Canadian Energy Podcast Series Episode 1 | Geothermal industry

Lorne:              Hello. I'm Lorne Rollheiser, Partner and head of Gowling WLG's oil and gas practice. Welcome to the Gowling's Energy Team Podcast series relating to Canada's energy sector. In this podcast series we will explore how Canada's energy industry is evolving, the new opportunities that are emerging and assess Canada's position in these markets. In our first episode we will discuss geothermal energy and its potential in Western Canada. I'm joined by my colleague, Anthony Mersich, an Associate in Gowling's Calgary office and our guest, Dr. Catherine Hickson, the CEO of Alberta No. 1, Terrapin's geothermic signature geothermal energy project and Alberta's first conventional geothermal power and heat facility. To kick us off we'll just describe a little bit about who we are and why this group is together to talk about geothermal. Cathy, you're our guest today but I thought I'd ask Anthony to just say a few things about his background to explain his connection to the topic.

Anthony:          Thanks, Lorne. So my background is in the energy sector. I currently am an Associate in the Calgary office at Gowling WLG. I work in advocacy in the regulatory group. But prior to becoming a lawyer I was a geophysicist in Calgary's oil and gas sector. Worked for 8 years. Still a licenced professional and geoscientist, professional non-practicing though, but I still take great interest in energy development in Alberta so that's kind of how I was introduced to the topic we're going to talk about today.

Lorne:              Thanks, Anthony, and Cathy, obviously Anthony and I have got to know more about you and you appear in several places in social media for people that want to follow more about what you have done and are doing, but if you could give us a little more of a synopsis for listeners about who you are and what you've been up to.

Cathy:             Great, thank you, and thank you for the invitation to join. Some people might say I've had a checkered geological past. I actually started off as a volcanologist, and in fact that's essentially what I'm still doing, is dealing with hot rocks. For 40 years of my career I have been in hot water and that hot water is mostly geothermal but it has been other things. Essentially what I think is important to the conversation today is that I've had this 40 years of experience. I'm a geologist. I have worked at all aspects of geothermal development. So as a student I was logging temperature wells. Now as CEO of Alberta No. 1, and having had former executive roles with other companies, it is about raising money and the commercial aspects of geothermal. I think that broad background gives you the context of what I can provide to the discussion today.

Lorne:              Thank you. I think some people that I would say have a casual understanding or reference of geothermal energy, maybe sort of a common base understanding would be some people have some geothermal systems in their homes and they might not kind of have, or maybe they just think that's a direct comparison to sort of a broader industrial geothermal projects, so maybe you could help us a little bit with the differences between those two things and more along the lines of what Alberta No. 1 is up to.

Cathy:             Great. Yes, it actually is one of the things. I have a number of roles. One of them is I am an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia. So I spend a lot of my time as a teacher and doing a lot of outreach, not just obviously at the university level but at all levels, and trying to get people to understand what geothermal is, it is sometimes a challenge. Because what you're speaking about, what we call geo-exchange, so geo-exchange is actually using earth as a battery. What we're doing is we're taking air out of the atmosphere, in your homes typically or the building which is being cooled or heated because it works in both those instances, we take that heat out, we put it into the ground, we store it there and that's into the shallow subsurface. So 50 metres, 10 metres, 100 metres is the typical depth. Then we extract that heat that we've stored away and we use that typically for space heating. Geothermal, conventional geothermal, is deep. I laughed with my engineering colleagues and I tell them if you want to be in geothermal you need to like pipes. Because we're about moving huge quantities of fluid around from the deep subsurface. What do I mean by deep? I mean a kilometre and a half to about 4 kilometres is the commercial depth that we can go for geothermal. We're talking about hot. As I mentioned, I'm actually a volcanologist, and that's essentially how I got started in geothermal because around volcanos there is often geothermal systems. These systems of hot water. But I don't want anybody to think that there are volcanos in Alberta or in other parts of the sedimentary basin down into the United States. There aren't but what those basins have is the advantage of earth's natural heat. It's not as concentrated as around a volcano but that heat is coming up from the very, very deep, the core of the earth, the deep subsurface, and it's heating up the fluids, the brines and the water, the oil and gas that's there, whatever is there in these sedimentary basins. So that's our target. Is water, which is hot enough to produce power, in the deep subsurface. So our project is actually drilling down 4 kilometres and that's how thick the sediments are in the area that we're working, which is Northwestern Alberta, just South of the City of Grand Prairie.

