Hon. Jonathan Wilkinson, P.C., M.P., Minister of Natural Resources: It’s a great question. I would say that Canada has been doing everything it possibly can to support our European friends and allies in the aftermath of the brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine. That started with the commitment we made to augment production of oil and gas in this country by 300,000 barrels a day such that we were creating more liquidity in the global market to enable countries like Germany to move away from Russian oil and gas. But it certainly also involves the conversation around hydrogen.

Chancellor Scholz and my counterpart, Vice-Chancellor Habeck, were here for a very important and, I think, successful visit. As you say, part of that was the signing of the memorandum on hydrogen. It relates to Newfoundland and Labrador and also Nova Scotia, which also has very significant aspirations in this area.

The first step is putting in place a regulatory regime to be able to appropriately regulate offshore wind. Some of these projects are starting with onshore, where there is a regime in place, or one can be put into place relatively quickly by the province. Then there is a federal-provincial offshore regulatory piece that we are working on with both of those provinces right now, and we are looking at ways we can do work even as that progresses.

The target is to be in a position to start to ship hydrogen to Germany by as early as 2025, which is not very far away. The Government of Nova Scotia, in particular, has set very aggressive public targets as to what they would like to see with respect to hydrogen going forward. So it’s an area in which I am working closely with both of those provinces and territories.

More generally, hydrogen is an enormous opportunity also for Western Canada, but it will more likely be hydrogen derived from natural gas, with appropriate carbon capture. It is one of those things that Canada can actually do to help energy security around the world.

Hon. Jonathan Wilkinson, P.C., M.P., Minister of Natural Resources: Thank you for the question. As I said before, we are very interested in supporting, in any way we can, our friends in Europe at a time of great stress. That is why we augmented the production and supply of oil and gas through the United States by 300,000 barrels a day and we are on track to achieve that. There will be liquid natural gas flowing from Canada as early as 2024 through the Kitimat plant that is being built by LNG Canada.

On the East Coast, what the Germans have said very publicly — and often to me — is that they need something that could be up and running within three years, and if not, they are not interested. They feel they will be in a position to have fully displaced Russian gas by that time, partly through the transition they are trying to make on an accelerated basis to renewables and hydrogen, and partly through contracts they may secure with others who have the ability.

We have been working. There is really only one project that could meet that timeline. You would need to have an existing pipeline and, ideally, you would have some existing infrastructure. There is such a plant in New Brunswick, but it requires upgrades to the pipeline, some in Canada and through the United States; it runs through Maine and New Hampshire. We have been looking at that and working actively with Premier Higgs on that. If you ask TC Energy, which is the pipeline operator, they are concerned about the ability for the regulatory process in the United States to get approval. It’s not in Canada that it concerns them.

As for the issue around the business case, I think we may have found a way around that, but it costs a lot of money to ship gas from Alberta all the way to New Brunswick. There may be a different funding mechanism where they don’t pay exactly what they would pay from the Gulf of Mexico. We are still working on that, but we should understand that the regulatory issue actually lies with the Americans not the Canadians.