Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
Watch videos at https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
Power Struggle
How clean is your energy? // Jason Switzer
Can you work in oil and gas and still be an environmentalist? Jason Switzer says yes. In this episode, he joins host Stewart Muir to talk certified natural gas, ESG, Indigenous rights, and clean tech in Canada’s energy transition.
Like what you heard?
Give it a like 👍
Drop a comment 💬
Subscribe 🔔 for more real talk on modern energy.
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
Linkedin
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
🎧 For audio versions of our podcast visit powerstruggle.ca and listen on the go in your favourite podcast app!
Video available on Power Struggle’s YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
So you work with big oil and gas, and some people might say, hey, Jason, you're working with the bad guys. How do you call yourself an environmentalist? Do you see yourself as in the middle of that?
Speaker 2:I mean that's fascinating, and where you sit is where you stand, and we're back where we started. Stuart, I don't know where the industry is right now. It's going through a generational shift too.
Speaker 1:I'm Stuart Muir and welcome to Power Struggle. Today I'm joined by Jason Switzer, a longtime leader and innovator in Canada's energy transition. Jason recently joined Equitable Origin, where he's driving ESG innovation and empowering Indigenous communities to hold resource developers accountable. Previously, he led Carbon Next, accelerating next-generation carbon capture and utilization technologies, and he played pivotal roles at Foresight, the Pembina Institute, synovus and Shell Canada. Jason's deeply involved in Canada's clean tech ecosystem and he holds degrees from MIT in environmental engineering and public policy. He's also a Harvard-trained mediator and recipient of the prestigious Clean 50 Award. Jason, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Stuart, it's great to be here with you.
Speaker 1:It sure is to have you here, Jason. To start off, I mentioned Equitable Origin. What's that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Equitable Origin has an amazing origin story of its own. It is the world's first and most comprehensive environmental and social performance standard for energy projects. We've been growing for many years now. Today, about 15% of US and Canadian natural gas is certified under our system, which shares DNA with the Forest Stewardship Council certification and many of the other global commodity chain certifications that your listeners are probably familiar with.
Speaker 1:Now everyone's familiar with going to the store. You get a light bulb or a toaster and you look on the bottom and there's a little stamp of approval from certain authorities. Is it a little bit like that, but for industry?
Speaker 2:Yeah, very much so. It's focused at the project level. Business and human rights were really at the origin of the establishment of the system that we synthesize. Many of the global benchmarks and good business practices that would be obliged by an oil and gas producer at the side level include as well good practice around corporate governance, responsible business practices, fair labor practices, indigenous rights and demonstration of free, prior and informed consent.
Speaker 2:And then annually, a project, because we don't provide assurance for the whole company. It's specific to the individual energy project. Annually they have to be audited and demonstrate compliance against the 500 or so benchmarks that are in our system. And so if you get a stamp of approval, as you said, from EO, what it really is is a score against those 500 indicators provided by a third party that's been accredited. You know, just like you would get an accountant in to do your finances and they would tell you at the end of the year hey, accounting practice, this is a good statement of accounts. Similarly, you get a good statement of accounts against these environmental and social performance benchmarks that says that you're doing well against them and that allows you to put that gas on the market with those environmental and social performance attributes. And hopefully Stuart saw him at a bit of a premium.
Speaker 1:How would you break it down for the average person?
Speaker 2:The easiest way to think about it is hey, there's this set of 500 or so things that you've got to demonstrate you're doing well against to get a stamp of approval under our system. And so if you want to do the effort to get our seal of approval, it requires a whole lot of work to put the evidence together and then have somebody who's similar to an accountant, who looks at your books at the end of the year, who will tell you how you're doing against that and give you a score, and that's how you get our seal of approval.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, this is where it gets interesting, I think, because everyone uses energy, and that includes the energy that your equitable origin brand appears on. So everyone really has, whether they know it or not, a stake in this. And I'm going to guess that not every kind of energy or every energy product that people might consume might put in their gas tank. Or maybe they're flying to Thailand to have a vacation. Is that jet fuel in the plane that's carrying them there and home? Is it certified? Is the gas when they're heating their home in winter? Is that certified? How do you know? What difference does it make whether it's certified or not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's going to be a tough thing to answer concisely at any barbecue, stuart, so let me try and break that into a few different pieces.
