I think both perceptions are correct. We have come quite a way in enlarging the body of information on the toxicity of the individual compounds. I'm going to talk about “on the lease”. The major issue that seems to be in everyone's mind is the viability of what is called the “end-pit lakes strategy”. We now have an understanding of this through a number of test ponds that were constructed on Syncrude's lease. They moved to a demonstration pond, and they're now moving to the first full-scale demonstration of the approach. We've undertaken a lot of research in the toxicity of the individual chemicals. We know what the effects are at different levels of biota. We know what percentage of a lake should be relatively shallow water that will support vegetation around the edges. We know how much should be deep. We know something about the viability of the breakdown of the naphthenates and materials that will be in the system.
The next step, as you move that up operationally, is to build a 50-hectare lake in which you have tailings material in the bottom. You look over a ten-year period to see how this develops, and you determine, based on the modelling that you've done, whether it actually will work. Have we done the preliminary stuff so that we can move to the demonstration stage? Yes. Have we done the demonstration stage? No.
In the wider environment, people have done a lot of monitoring of the potential impacts on the Athabasca watershed. This is what RAMP has been doing for fifteen years. This is baseline-level monitoring. It is not research activity. It doesn't consider the aerial transport of contaminants from leases and the potential deposition in the environment. We've never actually looked at an integrated survey of the sediments in the Athabasca River to see if there is transportive material, how much of it is natural, and how long it's been occurring according to core drilling. There's lots of information, questions that still need to be answered.