Olivia Woods
Canada’s minister of natural resources, Jonathan Wilkinson, disagrees that the Bay du Nord project will be the final oil project off the coast of Newfoundland, and it could become the benchmark for future projects.
“With Bay du Nord, from my perspective, that’s a good project because it is one of the lowest carbon-intensive-production barrels of oil that you are going to see in this country or in any other country around the world,” he told CBC News.
“I think the threshold for new projects is going to be can you actually effectively copy what Bay du Nord is doing, which is very low emissions and a target of getting to net-zero by 2050.”
Offshore drilling for Bay du Nord, which will take place 500 kilometres east of St. John’s, was given the go-light by the federal government earlier this spring.
In April, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault stated that future oil projects will have difficulty meeting the federal government’s increasingly strict environmental requirements.
On the other hand, Wilkinson argued on Tuesday that shifting Canada away from oil production will take a lot of time.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions about the role of fossil fuels as we move forward to a lower-carbon future,” said Wilkinson.
“We are going to have to reduce the amount that we use, and we are going to have to stop burning it eventually in 2050, but there are still significant amounts of oil and gas we’re going to use in a net-zero future. We’re just not going to burn it — we’re going to use it for petrochemicals and waxes and lubricants and hydrogen.”
Original source material for this article taken from here
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