Speaker 1:We've gone to the cigars and brandy stage. It's 2 in the morning, let's go to cigars. Let's go to cigars.
Speaker 2:What does it actually mean and who actually is using it? So why don't we take the who's actually using it first? So a lot of large gas users really care about where their gas comes from probably more so now than ever before Like an industrial customer, natural gas right and, to be clear, the buyers are buyers who have a stake in this right. So one big buyer of our certified gas is a utility in Quebec called Energier. They're the largest natural gas utility in BC.
Speaker 2:It would be Fortis in Alberta, maybe Enbridge, but essentially it's your large gas utility that's distributing gas and you want to say, hey, I'd like to make sure that my gas comes from Canada and that it meets a set of environmental obligations that are more than just what's required by regulation but actually demonstrate leadership across all the different aspects of that environmental performance and also that indigenous peoples' rights holders across, in particular, british Columbia and Alberta, which is where a lot of Canada's gas comes from, that those right holders are fairly compensated and even are fully equity participants in the gas that's being produced.
Speaker 2:And that's what makes the gas that's certified under our system unique in that it's got to meet all these different tests to demonstrate that it meets those different obligations and so yeah, so Energear is sourcing today probably about 40% of the gas that they distribute to residents and industrial users of gas in Quebec, and their commitment is to achieve 100% sourcing of EO certified gas by 2030. So that's a pretty significant commitment. There are similar commitments by other utilities as well as large energy providers for data centers and other users of energy who care where the gas comes from.
Speaker 1:So I'm in Quebec, I'm with Energier buying the gas and the company says, yeah, this has got the equitable origin stamp of approval, so I'm going to be able to tell my customers that they're getting gas that is described a certain way. I presume that means it's got some positive attributes. What would the positive attributes be that a customer like that would be able to say to their customers?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. So you know. Number one, I think right now the world is very focused on, you know, greenhouse gas emissions and methane abatement in particular. You know there's a lot of methane that gets released in the course of producing natural gas. A big concern when you're thinking about when you burn natural gas to make energy is how much methane was lost to the atmosphere. That has a very big impact on global warming.
Speaker 2:It's a very powerful carbon forcer, climate forcing gas, and so the goal of a gas buyer is to try and reduce those emissions as much as they can, to drive higher expectations upstream to the gas producer and to get from that a lower carbon product at the other end, and then a lot of those downstream buyers just like you and I care about. Right now in particular, it makes a difference if you're buying apples that come from BC or from Washington State. It makes a difference where the gas is coming from. Is it coming from some of the really highly regulated and then independently audited gas producers in Northeastern BC and Central Alberta, or is it coming from elsewhere maybe south of the border if you're in Quebec which might not be held to the same standards as the gas that's coming from BC or Alberta. So that's what certification helps level out Whether the gas, whether the molecules are coming from the US or Canada, they're being held to a common standard that's very high, higher than what they're required under any law.
Speaker 1:And is this standard an international one? Is say if Quebec is getting gas. You mentioned the United States from some of the like Pennsylvania, where they have a lot of gas. Maybe they're getting hyped up there. So do they use this system of approval?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so actually Canada only represents about 20% of the gas that's certified under our system. About 80% comes from the US, and in particular from the Northeastern US, although we have a lot of production as well that's meeting our standards from Texas too. So I think in Western Canada there's the perception that Canadian gas is the best in the world, and I think that's probably mostly true in most cases, that it's not a huge extra step to meet the obligations that are under our system if you're producing in Western Canada. But the reality is that a lot of producers are meeting those same standards south of the border as well.
