They won't even listen to people in the middle. It's just their mission, like all oil or no oil. And neither one is right, neither one works.
And the big problem I see with that is that when one or the other of those groups gets into a position of influence and tries to put forward policy or initiatives to support their extreme views, then everyone suffers in the long run. And we reach very inefficient solutions. And in fact, we reach places that aren't solutions at all. And we have to start backtracking to cover up the damage we've created from an extreme viewpoint.
And I've got Canadian examples of that that are, that are beginning to happen now. You know, we've got. The city of Vancouver has recently reaffirmed a policy that they will not allow natural gas to be built into any new residential units. The British Columbia Utilities Commission has also disallowed the expansion of natural gas pipelines into the central British Columbia, which is a very rapidly growing area. Lots of people move there and my son lives there, so I'm very interested in it.
But you know, they. Greenhouse gas emissions are bad, so we're not going to allow natural gas. But there's no answer. We don't. I mean, British Columbia doesn't produce enough hydroelectricity anymore to satisfy demand. And yet here these, these governing bodies are saying, well, we'll just use electricity to replace natural gas. And you have to ask, where's the electricity going to come from? And they don't have an answer. They simply do not have an answer. And that's a big problem.
Interesting. I think that this middle ground is not talked enough about. And I think, just like what you're saying now, just my experience also with this podcast this season, because when you try to take that middle ground, you risk being attacked, as you saw on your LinkedIn on the LinkedIn post, you can be attacked from both sides. So for Every episode I have published for this season, I have been thinking, oh, my bubble on that side can attack me for this and this and this, and so can those.
So it's really, really hard actually to try to walk in the middle of the road. But I don't think we talk enough about it. And I think you're so right. And it's a problem not only in. Canada, I think, and I think we don't. Again, what people at the extremes in particular don't seem to appreciate is that good solutions take a lot of time. I mean, we, by imposing artificial deadlines for net zero emissions or the adoption of electric vehicles or whatever other deadline that we're imposing.
When we impose those deadlines, I'm going to say arbitrarily, I mean, some people will tell me, yes, there's a good reason that we've chosen this date, but at the end of the day, they've chosen a date based on what they want the results to be. What they have not done is any kind of analysis to understand, well, can we achieve those goals by that time?
When we look at, you know, what infrastructure do we have to build if we want to have all electric vehicles by a certain date, can we mine enough lithium, graphite, other critical minerals to produce the batteries? And even if you say, well, we'll just use a different battery technology, well, no, that takes a lot of time, too.
And so we need to have an understanding that anything that we do in terms of improving our energy efficiency, improving our energy delivery, reducing our environmental impacts associated with energy, it takes time. You have to build new things, you have to source new materials, and you can't, you can't do that overnight. And just because you have a good technology like today's wind turbines, very, very efficient machinery, it doesn't mean that they're all just going to pop up magically.
They have to be planned and built. You know, in our mooc, we've got a very interesting lesson from an engineer at one of our local utility companies, and he talks about, here's how we built a new wind farm. And it starts off with several years of monitoring and measurement in a, in a target area to decide where's the best place to put these things. Is there enough wind resource here to actually build a facility that will produce enough energy to be worthwhile and to be profitable?
And, you know, so it takes years and years. I show a slide in one of my presentations that I took from Ember, I think an energy analyst in Europe, that shows the amount of time that it Takes to get a new wind or solar facility approved in Europe. And it's amazing. I mean, the target is we should have approval in 24 months. And in reality, the approval times can range up to 10 years. 10 years just to get regulatory approval to build a new wind farm, for example.
Now, let's say that, you know, that's the extreme, but let's say it takes five years. Well, then it, you know, do your studies, five years for approvals. And then you've got to source materials and build these things, get them online, build the enter ties to tie them into the electrical grid. Well, that's a long time. Yeah. And we have to be realistic. We have to be realistic to people on both extremes. Oil and gas will not last forever.
