North American energy leaders agree to data exchanges

The top energy officials in the United States, Canada and Mexico met Monday to agree to new measures to share and better integrate data on North America’s energy.

It was the first time the countries’ energy leaders met in seven years, and they pledged to continue meeting on the issues important to each nation.

{mosads}“We had a really, really productive meeting,” United States Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told reporters after the meeting.

Speaking of the data integration effort, Moniz said, “we have discovered that our data are not always consistent or available to all of us.”

The new cooperation efforts include ensuring that energy infrastructure maps agree with one another, sharing publicly available data about energy and better coordinating information and efforts about human resources development in energy industries.

“It isn’t that we don’t have energy infrastructure maps, it’s just that they don’t agree,” Moniz joked. “So we will need to rectify that.”

Greg Rickford, minister of natural resources in Canada, frame the meeting as a follow-up to the more wide-ranging meeting the three countries’ leaders had earlier this year.

“We share our respective leaders’ visions for turning North America into the most competitive and dynamic region in the world, and that energy security — an elevated topic obviously in foreign affairs today — is critical not just to our economic and environmental performance, but as well to our national, and one might say continental, security,” Rickford said.

The other major point of discussion was Mexico’s energy reform package that passed this year, which seeks to open oil, gas and electricity markets to private companies.

Pedro Joaquín Coldwell, Mexico’s energy secretary, said his staff gave a presentation that focused on the opportunities for American and Canadian companies in the energy reform.

“Mexico underwent a very comprehensive energy reform and changed the  paradigm going from an energy sector where only the state actors could take part, going to an open sector with competitiveness, creating markets and setting up regulatory agencies that set up very stringent technical norms,” he said through a translator.

Moniz said the Energy Information Administration will be the lead agency for the United States in the new data integration efforts.

Rickford used the press conference after the meeting as an opportunity to advocate for the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

“There are already 70 pipelines safely delivering oil and gas across our borders every day. Naturally, our government thinks that number should grow to 71,” he said while explaining the energy connections between the United States and Canada.

“Keystone XL obviously can help end dependence on insecure sources of crude, with a secure and reliable supply from Canada.”

But Moniz didn’t mention Keystone. And both leaders largely avoided answering a question about what current low oil prices mean for Keystone, which depends on relatively high oil prices to be economical.