Speaker 1:Just curious about one thing. You mentioned two terms, one methane, the other natural gas. You use them not interchangeably and a lot of time when I hear them used, they are, it seems like synonymous is the sense you get. But you are drawing a distinction in how you view what's the difference between natural gas and methane? Jason, yeah, thanks.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's really a term of art. They are the same thing in the end. But methane I'm really referring to upstream methane emissions. So when you're producing gas and you know, from wellhead until it gets to the birder tip, all of the methane that's lost along the way, all the natural gas that leaks out and goes to the atmosphere, would be what I'm referring to with you know, air quotes, methane, you know.
Speaker 2:So that's methane that a lot of operators are now working very hard to reduce, and so there's a number of different technologies that are being rolled out to reduce that slip, investments being made in things like detection and prevention, really, and just good management to avoid losses of gas at each step in the pathway from the gas from that wellhead till it gets to the burner tip in your kitchen. It gets to the burner tip in your kitchen. Ultimately it's the same thing and methane is natural gas and natural gas is methane. But to make it easier to talk about it's easier and maybe for the purposes of our conversation, if I say methane, I'm referring to methane emissions into the atmosphere that cause or contribute to global warming, and natural gas is the product that you use to make energy and other things that the world needs.
Speaker 1:You know this may be a rabbit hole but nevertheless a fascinating one. Just to stay on that topic, sometimes you'll hear those who are advocating strongly for an absolute departure from the use of fossil fuels will say oh, stop using that term natural gas, it's just industry marketing to make it sound like it's natural yogurt or something. Do you think that there are definitional confusions or controversies, that it would help if there was better public understanding?
Speaker 2:I mean I think you're playing a really important role in creating space for engagement. Right, this is an opportunity for deeper understanding and education of the public around some of the debates that are underway and, hopefully, in terms that people can understand, right, I don't think everybody wants a deep dive on the details. I think people really want energy services. I think we care about getting from point A to point B. We care about whether our homes are reliably heated in the winter and cool in the summers, and so on, and that you know, in the end, that desire to just flip on the switch which is totally right, is very challenging. Right, there's a ton, billions and billions of dollars invested every year to deliver those energy services in North America and Europe, you, europe, around the world, asia, latin America, africa as well. We're very privileged to have the ability to just flip the switch and have the expectation that we'll have that energy, but, of course, things are much more complicated and becoming more complicated, and so, yeah, I think having a deeper understanding is critical. I think these are deeper understanding is critical. I think you know these are also loaded debates because I think we all bring to them our, our positions. You know, I had a professor who said you know where you sit is where you stand and that it's really hard to get somebody whose check depends on certain things to happen to to speak their mind in a way that that is truly honest. Um, but I think you know the important goal that we got to keep their mind in a way that is truly honest. But I think the important goal that we got to keep in mind here is that we all want those services, that we want them to be reliable, that the world needs and is reliant on a certain percentage of fossil fuels in every scenario of climate mitigation we have, and that, in this difficult transition that we're in, finding a path that makes sense, that we can kind of deal with both economically and politically, is really critical. I'm very inspired by the founder of my little organization.
Speaker 2:The founder of Equitable Origin was a young kid in his teens in the US, by dint of a series of coincidences, ended up getting involved through a social studies project when he was in junior high, on the flight of a particular indigenous group in the Amazon who was fighting at that time with an oil company, texaco, over impacts that that development was having on their traditional lives and livelihoods in the Amazon. So you know, a kind of cautionary story because of levels of violence, the pollution on the ground. A very complicated project as well, because it's really hard to unpack what responsibilities the company had and what responsibilities the government had. But you know, so this young person, as a teenager, got really interested. His teacher was related to one of the lawyers who was active on behalf of this indigenous group, and so he ended up convincing his parents who knows how to get on a plane and go down and spend some time traveling and getting to know the community and actually again sort of me, to we style. By the time he was 15, he'd founded a charity that was bringing shoes to school children, pens and other things, and as a 19-year-old he, in one of the courses that he was taking in university, actually talked one of the co-founders of the Forest Stewardship Council into working with him to develop a certification. He's like look, we certify bananas, we certify coffee. Why can't we use certification to help these people find a path?