And oil and gas does produce environmental impacts that aren't good on the other side. Yes, it might be great to source much of our energy from alternative energy sources, but all of them have their own challenges, negative aspects, and it takes time to build them. One of the really interesting things I see is the discussion around hydrogen.
Now I've seen a lot of different viewpoints about whether hydrogen is a, an essential energy vector for the future or whether it's something that just isn't going to be effective at all. And I, I think the jury's still out. I think that there are certainly applications for hydrogen. It's very clear that it's extremely expensive to produce by electrolysis and that we don't have the electrical capacity to, to produce a lot of it, at least not right now.
I've worked with people that are looking to drill for hydrogen. They, they think that there are, there are deposits or pools of naturally occurring hydrogen underground. We just have to figure out the right place to drill for it. Now, as an oil and gas person, quite frankly, I think that that's highly, highly unlikely. But hey, I have been wrong before and I'm actually supporting at least one organization that is undertaking that kind of exploration.
Hmm. I'm also working with a potential client and I've got a meeting with him shortly who is looking to produce hydrogen by injecting air into depleted oil reservoirs, allowing chemical reactions to happen underground, and then producing hydrogen out of those wells while leaving the other byproducts, particularly carbon dioxide, underground in those reservoirs. Wow. Interesting.
That is a very interesting and potentially very cost effective method to produce hydrogen, which is great and I'm all for it, and that's why we're working with them. But will they be able to do it economically? Well, their models say so, but the Proof is when you do it right, and then even if they do produce a lot of hydrogen, they're going to have to produce it at locations where those depleted oil and gas fields are. Well, how are they going to get it to market?
You know, because we can't use regular gas pipelines to transport hydrogen. It, it degrades them. So, so, you know, can we produce that hydrogen? Can we afford to get it to market? And when we do get it to market, what are we going to use it for? So, again, super interesting potential, great impact on the energy picture. But we're in the early stages of understanding whether it's a solution or whether it's a dead end. It takes time to see that. Yeah, very interesting.
I just got so curious now because talking about, and I haven't gotten to that chapter in the MOOC yet, but what about nuclear power? What are your thoughts about that? It's such a kind of heated debate in so many networks that I'm a part of. So I'm just curious. Well, yeah, we've got an interesting lesson in the MOOC on nuclear energy and particularly nuclear fission with using primarily uranium and other similar elements like that. I mean, the technology is well known.
It grew rapidly in the 70s, and it was going to be at one point the. The whole of the electricity of the future. We had some issues with, particularly with accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile island and most recently at Fukushima in Japan, that, that got people nervous about nuclear energy, about how much we should be using it. And in fact, we have about the same number of nuclear reactors today that are producing electricity as we did back in the year 2000.
But it is accelerating rapidly now, particularly in Asia. We see that in some places they're able to build new nuclear reactors in only five, six, seven years. That, and that is something that's critically important in controlling the costs. Many people think that nuclear is just simply too expensive because it takes so long to permit and to build. And that's what I always heard. Well, and which suggests that a great deal of the problem there is not the nuclear energy, it's the timelines.
And many of those timelines revolve around regulatory issues. It takes so very long to go through the regulatory approvals.
And then even when construction is underway, the regulatory burden, trying to do things in a certain fashion, drag out the construction timelines to 10 or 15 or even 20 years, which does make it extremely expensive because you have to borrow a lot of money to build those facilities and you're not getting any return on your money until you turn on the switch and start selling electricity. And so you have huge costs up front.
Yeah. But if you can reduce that regulatory burden, if you can make it more efficient to build those reactors, and this is the thinking around some of the ideas around small modular reactors, well, then you can get to revenue generation and power much more quickly. And once you do get there, these facilities will last for decades and decades, far longer than just about any other method of electrical generation, except perhaps hydroelectricity. And so they do pay out over time.
I mean, the province of Ontario, the country of France, other places like that are producing electricity extremely efficiently from a fleet of nuclear reactors that were built some time ago but are still working quite nicely. Yeah, they've got issues, just like everything else does. But I think. I think you know that our solutions are in the middle, as we've been talking about, and our solutions are diverse. It's foolish to say nuclear has no place. It has a place.