Anthony:          Thanks, Cathy, for that explanation. So one of the things you mentioned is that this idea of conventional geothermal. Could you just tell us the different types of geothermal that exists and kind of how they differ?

Cathy:             Good question because there are new technologies out there. So what we're talking about is conventional geothermal. So we drill these deep wells, we tap that subsurface fluid and we bring it to the surface. Those fluids contain, in some cases they might contain, hydrocarbons. They might contain other minerals. The hot topic right now is lithium. So they might contain lithium. But, fundamentally, for our projects is they contain heat. So we bring those up to the surface. We extract the heat. We make power. We use it for direct use applications. Today is Earth Day, so what we're trying to push is geothermal is the greenest of the green, and today we're actually announcing a collaboration cooperation agreement with a worm composting facility that needs heat. So these are the kinds of things that you can do with geothermal energy. Heat vast areas, greenhouses or a bunch of worms, and also extract those other commodities, if applicable, in the specific circumstances. Now, there's a lot of focus right now, or attention being paid to, what are called closed loop systems. These closed loop systems drill deep underground and they do a heat exchange. So they're very akin to that geo-exchange system, that shallow geo-exchange system that I spoke about, but instead of essentially accumulating heat from the air and storing it underground, these systems take the already present heat in the deep underground and then transfer it to a heat exchange fluid and bring it up to the surface. They have a couple of advantages. One is you don't have to deal with these brines because the brines, in fact, are hypersaline. So anybody who might have been to the Dead Sea, or into the ocean and whatnot, will know that you can't drink this stuff. They don't have to deal with it but they don't also have the advantages of being able to extract one of the commodities that might be in those fluids. The other thing about these closed loop systems is that it's not clear. So they are experimental. Their R&D is how long will they last? How long before you need to drill new wells? It's exciting research but yet unproven in terms of its commercial applicability.

Anthony:          Gotcha. From what you've described here there's a couple of different systems. The system that I suppose is conventional is drilling two different wells, an injection well and then a production well, and you're relying on a porous and a permeable reservoir with brine, basically the brine carries the heat up to the surface, and at which point you use that heat to either turn a turbine for electricity or, as you mentioned, direct heating for this working with a compost facility, and then there's also a closed loop system which is effectively like a horizontal well in a subsurface formation and it's not really dependent on permeability or porosity. It's just a pipe that carries a fluid within the pipe and that just circulates. That's kind of correct?

Cathy:             Yes. No, no. That is correct and thank you for reminding me that we have to inject. So in a conventional system all of those fluids that we're bringing to the surface, we have to put back down, 100%25. That is one of the things that makes geothermal very green is that we're not exposing these fluids to the atmosphere. We're not removing them from the formations. Only that we're removing the heat.

Anthony:          Right. One of the other things you mentioned was this direct heat thing. I think most people when they thing geothermal think exclusively electricity but direct heating is another I suppose value add to it. Maybe could you discuss a bit about what the potential is for direct heating since most people just kind of think geothermal, electricity, that's what it's used for.

Cathy:             Yeah, and it's actually to the detriment of geothermal that we haven't done as good a job as we should have in terms of getting people to understand the direct use aspect of it. Essentially, if you think about any industry process that requires heat, not heat at steam temperatures like over hundreds of degrees centigrade, but 50, 40, 80 degrees C. So I spoke about this composting facility. So these worms like to be warm. They like a constant temperature. In any kind of environment, I mean obviously we're speaking from Alberta. Alberta's cold. Everybody knows that so the value of heat is huge. What few people really understand is that in terms of the energy usage, so if we're talking about taking our energy pie and dividing it into various pieces, 60%25 of that energy use is for heating. Most of that is for space heating. Currently, at least in the context of Alberta, that space heating is done by natural gas. So if we can replace that natural gas with geothermal, which the other thing I wanted to emphasize about geothermal, it is base load. It is firm power. So what that means in the context of electricity is essentially that electricity is available 99%25 of the time. In the case of the thermal energy it's actually even better than that. It's about 100%25 of the time and that's because we have backup pumps and various things like that. So you get that heat all the time. It's also another advantage of geothermal. If we look at geothermal relative to wind and solar, wind and solar are only about 25%25 efficient. So if we're talking about 100 megawatts of power, so if we're talking about 100 megawatts of geothermal power, you get 100 megawatts. If we're talking about a solar or a wind facility that is 100 megawatts built in size you're only going to get that power 25%25 of the time. Or in many cases it is actually less and you don't have that bonus heat. There is no heat generated in those kinds of facilities. So we've got these two things. We've got heat and we've got power, but particularly in cold climates, that heat has huge value.

