While news of Saskatchewan’s plan for a small geothermal power plant was met with excitement by renewable energy advocates,  experts say British Columbia is far better situated to capitalize on the technology yet has failed to do so.

“It should be a little bit of a shock that a less good resource is being developed in Saskatchewan over a world-class resource in B.C.,” said Alison Thompson, chair and co-founder of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CanGEA).

B.C. is located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, a geothermal hot zone. Maps produced by CanGEA found B.C. has enough geothermal potential to power the entire province.

“There are geothermal projects all up the coast but they stop at the border. There’s nothing in B.C.,” Thompson said.

“This is clearly not technical, not economic. This is policy driven.”

Northeastern B.C., a hotbed of oil and gas drilling, is home to one of the hottest recorded wells in Canada, measured at around 170 degrees Celsius. Aquifer temperatures in Saskatchewan’s Williston Basin are recorded at around 120 degrees.

“You only need about 80 degrees for power,” Thompson said.

Project developers in Saskatchewan signed the first Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for geothermal in Canada with the province’s utility provider, SaskPower.

The same has not been possible in B.C., where a primary focus on hydro development, most pronounced in the recent decision to build the controversial $9 billion Site C dam, has taken up the lion’s share of the the provincial utility provider’s attention.

In 1983 the B.C. Utilities Commission recommended the province to explore geothermal as a potential alternative to Site C. As the Site C Joint Review Panel noted in its final report on the project, the province put virtually no effort into exploring alternatives.

“If the senior governments were doing their job, there would be no need for this recommendation” to explore alternatives, the panel wrote in its final report on Site C in 2014. “The low level of effort is surprising, especially if it results in a plan that involves large and possibly avoidable environmental and social costs.”

Critics argue Site C has actually forced out renewable energy industries like wind and solar.

“At CanGEA, we’re in our 11th year and we’ve been advocating consistently for geothermal in B.C. with no results with B.C. Hydro and the Ministry of Energy,” Thompson said.

The West Moberly First Nation, which is fighting Site C in court, has also advocated for geothermal to no avail.

“If Saskatchewan can build a geothermal plant, why the hell isn’t B.C.? Especially when they know there’s geothermal potential here. We’ve asked to partner with them on it,” Chief Roland Willson told DeSmog Canada.

B.C. Hydro’s Mandate Needs Update: Weaver

B.C. Green Party Leader Andrew Weaver told DeSmog Canada geothermal is long overdue in B.C. but that “B.C. Hydro’s mandate needs to be massaged, be changed a bit.”

“The problem with geothermal in the province is not that we can’t do it,” Weaver said. “The problem is B.C. Hydro is the only buyer of power so no one is going to invest the capital in a project if there’s no buyer for the electricity.”

He added: “We have enormous potential for geothermal — it’s stable, base power that’s renewable and it will happen in B.C. sooner than we think.”

Steve Grasby, geoscientist with Natural Resource Canada’s Geological Survey, said in the 15 years he’s been researching Canada’s geothermal potential he has seen a massive shift in public awareness and interest.

A 2013 Geological Survey of Canada report found northeast B.C. has the “highest potential for immediate development of geothermal energy” anywhere in the country.

“When we first started this most people didn’t even know the term and if they heard it they didn’t know what it meant,” Grasby told DeSmog Canada.

“There has been a huge increase in awareness on all different levels. Now we’re seeing a lot of growing industry interest with small companies and people exploring this new opportunity.”

He added test drilling has yet to be completed in Saskatchewan, so it could be some time before more detailed knowledge of that resource comes to light.

Grasby said there is “tremendous” geothermal potential across Canada but the highest temperature regions are in B.C.

“That’s where we really have the potential to consider electrical generation compared to just direct heat. There’s been a lot of interest and various projects pushing forward. It’s an exciting time.”

B.C. Policy ‘Indifference’ to Geothermal Hurt Industry

In Valemount, B.C., plans for a geothermal ecovillage are underway. If successful, the plan will not only produce electricity but also provide direct heat for the community, recreational hot springs, year round greenhouses and a first-in-Canada geothermal brewery.

It took several years for the company behind the project, Borealis Geopower, to land a drilling permit.

Thompson, who’s also a principal at Borealis, said the regulatory system is slow, full of setbacks and plagued by what she considers chronic indifference.