It depends on the regulatory regime, it depends on the circumstances, it depends on how easily you can get fuel. Depends on many things. But nuclear is probably the best solution for producing electricity in many, many different places. But not all. There's other solutions work better in other places. True. So we need to wrap up, I think. But there's one final thing I would love for you to talk about, and that is team effort.
I think we can all agree that we need everyone on board, at least as many as possible, to make the energy transition happen. And we need this big team effort, which is something you have talked about and written about. What does that actually look like in practice? And how do we get everyone, like oil and gas policymakers, climate advocates, playing on the same side. I think it involves all the things that we've talked about today.
Rejecting extreme positions, improving energy literacy so that everybody understands how important energy is and how we need to focus our efforts on energy security so that we've got the energy, if you will, at the time, the ability to address other important issues. Again, we can't address world hunger or we can't address sufficient water resources or education or all these other highly desirable sustainable development goals if we don't have energy underpinning them.
So we need energy literacy. We need people to understand that energy security is paramount. We need people to understand that there are very many diverse solutions to achieving energy security. And also that environmental impacts of all kinds, and not just emissions, but other environmental impacts, water resources, land issues. We've been dealing with this in the oil and gas industry forever. How much land are we using, what are we doing to water resources? What are the emissions?
I mean, these are all important concerns. I think people need to understand that we're talking about very, very big, very complex problems or issues and that it needs a lot of time and a lot of effort from very, you know, many different skills and people to, to get to where we need to get to, which is energy security. With minimum negative impacts, it can be a real vehicle to uplift, you know, different social groups and that.
In Canada, I think, you know, we've had a long and very checkered history of dealing with our, with Indigenous peoples, with first nations and Metis and so on. And there are still problems, but what we are seeing now is a much greater spirit of cooperation with some of those first nations and being involved in resources. So we have a First Nation in northeastern British Columbia that is sponsoring liquefied natural gas project.
They want to build it on their lands, they want the revenues from the exports, they want to be involved as part of the energy solution. And at the same time they are stewards of the lands that they've occupied for thousands of years and they're highly, highly motivated to minimize any environmental impacts on those lands while they go ahead and participate in resource development. Not all first nations are interested in resource development and that's fine.
I mean, they are independent people and they have to chart their own courses. But we rely on many of them being parts of the team to help us get to the solution. Yeah, yes. And as you said there also the literacy, energy literacy. I think that is so important for everyone to know a little bit about this. And I'm not quite sure how to get there, to be honest. I don't know if you have any ideas, like schools, of course, and education.
But like, you know, it's, it, it's like everything else we've been talking about. I think we're getting there. I think it takes time because again, those of us who have been fortunate enough to live in energy rich countries like Canada, like Norway, we're used to stepping into the room, flipping the switch, or we're used to stepping into our vehicle and it goes. And we don't think about energy security. We don't think about it until we lose it.
And I think that, you know, one thing that is becoming better known because of media coverage and so many different places where you can read about things or hear about things is that we understand, yeah, there are lots of people in this world that don't have energy security and it's people becoming a bit more conscious I think of that, but it's a slow process. It's not going to be solved overnight.
And again, in my mind, setting targets to achieve certain goals are, you know, it's necessary in a lot of cases and it's great guidance. But if we're going to set targets for achieving reduction of emissions, achieving energy security, achieving knowledge about energy, we have to set those goals with the realities of how we're going to get there in mind. We can't just be plucking numbers out of the air and saying we're going to have energy literacy by 2040 or something like that.
You know, we can set some more specific to say, well, by doing this and by doing this and by doing this we should be able to help educate this group of people in energy over the next short period of time. For example, one thing I'd like to just throw in here too, that is becoming again really a hot topic of discussion in Canada is that it's, we need to be in the middle to achieve our solutions.
We need to hear from all people and we, we need to hear from even the extreme viewpoints that you or I wouldn't disagree with. But we need to understand where those people are coming from and perhaps look to see whether they've, they're saying something that has some value even if we don't agree with their overall perspective.