Anthony:          Right and it sounds like, especially with direct heat not needing to be from a source that's as hot, the available resource under the ground is substantially larger. Meaning in order to access fluids that are 120 degrees Celsius or higher, there's only a few areas in the Province that might have that, but in order to access fluids that are 40, 50, 60 degrees and higher, probably anywhere in the Province you can get that. Is that right?

Cathy:             Yes. Yes, that's absolutely correct. So the areas where we can produce fluids of high enough temperatures using conventional systems. Conventional systems is we drill through those sediments, we extract the fluid, we bring it to the surface, extract the heat and then pump it back down. Now there are areas, for instance in the Northeast of Alberta, where there aren't any sediments. Unfortunately there there's little likelihood with current technology. If we wanted to invest in what's called enhanced or engineered geothermal systems, there is a possibility, but that like these closed loop systems is very much R&D.

Anthony:          Right. Okay. The closed loop systems have the R&D challenge and I suppose the conventional systems, at least in Alberta, have the risk where we don't totally have an idea of where it is and that's I suppose why the sectors in its nascent phase.

Cathy:             Yeah. So people think about Alberta, and of course Albertans know that there are many, many oil and gas wells, and that's absolutely correct. In fact there's over 500,000 wells that have been drilled in Alberta. From a geological perspective this is a gold mine but those wells were drilled to get oil and gas. For doing oil and gas exploration. So they weren't into the deep subsurface. So that's why we can say that the resource, call it the low load temperature resource, the resources that are say over 40 and under 100, we know those are ubiquitous throughout much of Alberta. Those deep higher temperature resources are less well known and, in particular, we can guess at what the temperatures are and we can guess at the temperatures because of essentially the information that is provided by the oil and gas wells. So we can guess at the temperatures but what we don't have a good handle on is the flow rates of those deep formations. That's why we actually do need to do exploration, from a power perspective, into the deep subsurface in Alberta.

Anthony:          Right. Maybe we can touch on the overlap between oil and gas and geothermal just a bit later but I just wanted to get your thoughts; so the Geothermal Resources Development Act, it's the new legislation that's now passed Third Reading back in December, it hasn't been proclaimed yet. The government is putting together the Regulations that will accompany the Act. But you've been working in the sector for quite some time and Alberta No. 1 is your project, your company, we're wondering what's it been like trying to develop a project before there's even been any regulatory framework put in place.

Cathy:             It was a lot easier.

                        <laughter>

Cathy:             That's the short answer. I think unfortunately government has failed to really understand what geothermal is. As a result they've created a regulatory framework that is unlikely to work. It's certainly unlikely to work well for geothermal because they haven't thought about the commercial aspects of it. So I talked about geothermal for conventional geothermal. We're reaching down about 4 kilometres and that's because we need high temperatures. But it also is because it's too costly to in fact drill deeper. So we might have deeper fluids, particularly in the area, not to the extreme where the mountains are, but close to the mountain front we know that the sedimentary basin there is very deep and there are high temperatures. But because of the differences in how we have to extract geothermal energy, that heat energy, we just can't afford. It's two things. Is one is the cost of those very deep wells to get that hotter fluid is not commercially viable. It doesn't give us enough of a boost in terms of our electricity production to compensate for those deep wells.

Anthony:          Right. Maybe just give us an idea of what's required for geothermal. You mentioned 120 degrees Celsius or above but the construction of a geothermal well is going to be pretty different than any of the oil and gas wells that have been drilled recently. Maybe could you talk about what's required for a geothermal well.

Cathy:             Yes. The biggest thing is volume. We have to move significant volumes of fluid. Let's do an analogy and that analogy I use is an elephant. Our wells and our fluid flow infrastructure is the elephant. Natural gas is a little tiny kitty cat. Some of the big disposable wells get up to kind of Malamute size and the biggest ones are Arabian horses. We're the elephant. I hope that sort of helps give people a graphical feeling of what in fact we're doing in geothermal. Those elephants cost money and moving elephants around costs money. So that's where the existing oil and gas infrastructure. So what is very valuable for geothermal are already constructed pads and roads. What is not useful, particularly for power generation, are the wells because those are the cats. We need an elephant.