Speaker 2:Not everyone is against oil and gas development. They're just against the kind of oil and gas development that does harm to their communities and one in which they don't have a voice or a share in the benefits. He's truly an optimist in the potential for oil and gas development to do good and a recognition that it would happen, because the world needs energy anyway, that there was an imperative to try and create a market-based mechanism that would incent leadership and reward it and allow the people who are trying to do better to be able to whether it's just a pat on the back or actually someone who's willing to pay a little bit more for that molecule or electron to create a mechanism for that to happen. And I think that's the future right. That's a kind of optimism that well, it's a cautious optimism in that it says, hey look, there's this difficult kind of path that we have to navigate and that we can do better at it and that we need to figure out collectively how to do better at it.
Speaker 1:We're coming into a phase of history, it would seem, at least the last. Is it 100 days that have shown us that assumptions about how the world will unfold are all wrong or turning out differently, and one of the things is that ESG in particular has been under attack, and whether or not some of the finance world agrees or disagrees with whether ESG should be embedded in their world, they are needing to show the White House that they are not involved in ESG anymore. That's my read of it, Jason. What's your thoughts on this issue?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. I think you know I've heard this expressed a few different ways that the era of environment for environment's sake is over, or that you know there was a whole lot of virtue signaling that was being done around a lot of these issues, whether it was inclusion and diversity in the workplace, or aspirations around getting to net zero on a particular timeline and so on, or aspirations around getting to net zero on a particular timeline and so on. I guess I have two answers, and having listened to a few of the pods that you've posted recently, stuart, I have a sense of some divergence of perspectives as well amongst some of the people that you've had. I think, looking at the long arc of history, certain things are hard to ignore. If you were in the Soviet Union before communism fell, the only area that people were really able to protest was environmental, because it was so obvious that the environment was going downhill and that it had to be addressed. I think there's an expectation building in the markets that's driven in part by insurance companies and by financial modeling, that we're coming into an era of profound risk associated with just the evolution of temperature on this planet, and so I think that's driving certain behaviors that, by definition, have to go beyond political cycles.
Speaker 2:And I guess answer number two is things change. We've been through this before. I've worked in this space when it was called corporate social responsibility and again when you said, hey, we're doing these things because it's the right thing to do, then the minute it's no longer the right thing to do, because it doesn't fit the bottom line, it's gone. So I think, no matter what, you've got to be very focused, rigorously focused, on the economics of this stuff, and so I think the things that make sense economically are going to win over time.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm glad you point to past experience as a way to inform understanding where we might go. You mentioned CSR. Of course you mean corporate social responsibility. That was a trio of letters that used to appear in profusion in corporate documents and in any discussion of what I don't know. Do we call it social license anymore? The issues of social license? I think that term is understood, at least Did anything come before that?
Speaker 2:The CSR probably goes back to what the 80s I mean you know these things have been cycling for a while. I was very fortunate when I went to. You know, I did my undergrad actually in Montreal, at McGill, and I studied how to build large dams, large dams. It was a very interesting time in which at school I was learning how to build large dams, concrete hydrology and what happens when you put a wall in a river and how that affects upstream fisheries generally a good thing and allowed you to do flood control and other downstream things while you were making power all really positive things. So in class I only heard about the good things that you could do with hydro. I mean it was an ironic moment too, because at the same time First Nations in Northern Quebec were protesting construction of dams by Hydro Quebec and were mounting large-scale protests in downtown. So it was sort of two different worlds downtown. So it was sort of two different worlds and it wasn't until, as a new, relatively freshly minted university graduate, I guess, I went to work for the World Commission on Dams, which was an effort to try and square the circle, to kind of navigate between the massive protests that were facing dam building at the time and the efforts by a number of countries, the World Bank and some large financial institutions to essentially say, hey look, no, dams can sometimes be really good, and we have lots of examples of good dams. So you know, how do we find a path? There's got to be some way to take this technology, which isn't inherently good or bad, and do it better, and so that was an example of where people tried to find a better way.
