Alberta minister accepts “Country of the Year” award.

Excerpts from Industry minister Jim Prentice speech in Houston while accepting award:

Canada has a deep and long relationship with Texas, and my home province of Alberta is often said to share many similarities because of the abundance of oil and cattle - and cowboy hats worn with a swagger. However, the similarities do not end there, as the city where I live, Calgary, is the financial centre for business in Alberta, just as Houston is for Texas. Several large Canadian companies have a significant presence in the Houston area. Of course, oil and gas leaders such as EnCana and TransCanada may be the first to come to mind, but Canadian firms from other sectors are also doing business here: BlackBerry inventor Research In Motion in the high-tech sector, the Royal Bank of Canada in the financial sector, and Air Canada, just to name a few. Canada occupies a unique position in the global energy equation. We have a lot of energy, enough to make us the sixth-largest energy producer on the planet, and we are the only OECD country whose energy exports are actually increasing. Canada has 14 per cent of global oil reserves, second only to Saudi Arabia. We are the second-largest exporter and the third-largest producer of natural gas in the world. We are the world's second-largest generator of hydroelectricity, providing 13 per cent of current global production. Regarding nuclear energy, Canada's Cameco Corporation alone accounts for 20 per cent of the world's uranium, and our world-class CANDU reactor technology can be found around the world. The U.S. is the world's largest energy producer, consumer and importer. It produces roughly 70 per cent of its energy needs and imports the rest, mainly oil. That's where we come in. After your own production, Canada is the United States' largest supplier of energy - electricity, oil, natural gas and uranium. Annual exports are close to $100 billion. Concerning oil, Canada has been the largest supplier to the U.S. since 1999 - not Saudi Arabia, not Kuwait, nor any other OPEC producer. In 2006, we sent over 2.3 million barrels per day to the U.S. - 1.8 million barrels of crude and another half million of refined product. Canadian supply represents 17 per cent of U.S. imports, or 11 per cent of your consumption. Concerning natural gas, Canada supplies 10 billion cubic feet per day - 85 per cent of your imports, or 16 per cent of your consumption. And Canadian production is growing, mainly because of the oil sands in Alberta. Currently, Canadian oil production is some 2.6 million barrels a day, roughly half from the oil sands. By 2030 this will increase to five million. The proven reserves in Canadian oil sands rank second in the world; again, only Saudi Arabia has more proven reserves. But the potential goes well beyond the Alberta oil sands. The proposed pipeline from the Arctic's Mackenzie Delta, once up and running, will be able to provide additional supplies of natural gas for the Canadian and American markets. But we want to move our exports up the value chain. In addition to low-value bitumen and medium-value synthetic crude oil, we want to export finished gasoline, diesel and petrochemical products. We want to create modern, environmentally clean refining capacity to help supply the American market through a dedicated product pipeline. Canada is also a significant factor in the oil and gas equipment and services business. Canada exports more than $1.4 billion worth of equipment and services a year - mostly to the United States. Canada is a world leader in the development of specialized oil sands extraction equipment, advanced drilling technologies, offshore drilling modules, winterized drilling rigs and enhanced automated techniques. It also offers world-class services in pre_drilling, drilling, logistics management, and offshore engineering and project management, to name just a few examples. So, as you can tell, Canada is indeed a player in all aspects of the oil and gas industry, and the U.S. benefits throughout the value chain, from raw commodity to hi_tech equipment. The challenge, however, is a race against time. Since 1990, industry has reduced the CO2 intensity of oil sands production by 45 per cent. New legislation and regulations will require even more dramatic reductions. In the meantime, the industry continues to act. It recycles its natural gas by_products and uses them for petrochemical feedstock. It recycles petroleum coke by_products and produces synthetic gas. The result is an industry that is a net user of natural gas today and could become a net supplier of natural gas to North America tomorrow. The industry has found ways to recycle its water and reclaim its tailing ponds, and it's looking at ways to inject carbon dioxide into geological formations - to return the carbon to the ground it came from. It partners with wildlife and conservation groups to preserve habitat. And one oil sands company, Suncor, has even been recognized as one of the best companies in the world for going beyond what is required to operate in an environmentally sustainable way. We've come a long way. Industry has reduced the amount of greenhouse gases it emits and the amount of water it uses per unit of energy. But the total amount of energy that the industry produces continues to rise. So we need to go still further. We need new ideas and new technology. World energy demand will not abate any time soon. In fact, it will continue to grow. And energy will be a North American advantage because we have such abundance. American investment has helped build the Canadian energy sector. Selling to the_American market touches every part of Canada's economy and every region. We all have a lot at stake in keeping this trading relationship going strong through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Canada is the biggest and most stable supplier of energy to the United States in the world. That energy security is more important now than it was 20 years ago when NAFTA was negotiated - and will be even more important in the future. So what happened in Canada with oil and gas under NAFTA? Free trade and open investment, coupled with price deregulation, created a joint Canada-U.S. market. When artificially lower Canadian domestic prices ended, domestic and foreign investment flooded into our oil and natural gas sector, with U.S. companies - many of them headquartered in Houston - representing the largest portion. With this investment came great innovation. Growing the oil sands and initiating Atlantic offshore production were both but pipe dreams 20 years ago. Today, both are commercial. The oil sands in particular are now booming. As Canadian oil production expands, it is being delivered farther south. In the last two years, pipelines have reversed direction, and Canadian oil now reaches refineries at the oil hub in Cushing, Oklahoma, and at refineries in Beaumont, Texas. And foreign investment is not a one-way street. The impressive oil and gas sector expansion in Canada led to growth in domestic Canadian companies as well. These companies are now investing in foreign markets. For example, last year Encana announced another investment in Texas, this time $2.5 billion to acquire the remaining half of the Amoruso Field, part of the Deep Bossier formation, in East Texas. The Canada-U.S. energy relationship may be the most important thing to business people in Houston and Calgary, but the overall Canada-U.S. trading relationship itself is the most comprehensive of any two border nations in the world. It accounts for more than US$1.6 billion a day in cross-border commerce, which boils down to over $1 million every minute in cross-border transactions. Our two countries benefit from one of the most heavily integrated investment and trade relationships, as well as supply and distribution chains, in the world. But the story of our shared economic partnership and prosperity goes beyond our bilateral relationship to include our other NAFTA partner and your southern neighbour - Mexico. The North American trading relationship is the deepest of any three nations - and we all have a shared interest and responsibility to secure its continued growth and prosperity. We “make stuff together” more than we compete with each other. There is a North American supply chain. And it's the efficiency of that supply chain that allows the businesses and the workers on this continent to compete effectively with Asia and with Europe. In the just-in-time manufacturing world we live in, we cannot burden the supply chain with unnecessary delays, added costs or other factors that undermine productivity. We are concerned with what we see as a gradual “thickening” of the border in recent years and what may be an erosion of the economic efficiencies we attained under NAFTA. This needs to be addressed by all three partners. The inevitable conclusion of all this is that the management of our joint border is an extremely important element of our joint economic prosperity in these very turbulent times. This must be done carefully.