Anthony:          Right. So just the diameter of the wellbore you need much bigger. You're talking, I think you mentioned in an earlier conversation we had, you're looking at kind of like 100 litres per second? Or 100?

Cathy:             Yes.

Anthony:          Yeah, so you're talking about a cubic metre every 10 seconds which in order to be able to produce that up a wellbore it needs to be pretty wide. Most natural gas wells and oil and gas wells will not be the wide. So you mentioned they're not useful. Certainly not from a production area context for electricity but at least for data points they provided some useful information. Is that right?

Cathy:             Yes. Absolutely. So they provide us with information about what does it look like down there to the depth that they have been drilled. But again, typically these are drilled, so that's why we have a good understanding of where these low, low temperature resources are. Because they're drilled through. They're actually being produced as we speak. It's those deep wells that we have the problem. We just don't have as much information. We can use those wells. We can use them as monitoring wells, for example. Just to give people another graphic, in terms of what that elephant is doing for us, is a typical oil and gas well, and maybe not even typical, will flow about 10 litres per second. That's enough fluid to fill half of an Olympic sized swimming pool in a day. Our elephant can flow enough fluid to fill 10 swimming pools a day. So, again, just a graphical representation of what it is that we need to do and why the costs are so high. It's interesting, getting back to the geo-exchange versus conventional geothermal, is that's a back difference. So if somebody has in their mind geo-exchange they're talking about, they're thinking in their mind, "Okay. I'm going to invest in this. It's going to cost me a few tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe a few hundred thousand dollars." and I say, "Well, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 30 million." and peoples jaws drop because they're thinking geo-exchange. They're not appreciating that elephant that we need to produce those 10 Olympic swimming pools that we need to flow on a daily basis in order to make power. I want to underscore power here. We need much less. Like that half Olympic swimming pool a day could heat a couple of acres of greenhouses. So it's a different order of magnitude.

Anthony:          The direct heat usage, is the resources required to drive that, might be substantially less than electricity.

Cathy:             Absolutely.

Anthony:          Yeah. Okay, well, the Geothermal Resources Development Act is basically, the government has even said this, is modelled after the Oil and Gas Conservation Act, right? And there've been a lot of comparisons in recent years between geothermal and oil and gas. A lot of the technology needed to develop either one, there's overlap between the two, but this current Act it imposes, or implements, a licencing regime which prior to this Act being proposed, and it's not yet even proclaimed, there is a total vacuum of regulatory framework. But it implements a licencing regime. There's also abandonment obligations it imposes and it sets the AER, the Alberta Energy Regulator, as the regulatory of geothermal development. Those are some of the gaps that have been, I suppose, filled but it sounds like there's probably other ones that need to get filled and some of them may be addressed as the Regulations come out. You can maybe tell us about some of, I know that you're familiar with what the Act says, so what are some of the remaining gaps that need to be filled?

Lorne:              Cathy, maybe just as kind of further, I know we're sort of shifting from the technical background which you guys have obviously covered I think very well, and moving more to the legislative and legal regulatory piece. From your prior discussion you guys have both talked about heat, value of heat, heat as a commodity and I think that's really kind of leading into, or makes me think about the process of obtaining rights and the distinction between, from my past and my practice as more of a traditional old school oil and gas practice, and it can compare in the contrast that you've experienced or are experiencing in respect of the acquisition of rights for heat as opposed to the oil and gas experience of the acquisition of mineral rights and the extraction that takes place there after. I think that's kind of an interesting connection to move from the technical piece and the obvious background that you guys have discussed about the differences in the technical aspects of what you're doing and how that's playing out in the legislative side in respect of acquiring and the necessary rights.

Cathy:             Absolutely. Lorne, do you want to continue on?

                        <laughter>

Lorne:              As you are adapting your project, you're focused on acquiring heat, and heat is a different thing than a mineral. Minerals in stick Alberta is an easy example that we're practicing in here. You can get 10 year rights in respect of gas or petroleum and gas or petroleum or petroleum, gas and coal, you can kind of identify what you're after. Your experience in acquiring your rights has been different. The Service Rights Act doesn't apply for geothermal development whereas for oil and gas development it does. That creates simple access issues that have to be addressed. That access issue isn't really confronted unless, or until, you've got the rights to enter the zones and obtain this heat. In respect of how heat is being treated versus how minerals are being treated, I think the legislation has kind of set out that, but I understand that's created some challenges for geothermal and I'm interested in your thoughts about that.