Speaker 2:It was chaired by it was 2000, let's remember it was chaired by the former minister of water for South Africa, who had spent time in Robben Island and this was In prison, had spent time in Robben Island, and this was just at the end of Mandela's time and recognizing that South Africa is very dependent on hydro for its power needs, that countries need these tools as a pathway to development and that there must be a better way to do things.
Speaker 2:Things you realize pretty quickly is environmental problems are basically financial, that if we wanted to solve these things we could. It's just a question of whether we can afford the check. Social license is really complicated and there may be situations in which no size of check is going to be sufficient to deal or to overcome public opposition or social opposition to a particular project, and that's really informed a lot of the work that I've done ever since that you can manage the environmental issues. But ultimately trying to navigate the questions of who bears the risk and who has a right to have a voice in decision making and who gets a stake in the benefits is really complicated and hard to navigate.
Speaker 1:From that training do you see social license as a local thing?
Speaker 2:I don't actually. I mean local is very important, but it's complicated because so many. It's complicated because so many actors are involved in every one thing. You know, as you understand, large-scale project finance is just the number of different financial intermediaries and complicated relationships are involved in every big decision. And then the role of government and the different levels of government. In every country, whether it's Canada or Niger, there are a lot of different levels of government that get involved in every big decision, for good and for bad.
Speaker 1:Your journey has taken you into, say, the practical, solutions-oriented end of the environmental movement. What did you learn in that?
Speaker 2:There's so many interesting things to say about that. I've been fortunate to be able to work both in oil and gas and then with advocacy organizations and think tanks working, you could say, on the other side of it. What's so clear is that there are like-minded people involved in all sides of these discussions and that we've been polarizing these things progressively over time, but that there's an incredible need for people who otherwise don't talk to each other to talk to each other, to kind of get together in a room and try and figure out how to navigate a path that that, you know, no one's going to be entirely happy with, but that allows for responsible decisions to be made.
Speaker 1:You uh, you look like you are a dad age, jason. I don't know if you uh uh interact with young people who are planning their careers ever. Do you ever get into conversations about how opportunities to build a career like yours could be started in 2025?
Speaker 2:I mean, I think every day is so fascinating right now. There's so much change going on. There's so much opportunity. You must get this too, stuart.
Speaker 2:I think what's changed the most right now is the fact that you know, when I was wanting to get involved in this stuff in university, you could go and work for an environmental organization like a Pemina Institute or a WWF or Greenpeace.
Speaker 2:You could go and try and get a job in a large company, an oil company. Oil and gas had always had interesting roles in this space and, frankly, I've been a real pioneer in a lot of the stuff that we see globally in this space. Those were kind of the auctions and maybe you'd find work in a UN organization or something like that. That was part of my journey and it was a really great part of it. But now, if you want to do something, you can start a company. That was just not even on the radar, but the smart kids are taking the research that they're doing in university and they're spinning it into these incredible tech plays, and I've been very fortunate to work with and support and be a cheerleader for a lot of those entrepreneurs too, and that's a really promising and powerful path to learn a ton and have an impact, or fail beautifully and learn a lot and move into the next chapter.
Speaker 1:Well, jason, I'm confronting the fact. You are challenging, not by your words but by your deeds, the stereotypes that seem to affect those in the energy industry. You are an environmentalist, but you're actively engaged in seeing a pathway for the prevalent forms of energy in our lives in a positive and highly educated sense. But I meet all kinds of people just like you in my work, I mean that's great.
Speaker 2:I think, yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things happening at this moment. Technologies evolve, the needs are greater than they've ever been. The challenge is actually just to be able to kind of sift from all the noise that's out there to find a way to something that you feel passionate about and where you can actually have some leverage on a solution. I'm very fortunate to have been handed this beautiful lever by the founder and then the most recent CEO, and we have an amazing team and a potential to have tremendous impact in a very positive way that I think aligns with a lot of the national interest in Canada around being a globally significant exporter of energy to the world in a responsible way. So, anyway, I feel like there's some really wonderful opportunities that anybody will have in their career if they're open to them in this space.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's issues there. I was in Toronto recently. I heard from one of the, I guess, deans from the University of Toronto engineering program, where they have a petroleum stream, bemoaning the fact that it's really hard to show students that this is a great path for them because there's been a sort of stigmatization of that field. And I've heard that from University of Calgary as well and I think it's a kind of a trend. And yet for those who look at the details and meet the people and realize that there's something different going on, it must be a little frustrating. I mean, what's your thought on, again, the social license issues of an industry that's so important when so much positive work is being done?