Policy in B.C. hasn’t kept pace with advancements in the geothermal field, she said.

“For example, B.C. Hydro only thinks about electricity and there isn’t a utility provider in B.C. that thinks about heat. Geothermal can give you electricity, it can give you heat and it can even be a source of precious minerals that don’t have to be open pit mined. It provides jobs and carbon credits.”

Borealis is now awaiting a land access permit for the drilling pad from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations.

Thompson said the permit is stuck in suspension as B.C.’s political landscape remains uncertain.

“If this was oil and gas permitting it would be done in weeks. With geothermal, this is rolling out in the months and years,” she said.

Korie Marshall from the Valemount Geothermal Society said some of the lag time can be considered the hazards of trailblazing.

“It’s not always fun to be first. We’ve been coming up against all these roadblocks that no one understands. We want to help fix that for others coming up.”

“A big part of our goal as a society is not to just get this going in Valemount but to show the rest of Canada that we can do it.”

Geothermal Energy a Part of Community Building

Meanwhile, geothermal companies are chomping at the bit to get to work in B.C.

“At StromTech we’re actively engaged with clients in northeastern B.C., in the Peace River region, to explore geothermal. There’s lots of good opportunity up there,” said Ben Lee, engineer and geothermal consultant with StromTech Energy Services.

StromTech is in the preliminary stages of conducting a feasibility study for a community led geothermal project with the West Moberly First Nation.

Lee said smaller communities stand to benefit from local geothermal projects, especially where heat from geothermal projects can be used to prop up other industries and jobs.

“The fact that we can generate electricity and generate heat in sustainable, renewable manner — that’s sometimes overlooked or glossed over,” Lee said.

Lee said northern communities concerned about food security are especially interested in the co-generation of electricity and direct heat from geothermal.

“The ability to grow food and produce that for themselves, reduce their reliance on imported food whether that be from the Okanagan or southern B.C. or California, that’s of interest to remote communities.”

“Where I see an opportunity for government, for B.C. Hydro to make a difference is in supporting localized, distributed generation.”

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Abandoned oil and gas wells in Alberta are on the rise — but where many see a growing liability, Alberta’s fledgling geothermal industry sees massive opportunity.

“We’ve got these old wells that we know are hot and we’re going to fill them with cement and walk away,” says Tim Davies, CEO of geothermal company Turkana. “It’s just stupid.”

There’s currently no permitting framework for geothermal in Alberta, leaving the renewable energy out of play.

“I own the well, I own the land and I own the oil. But I can’t own the heat,” Davies said. “There’s just no mechanism for that in place.”

“The oil business has drilled 400,000 wells in Alberta alone,” Alison Thompson, president of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association, told DeSmog Canada. “They’ve already found all the hot water the province has.”

“The oil patch has those skills to get the most out of every well,” Thompson said, adding the workforce has been hamstrung by a lack of forward thinking policies. [view:in_this_series=block_1]

The number of orphaned wells — left in the wake of a mass exodus of oil and gas producers — has quadrupled in the last 12 months.

Ben Lee, owner of Raven Thermal Systems, says the oil and gas sector’s loss could be the geothermal industry’s gain.

“For the first time in more than a decade you’ve got very skilled workers that have exactly the skillset that a successful geothermal project needs,” Lee told DeSmog Canada.

Geothermal energy draws on the earth’s natural warmth to create a renewable form of energy with a low environmental footprint and virtually no carbon emissions. Importantly, geothermal provides reliable base load capacity, similar to a hydro dam or gas-fired power plant, enabling system stability.

Despite being home to enormous geothermal potential, Canada is the only country on the Pacific Ring of Fire that doesn’t use the resource to produce commercial-scale energy.

CanGEA released a report in late 2014 that found geothermal could supply all of the energy needs of British Columbia for much cheaper than the Site C dam, currently under construction.

“You’ve got top-notch geologists, reservoir engineers, drilling and completion engineers, surface engineers and all the associated landmen and everything else that comes along with a successful drilling program,” Lee said.

“They are available, and available on the cheap to some extent right now, because there is so much supply.”