And a big problem that we're starting to see here in Canada and I suspect elsewhere as well, is that governments and other, I guess self appointed judges are trying to control what people say or what what's, we've got a federal government piece of legislation pending here where it's worded in different ways, but basically what it says is if you're going to say something about how you're reducing emissions, for example, then anybody can speak up and say they don't believe that and can take you to
court. And so the upshot or the result of that pending legislation now is that many companies and organizations are saying, well, we're just not going to share information about our greenhouse gas emissions, for example, on websites because we know that people are on an extreme that don't agree with us, are simply going to take us to court and we've really got better things to do with our time and our money than go to court fighting against frivolous charges from extreme groups.
So and of course when one, what's going to be very interesting about this particular piece of legislation in Canada is that it's envisioned that, well, it's going to stop greenwashing so called and people saying things that they're not really doing about emissions.
But what I don't think some of the regulators see coming is that other people who are more in the middle and a bit, I think bit more knowledgeable about energy issues overall are looking at some of the things said by extremists on the other side of things, people who, you know, let's, let's say are just stop oil type friends and things like that will say some of the most ridiculous things to defend their point of view.
Well, under this legislation people are going to start taking them to court too. And you know, do we want to do that? Is that a great thing to do? No, it's a total waste of time. But at the same time, maybe the only way to step back from this kind of extreme thought control if you want, is to demonstrate that it really isn't productive because it just leads to a whole bunch more accusations. And the only people that love it are the lawyers, as they say. Yes, yeah, they would.
Yeah, it's the backside of being too caught up on, on catching the greenwashers. I have seen the same so many times and, and people not daring to, to share anything at all is, is the consequence. So. And that's not good at all. I have mentioned so many times during this conversation that you are writing so, and I enjoyed so much of your writing. So where can people find your work, your writing, your. Yeah, what you do, the, the mooc, as you mentioned, I think you're going to reference that.
That's certainly kind of the foundation of most of my energy work. And if you want to watch me talk, that's a great place to go. There's other people talking though too, so you can skip over me and look at the other people. In terms of writing, I do a lot of communication on LinkedIn, the main social media platform that I'm on. I write for a. An organization called Big Media, Capital B, Capital I, Capital G. I'm sure you can Google them and I'll put the. Link in the show notes as well.
Yes, and that. And those articles often get referenced on LinkedIn, so those are the primary places. I do a lot of speaking to various university groups, in particular to students and my primary vehicle there is is the Canadian Society for Evolving Energy or csee.
And again they've got an online site that you can have a look at and we've been involved in outreach for over 10 years now looking to communicate to students about energy industries and more broadly in the last few years these issues around energy transition. So thanks for the opportunity to talk about that and I'm really happy to share thoughts with people and I certainly look forward to constructive feedback. That's great to hear.
So if people want to reach out to you, they can contact you on LinkedIn. That's a good place, right? Absolutely. Yeah. That's good. Thank you so much for your time and best of luck with all your really important work and I will continue to enjoy your mooc. Thank you. Thank you for everything that I'm learning through that. That's amazing. Well, thank you.
I really appreciate the opportunity to join you today and I will try to tune into future episodes because I always want to get broader perspectives, lives outside my own country. That's good to hear. Thank you. Perfect. So this was an example of an episode where I didn't feel I could edit out anything. Everything was so interesting. So it's a bit longer than usual, but I really hope you enjoyed it. What I take away is the importance of energy literacy.
And there you have a perfect opportunity to become a bit wiser by taking the course on Coursera that I will link to. And also the importance of balanced, practical solutions to secure energy while minimizing environmental impact. And maybe more often than we tend to choose the middle road and avoid those extremes that we often are so fond of. All links and contact details you can find in the show notes and I really hope you will check them out.
Also, have a look at my evolving website@storiesforthefuture.com to see other things that I'm working on at the moment. Thank you so much for tuning in. Take care and I will be back soon.