Speaker 2:that the incentives for action were kind of running contrary to the desire to go forward.
Speaker 2:So, like you know, it's a real, specific example whereas you know three of the folks representing the oil companies, oil and gas companies, we're working on a particular thing. We're, like you know, we're going to do this, we're going to demonstrate some leadership, we've got the capability this is, round off error, one person in the room who said you know what my marching orders are really, to delay this by another quarter, because every quarter I can delay this is so many X millions of dollars, and that's my goal here. So I think the industry has done itself a disservice at various points. That's an outcome of that and the cost of that is, you know, when the regulatory hammer has come down, it's come down harder than some of the proactive action could have been and that the impact on that social license has been significant. And now I mean, maybe that would have happened anyway. You know, I think there were opportunities that the industries had at different points to go beyond and do better and solve problems before they became emergencies.
Speaker 1:So you work with big oil and gas and some people might say, hey, jason, you're working with the bad guys. How do you call yourself an environmentalist?
Speaker 2:You know I had really amazing privilege to work with the founders of the Clean Resource Innovation Network, which was an effort within the oil and gas sector to try and mobilize capital and networks really the professional and personal networks of the industry to drive innovation within the sector. You know, at the time I was running the industry association for clean tech startups in Alberta and the oil and gas sector is the biggest investor in clean tech startups and in technology generally within Canada, has a real productivity challenge, of course, as so much of Canadian industry does Not great at doing innovation in-house, for good reason slow capital turnover, risk averse for a variety of reasons, including there's a lot of risks in oil and gas that don't affect a company in tech, for example. So try to figure that out and to be an engine for innovation and to kind of raise the water level for innovation generally across Canada. I think Crenn's been a huge success. There are so many startups now in Alberta.
Speaker 2:There's a huge flow of capital into Alberta-based tech ventures and there is so much evidence of the success of those startups domestically and globally Companies like Summit Nanotech and Carbon Engineering, which was born at UC, A poor of Sina's Carbon Upcycling, which has just closed a really huge round. It's not for nothing that a lot of the world is beating its doors to Alberta for the technology developers and the solutions that we're seeing emerge in that landscape. And that's grounded in the fact that not entirely without some kicking and screaming the oil and gas sector has been a huge engine for that kind of innovation and, frankly, has done that on environment historically as well. So I feel very comfortable trying to kind of lean in at the margin and shift outcomes, because I think that the potential for large impact through engagement with the oil and gas sector, not just in Canada but in the US as well and globally, is huge.
Speaker 1:Do you see yourself as in the middle of that, or do you see yourself as sort of one side pushing to find equilibrium?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's fascinating, and where you sit is where you stand, and we're back where we started. Stuart, I don't know where the industry is right now. It's going through a generational shift too. The political tide has moved in one direction, I think, generationally, though the next generation is very concerned about these issues and will live in it in a way that you and I, maybe we won't see the full, the full outcomes of, of the, the, the kind of policy fights that are going to be fought over the next 10 or 20 years. So I I you know to be, to be frank, I don't know where I am, but I know, I know that I'm, I'm pushing in in the direction of doing more and doing better.
Speaker 1:Well, I think we need more of that. And you know, when you come to energy, we haven't really talked about the renewables component, and I'm talking about oil and gas versus renewables or with renewables. I'm an and more guy. I think you know we're just using more energy. Let's make it all good, but where do you come in on this? On this, I guess you could call it energy transition. Is there a transition?
