Economic diversification, economic growth and expanding our trade with Asia are major concerns today.

In Alberta, for generations now, we have relied on oil and gas to reinforce our high standard of living.

Unfortunately for us, not only is the world oversupplied with oil, but our biggest customer, the United States, to whom we are handcuffed by a network of pipelines, is becoming an exporter and our competitor.

To add insult to injury, because the pipeline network to the south is oversupplied and undersized, Americans are able to purchase our products at a discount, refine it, and sell the end products to South America and Europe at a good profit.

To those who want to jump in and say ‘why don’t we sell our refined products to Europe?’ The answer is simple - we cannot even get our crude to the refineries on the east coast because there is no continuous pipeline.

Canada’s largest oil refinery is located in Saint John, New Brunswick, and it has a deep port which receives oil from abroad. According to the company website, it produces 300,000 barrels of refined oil products daily, half of which are sold to the U.S.

So, while our landlocked energy industry is laying off workers left and right, with Calgary being especially hard-hit, British Columbia is emerging as the best performing economy in Canada.

One of the brightest stars in BC is Teck Resources, and in particular, its steelmaking coal division.

Steelmaking coal is not well understood in Alberta or, for that matter, throughout the rest of Canada.

Much of this confusion arises because most of our information about coal is a by-product of a wider discussion around climate change.

In this context, all coal is lumped together and seen as black, dirty and best left in the ground. If we hold fast to this argument, one may be inclined to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In this case the “baby” is the less well-known steelmaking coal, and the bathwater is the more plentiful thermal coal. Unlike thermal coal, this baby is healthy and serves a real purpose in the world.

Global demand for steel is rising, even if there was a small correction during the past two years.

The reason for this growth is simple: a growing global population needs new and continually repaired infrastructure and all the other necessary things only steel makes possible.

New steel can only be made with steelmaking coal. Some people will point to electric arc furnaces as a good alternative to produce steel without coal, but that is not correct.

Electric furnaces re-use steel which is already made, sometimes adding more crude steel and other additives, to make special alloys and products.

Even though most of the steel globally is eventually recycled, this is not near enough to meet the needs of the growing world.

For example, a headline in The Economic Times of India last June read “India to equal world per capita steel consumption in ten years.”

The World Steel Association states that in 2015, the population in India consumed 60.6 kg. of steel per person. In the same year, China, with a population of just 9% larger than India, consumed 488.6 kg per person.

Canada, in the same year, consumed 404.6 kg of steel per person. The world average consumption in that year was 216.6 kg per person.

Clearly, the growth in India alone will contribute to the need for additional new steel.

Given that it takes .7 kg of steelmaking coal to produce 1 kg of new steel, the world demand for this type of coal will keep on growing.

Let’s remember, there is no replacement, as of yet, for the durability and safety of steel reinforcement in infrastructure for things like bridges, public transportation and buildings.

This gets back to my first point. Our neighbour to the west is leading the provinces in economic growth and most of Canada’s steelmaking coal is mined in British Columbia along the Alberta border.

That being said, there is a clear and immediate opportunity for our provincial government to assist Alberta’s distressed economy by diversifying our exports and adding steelmaking coal to the products we sell to the world.