By Allan Dowd VICTORIA, British Columbia, July 23 (Reuters) - Canada, the United States and Mexico pledged to co-operate on developing energy technology on Monday in an agreement that could reduce trade barriers to alternative energy development. The countries' top energy officials, who signed the five-year deal following a meeting on Canada's Pacific Coast, said it should also promote joint research in areas such as nuclear energy and renewable fuels. Promoting renewable and more energy-efficient technology will increase North America's energy security and help the environment, the officials said. The countries agreed in 2001 to promote energy security in the region, but a new pact was needed to provide a "formal framework" to resolving issues such as ownership of intellectual property rights, the officials said. "There are barriers that don't allow us specifically to share technology or work on the same projects, while this will allow us to do that," said Gary Lunn, Canada's minister of natural resources. "We've developed some amazing technologies ... but the real challenge is to take them to deployment or commercialization," Lunn said after the meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman and Georgina Kessel, Mexico's secretary of energy. Canada and Mexico are major energy exporters to the United States, but officials said the meeting did not deal with specific supply-related issues or projects such as Canada's oil sands. The meeting dealt only "in general terms" on issues such as regulatory approval of pipelines that would bring oil and gas from Alaska and northern Canada to major southern markets, Lunn and Bodman said. The officials also said they remained committed to aligning energy efficiency standards for consumers goods, including power demands for home computers operating in "stand-by" mode. Environmentalists at a news conference at the same hotel in Victoria where the energy officials met complained that increasing energy exports to the United States would increase tanker traffic on the British Columbia coast. Lunn downplayed the concern, saying that any efforts to build pipelines to the Pacific Coast from the oil sands in Alberta were years away from development. There is a moratorium on tankers traveling too close to portions of the Pacific Coast region. Lunn said the moratorium is voluntary, but some environmentalists contend the ships are legally banned from sensitive wilderness areas.