Lee, who has a degree in aerospace engineering and specializes in heat transfer systems, used to work in other resource industries but last year founded Raven when he saw an opportunity to bring underutilized geothermal energy to the forefront.

But Alberta has yet to see a single geothermal operation materialize.

Lee said the regulatory climate in Canada has failed to keep pace with knowledge of Canada’s vast geothermal potential. Currently there is no licensing framework in place for the development of geothermal energy in Alberta.

For Lee and others struggling to find work in the province, waiting for policy to catch up has been painful.

“We have some very available high-end skill that’s sitting around and could be very quickly turned around because at the end of the day whether you’re drilling for oil or drilling for hot water, the process is the same.”

Craig Dunn, an exploration geologist with Borealis Geothermal, the only company in Canada to have a geothermal exploration permit for B.C., said many of the techniques used to develop oil and gas deposits are directly applicable to geothermal.

The steam-assisted gravity drainage, or SAGD, used to recover bitumen deposits in the Alberta oilsands is “basically geothermal in reverse,” Dunn said, saying with one steam is pumped into a reservoir and in the other steam is pumped out.

“I got into this because one of my last jobs was in a heavy oil play,” Dunn said.“And I thought, ‘is this the best we can do? Is this a resource we want to hand down to our children?’ ”

Canadian Companies Going Abroad for Geothermal Opportunity 

Brett Erickson from FlashPoint Resources Management Inc., a Calgary-based drilling and completions firm, said his company has been busy applying its skills in Nicaragua and other countries, such as the U.S., that are open to geothermal development.

“Alberta has some of the best engineers and best mind power when it comes to drilling and power generation as a whole,” he said, but other countries “are ahead of Canada when it comes to green energy.”

“I believe it’s because we’ve got access to easier, cheaper energy like oil, gas and coal,” Erickson said. He added geothermal is expensive to start but it’s “the greenest energy out there.”

“It’s a lot more reliable than hydro or wind,” he said, “with less of a footprint.”

Erickson said it’s going to take some help to get geothermal up and running in Canada.

“It is an expensive technology but over the long term it has a payback and that’s what investors care about, the long-term payback,” Erickson said

Proving geothermal is low risk but high return has been a key struggle for geothermal companies in Canada, Erickson said. “With the downturn in oil there are investors that are sitting on money that usually would have gone to oil projects.”

“The pieces are in place for geothermal to take off in Canada.”

Thompson, who previously worked with companies interested in using geothermal energy to reduce the carbon footprint of the oilsands, said industry is eager for the opportunity to apply what they know to this new resource to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“If someone would just at the government level formulate a task force…we don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” Thompson said. “It’s plug and play. That’s what we’re hoping for.”

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Like a stand of eager horses chomping at the bit, Canada’s young geothermal industry is waiting impatiently at the starting line, ready for the race to begin.   But there’s no starting pistol in sight. At least, not yet.   Getting geothermal projects up and running in Canada "has been harder than it needs to be,” according to Alison Thompson, founder and president of the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association (CANGea).   Thompson, along with a group of delegates from Canada’s geothermal industry, is currently in Reykjavik at the Iceland Geothermal Conference where delegates, experts and scientists from around the world are swapping stories from the geothermal trenches.   Despite having the second largest delegation at the conference after Iceland, Canada has little to show or tell.   “Canada has an incredibly high quality resource and we can’t even get out of the starting gate,” Thompson told DeSmog Canada.

The Iceland Geothermal Conference 2016 in Reykjavik, Iceland hosts delegates from over 50 countries. Iceland is one of the largest producers of geothermal industry in the world. Photo: Carol Linnitt.

Maps released by CanGEA show Canada, especially in the oil and gas rich west, is teeming with geothermal activity, the same natural forces behind British Columbia’s beloved hot springs. Conveniently, much of the temperature of the province’s varied geography has already been mapped thanks to high levels of natural gas drilling.

“The United States is the number one producer of geothermal energy in the world. Mexico is number four,” Thompson said. “I want to see Canada up in the top five.” 

