As I said in my opening remarks, we've been in business for 130 years. There is no end to the challenges of extracting hydrocarbons from underground. Every year we're constantly faced with opportunities to do it better, how to recover a greater percentage of the oil and natural gas that's in a particular reservoir, how to do it with a smaller footprint environmentally, and how to do it more safely.
Our company and our majority shareholder to the south have both been committed for decades to research and development. We've actually considered it an advantage to spend money up front on taking on these challenges. We set up a state-of-the-art research lab in Calgary that's wholly owned by Imperial. It resides on the campus of the University of Calgary. We employ a great number of Ph.D. scientists at that facility. Every year the business brings to that research facility challenges and opportunities, and it's, “Gee, if we could just do this, look at that resource we could develop.”
Many of the challenges that are brought forward to this team in this day and age are environmental in nature. We've really steered our efforts towards working on extraction-based technologies that dramatically reduce our environmental footprint.
One of the challenges in the oil sands, which is a huge resource estimated to be 170 billion barrels of recoverable in place, is it's very thick. In the reservoir it has the consistency some have described as that of peanut butter. It won't flow naturally on its own, so the challenge is making it flow.
Historically the technologies have used heat to burn natural gas, generate steam, and basically melt the bitumen that's underground in the case of in situ. We're working on alternatives to that, solvent-based technologies that would not require consumption—