Speaker 2:You know I love this. In 2017, I think, when I was at the Peminent Institute, we did a study looking at renewables and oil and gas, and what we found at the time was that the largest buyer of solar panels in Western Canada at the time was the oil and gas sector. Largest buyer of solar panels in Western Canada at the time was the oil and gas sector, and the application was remote power, for you know, the wells and compressor stations and SCADA systems were sort of far from roads and people. Of course, the industry has moved on and I think there has been some waves of investment by oil and gas in renewables and then stepped away from it. We are in the middle of a transition. We shouldn't kid ourselves that the power mix that we have today is going to be the power mix that we have in 20 years or 50 years. It's going to be a complicated transition, though, and, I think, very diverse in how it plays out, and I'll give one very concrete example.
Speaker 2:I was in Colombia recently for our work. We work globally. Colombia is a complicated place for a variety of reasons, but they have tremendous renewables potential and they're very hybrid dependent country, but they also import LNG and they are going through a sort of historic drought in the Andes region which has massively affected their hydro capacity, and so if it wasn't for natural gas, they would have been in incredibly deep trouble. Fortunately, with natural gas, they're able to balance out their power system, but they're still going through power cuts and blackouts at different points, and I think what we need to offer so the world is set as a target that we're going to get to tripling renewables capacity by 2030.
Speaker 2:I think that's going to be hard and again it's going to come down to social license in a lot of respects that. Are you going to be able to build all of these wind farms and solar farms and offshore wind platforms as quickly as you think, and can you mobilize the capital in a world where interest rates have been a lot higher than they were when things were a lot easier? So it's challenging. We're going to go through some complexity, but, I'd say, directionally. We know where the world is headed and, as EO, we've taken the position that it's important that wind and solar projects be held to the same standards as oil and gas projects are in our system, and so we've launched standards for wind and solar projects as well.
Speaker 1:Recently we've been hearing a lot about data farms and AI and their huge demand for energy, and a lot of that seems to be served up that demand. New things have come up and Alberta is saying hey, we're going to be a major player by making investments in AI, so that's going to mean using more probably natural gas Hopefully it's equitable origin natural gas. But where is this headed? Is it just way, way more energy being used in future? And can all of that be certified? Is there enough certification muscle to go around? Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 2:Data centers are a big and emerging demand source. I think that's true. I think speculation right now based on DeepSeek and Chinese AI is maybe the most I don't know, call it optimistic view of natural gas use increase as a result of the AI centers is maybe not as as high as as you know, as all get out that uh, they're going to find more efficient ways to to deliver the compute. Um, and then we get to the question of well, if, if compute is cheaper, maybe people use it more. Maybe they will use it, as you and I did, clearly, stuart, in finding out our wardrobes for today's call and not just for higher end uh applications, where you're, you know, you know, getting it to write nursery stories for your, for your kids, so you can read it to them at bedtime, or you know, and, and to be honest, we're, we're using AI more and more in our own workplace in terms of automating functions, creating meeting minutes and all that. I mean it's, it's more and more ubiquitous.
Speaker 2:So demand, demand is going to continue to increase for sure. Can we certify it all? I think no. I think there's going to be a differentiation in the market, like there is in every market, but regulation will tend to follow, and so if you raise the ceiling, then presumably eventually the floor will rise as well, and I promise you we'll keep raising the ceiling over time, because our producers companies like ARK and Vermilion, petronas and others are actually continually coming back to us welcoming evolution and update. Social expectations go up, never down, so I feel there's no doubt that we'll continue to see an evolution and a differentiation in the market.
Speaker 1:Jason, if you could put up a billboard anywhere, what would it say?
Speaker 2:One of my favorite periods in life was living in Washington briefly while Obama was president, so I guess hope. Thanks, jason, I've really enjoyed our time hearing all about equitable origin. Thank you so much for this, stuart guess hope.
Speaker 1:Thanks, jason. I've really enjoyed our time hearing all about equitable origin. Thank you so much for this, stuart. This was a lot of fun. This has been Power Struggle. Please share, like, subscribe wherever and however you are listening to this or watching. Thank you.