“We have enormous potential for geothermal energy in Canada,” Stephen Grasby, geochemist with Natural Resource Canada’s Geological Survey of Canada, said.   The “in place capacity” of geothermal energy in Canada “is well over a million times what Canadians actually use,” Grasby told DeSmog Canada.   “There’s always a distinction between what’s in place and what you can extract from that and that’s where economic barriers come in,” Grasby said, adding the high capacity is “comforting because it says we only need to produce a tiny fraction of that to supply a significant amount of energy for Canada.”   Canada spent a full decade studying the country’s vast geothermal resources during 1975 to 1985 but when the energy crisis ended, so did the country’s desire for renewable energy security.   But now concerns about climate change have pushed the alternative energy portfolio back onto the table.   In 2007 Grasby, along with a team of scientists and researchers, began updating Canada’s old research, finding geothermal potential exists right across the country.  

Stephen Grasby photographs Hellisheidi, the world's largest geothermal power station outside of Reykjavik, Iceland. Photo: Carol Linnitt.   How you view the resource “depends on what end use you want to make of it,” Grasby said. “You can use it for direct heating, electricity generation or heat exchange systems.”   Geothermal plays are greatly varied, Grasby said, meaning how one uses the resource largely depends on what they want to do with the heat.   Grasby, who is also in Iceland for the geothermal conference, said he hopes his work at Natural Resources Canada can help advance the geothermal industry in Canada.   “We’re not a regulatory department, our main focus is to provide industry the geological information they need. That’s the one area we can help in.”   “We find the haystack and leave it to industry to find the needle,” Grasby said.   “Now we’re looking at what we can do to move things forward.”   Ben Lee, owner of Raven Thermal Services, says it’s unfortunate that in Canada geothermal “has always been something of an afterthought.”   Lee, who has a degree in aerospace engineering and a background in the oil and gas sector, said there are many ways of using geothermal heat effectively.   “I had a bit of an epiphany flying over Regina once in the late winter,” he said.   “It was amazing to see everything was white except for this big teardrop shape off the south edge of the city.” Prevailing winds from the north were pushing warm air generated in the city south, “creating this teardrop of melt,” Lee said.   “It just happened to be the perfect scenario for me to see that marked in the snow.”   Lee said thinking about heat — how it’s generated and how it’s wasted — plays a big role in how he sees his company utilizing geothermal energy.   “How can we capture that heat and use it more efficiently?”   Lee is also attending the Iceland Geothermal Conference in Reykjavik, a northern city entirely heated using geothermal direct heat systems. Hot water, piped 27 kilometres in from Hellisheidi, Iceland’s largest geothermal energy plant, is circulated throughout the city for district heating.

Insulated pipelines carry hot water from the Hellisheidi geothermal power station to Reykjavik for district direct heating, a system that has been in use in the city since the 1930s. Photo: Carol Linnitt.   “A piece that gets missed in Canada is the direct heating side of geothermal,” Lee said. And being in Iceland, Lee said he’s excited to see geothermal heated greenhouses used to grow much of the country’s produce.   “They’ve got greenhouses growing food in the Arctic — as if that is not applicable to Canada,” he said.   “I had a friend go up to the Northwest Territories and pay $16 for a single red pepper. My question is how can we leverage our geothermal resources to address our concerns about food security up north, particularly for First Nations?”   For Lee, the opportunities for geothermal are a vast as the resource: “We can help a lot of people solve different problems with the same solution.”   But that solution is caught in a regulatory grey zone that has so far prevented any major projects from getting off the ground.   Despite the resource potential, Canada has zero mega watts of energy production.   “There’s a regulatory pathway to owning an oilsands mine in Alberta, or for opening up a coal mine,” Thompson said. “But there’s no regulatory pathway to operating geothermal.”   She added the industry doesn’t enjoy any of the tax benefits or incentives given to other sectors.   “At the national tax level we’re legally disadvantaged against mining, oil and gas and other renewables.”   “We’re not looking for a hand out we’re looking for a hand up — we want parity with other industries.”   Thompson said without favourable tax and policy structures in place, finding investors to back geothermal projects, which are capital intensive in the early stages, has been near impossible.   “Because we can’t get the tax incentives, unless you get a geothermal lover, an investor is going to put their money elsewhere.”   “We’ve been in this valley of death,” Thompson said, but added she hopes public awareness about geothermal as well as increasing government interest might get things moving in a positive direction.   “We can do this. We just need to want to do it.”

Image: Power generation at the blue lagoon, Iceland. Photo: Carol Linnitt.

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