[English translation not provided.]

I am practicing my French, and some days I practice better than others.

Mr. Speaker, what I was trying to say there was today’s final statement will be on fracking technology. Our environment, our water and our land are very important.

Industry is working very hard to reduce the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. General Electric and Statoil, a Norwegian oil and gas producer, are working on waterless fracking. Instead of water, these companies plan to use supercritical carbon dioxide to enable the flow of gas and oil to their wells.

Supercritical carbon dioxide is between its gaseous and liquid states. It could be supplied under high pressure in a tank. There are some challenges yet. Collecting carbon dioxide and hauling it into fracking sites is currently more expensive than using water. That statement alone probably says we might not be putting the right price or the right value to what our water really is worth.

GE and Statoil hope to actually inject carbon dioxide into the well and then recapture it at the wellhead. It would then be used again at the next well. If this technology was used widely, much more carbon dioxide would be needed than is readily available. That probably means we could find new ways to capture carbon dioxide from those coal-fired power plants and we’d have a reason to put it somewhere else rather than flaring or venting it.

Two companies have just started a three-year project that would cumulate in a technological demonstration before full commercial launch. This strikes as very promising to me, because with the exploration efforts involving fracking currently on hold in the Northwest Territories, time will be certainly on our side.

It may be that fracking might be done here one day, and perhaps this is the technology for the North. This may not be the complete answer or the only solution, but what it does is it demonstrates that

people are looking in the right direction to the right types of solutions. They’re putting the environment first.

So as I said… [English translation not provided.]