Cathy:             It has created challenges and when I said it was easier before there was a contemplated legislation, I was being a little bit facetious but not untrue. The constraint that we had prior to the legislation was that we had to find an area that had no pre-existing rights already awarded. So all the rights were still held by the Crown. Whether they be metallic, industrial or hydrocarbon rights. We were able to find one location, and we have a Crown grant to that location, below a particular formation that just happens to be called the Wabamun, which is in the deep. The important thing is it's in the deep subsurface where there were no existing rights that had been awarded. All the rights were held by the Crown. That was fine except that, in the context of Alberta, what we didn't fully appreciate when we first applied for this particular square of land, we had nominated 9 areas and this was the only one that there was no pre-existing rights to the deep subsurface. So that's why we were given it. But it turned out it was a stretch to actually develop it commercially. That's because in Alberta we need three things to make a geothermal project commercial. We need to sell heat, we need to sell power and we need carbon credits. That's because the price of power is so low and the price of heat is so low because our direct competitor's obviously natural gas. So we moved the project Northward and then started working in another area that has pre-existing rights. So Alberta No. 1 has been a test case, I think, for the Alberta government. We moved North to an area where we know that we have both heat off-takers as well as power off-takers and we can get those carbon credits. Because an underlying, and very important commercial aspect of geothermal is, that it is carbon zero and if you are selling power or heat into an existing grid then you get carbon credits that are dependent on the carbon intensity of that grid. So the more coal and natural gas fired electricity on your grid, the more you get in terms of carbon credits. So we come in at zero plus we get credit because we're zero. We're not a carbon emitter of any sort. So now we've moved North. We're into an area where the deep subsurface rights are held. What Bill 36 is saying is that the heat is held by the existing mineral rights holders. Under the Crown, the Crown, and for anybody from the US Crown equals government, it really is what the Crown means. In some of my international work I'm always talking about the Crown. It's like, "Who's the Crown?" So Crown is government. So the existing rights are already divested to companies. So the first thing that we had to was negotiate. So what the government told us to do was to receive non-objection from existing rights holders. So we have both industrial and metallic rights holders and hydrocarbon rights holders in our new location. We had to obtain non-objection from those rights holders through which we are drilling. We had this extra complication and also it created significant delay in the project because if we were drilling a natural gas well we would never have been asked to get those non-objections. It's not required. We're not having any impact on those other layers so the companies were saying like, "Why are you asking us? Do you know something we don't know?" and then saying, "No. Our expectation is that there is no impact on your resource."

Anthony:          To be fair, you do know something they don't know. It just doesn't relate to their business.

Cathy:             Yes. Yes, that's right. You are quite right. Then to our producing, where our target is into that deep subsurface, where we don't know whether or not we're going to have flow. We're pretty certain we're going to have temperature but we don't know that we're going to have the flow that we need. We now need to negotiate with the metallic and industrial mineral rights holders and the PNG rights holders. What we've had to do is we've had to purchase the industrial and metallic rights holders in order to apply for a well licence. The PNG rights holders had an extremely high cost. So this gets down to the economics. If a geothermal project has to buy PNG rights, or metallic and industrial rights, in order to drill its well it's not just going to be economic. Again that stems back to the value of the commodity. Essentially, a hydrocarbon is about 100 times, it's an order of magnitude more valuable than heat and electricity. We're just not competitive companies and we agree with the companies. Companies have spent millions of dollars to acquire their PNG rights. So we understand that there is concern. What we're trying to tell the government is that there has to be another way of doing this and that other way is that heat is not connected. So as a PNG rights holder you do not have the rights to the heat. As a metallic and industrial mineral holder you do not have access to the heat. That's because in this conventional geothermal system we can actually produce those and give them to the rights holders. Obviously we're not going to give them ,because if we're paying for the well we want to recover our costs, and we would essentially work out a deal with the existing hydrocarbon owner to provide them with their commodity that we're producing, or the metallic or industrial mineral rights holders to provide them with their commodity, and then the residual we're putting back down into the subsurface. Obviously, if we don't have a deal or either we don't own the rights or the existing rights holders are not interested in any kind of a deal, then it all goes back into the subsurface. So we're not removing anything or impacting those existing rights holders. If we, and we being a geothermal which is not an industry, there are three companies that are doing geothermal currently in Alberta, and those three companies are doing it in very different ways. One is a closed loop system. One is essentially co-production with an existing oil and gas operation, and then there's us, which is a conventional system. Basically trying to take heat out of the a fluid. Having the heat rights awarded to existing mineral rights holders is just it's not going to be economic because they've paid. Again, we agree, but we don't have the economics. We can't be commercial if we have to pay hydrocarbon rates for the heat.

Anthony:          Right and I imagine that having the conversation with oil and gas companies or existing mineral rights holders saying, "We would like to drill into your formation. Don't worry. It's not going to harm anything." probably doesn't go so well just because at the current state there's nothing in it for them.

Cathy:             Absolutely. There isn't anything in it for them and we haven't. So even though geothermal has been working, there are operating geothermal plants in sedimentary basins in Germany, in France, and many other places in the world, it has not been done in Alberta. Alberta's a very conservative Province and very much the operators are show me and we can't show them because we haven't got a project going yet. We can them in terms of what the other company is doing that is doing co-production. So we can use that but they don't want to necessarily share their data. We're between a rock and a hard place.

Anthony:          It seems kind of chicken and egg where you can't develop the technology without trying it out first and no one wants to try it out first until you show them the technology exists.

Cathy:             Absolutely. Actually it's not the technology. Making the power is the simple part. It's the subsurface reservoir. It's the implication of the subsurface reservoir. Having done a lot of reservoir management and worked with companies to recover fields which had been overproduced, as a scientist I don't necessarily want to say this, but it's much an art as it is a science. That's because we can't touch and feel the subsurface in the same way we can rock exposure, like a mine that's at the surface. We're sending these tentacles down these wells that are providing us with information, but it's still difficult to really get a holistic understanding of what that subsurface is, particularly until you actually start producing it.

Anthony:          Right.

Lorne:              It seems, Cathy, that certain things can be broken down into a matter of skill versus a matter of will and it seems clear the technical skill is readily available and it exists. It's really the main challenge it sounds like you are trying to deal with is that of the will. Sort of a commercial willingness to enter into arrangements that would have your developments penetrate zones that other interest holders currently have rights to, or alternatively if that wasn't possible, a legislative will to mandate these kinds of changes. I guess that's, to my mind, a significant purpose of this discussion today is trying to help people understand more about geothermal, more about its current activities, its future potential. I think, in my mind, for people to listen that have had a chance to listen to this and hear what you're doing and what some of your colleagues are doing, is to try to help with that education, develop that support and hopefully increase the level of will. Whether they be commercial parties or regulators and legislators to help enhance the level of will to just get this done. I don't know if that feels like a satisfactory kind of bow on the discussion but that's what I take from a lot of things you've shared with us today.

Cathy:             Yeah, Lorne, I think that's actually a very good summary. Is that this is not a technology challenge. This is very much a will. If the Government of Alberta really wants to see development of an industry they are going to need to take a much more proactive role. They are going to need to take a much more supportive role in proving to other operators in Alberta that this can work. This is the right thing for Alberta. This fits in terms of the value of the resource, and putting the expertise and the equipment and whatnot that we have in Alberta, back to work. But I don't want to oversell geothermal. Just it's not the panacea. It's not the magic bullet. It is only part of the energy transition and there is a bullet that I just want to throw in there. That bullet is actually marrying geothermal with carbon sequestration. So, what Alberta needs is they need geothermal energy. They need base load, firm energy. They also need carbon sequestration. We think we can do that with a geothermal facility. So we're not only carbon zero, we're actually a carbon negative. We can support the entire  industry by being carbon negative.

Lorne:              That's very helpful and I appreciate you taking so much of your time today to help educate us. Help educate listeners and just talk about the industry and what you've been up to. I really appreciate your time. Anthony, thanks again for all the work you've done on this and bringing your technological background and expertise. I think this has been really helpful. Again, thanks to both of your and hope to carry on the discussion after this podcast is over and possibly into the future on geothermal development in Alberta and beyond. Thanks everyone.

Cathy:             Thank you.

Anthony:          Thank you.

Lorne:              We hope you enjoyed this discussion and please watch for future podcasts on bio-fuels, hydrogen, nuclear and other future fuel developments. Thank you.