Natural Resources committee  Is the question how much the efficiency is improving in certain supply-side industries?

Natural Resources committee  Hopefully, this addresses your question. There are two sides to that. One side is that if you are looking at it in terms of per-barrel production, how much better is the industry doing versus overall gross impacts? On per-barrel production, I can speak to oil sands. They are i

Environment committee  I haven't heard of any requirement. There's no return of water to the river right now. For the in situ operations, there's a new directive on increasing recycled water, but there's no mention of return of water to the river. As far as surface mining goes, I have not heard of any

Environment committee  That may be the case, but I have not heard that.

Environment committee  Yes. It is not my area of expertise, but that's what I have understood. The geologists say that it has undergone degradation by bacteria over geological time, broken off the light ends, and you're left with the heavy big molecules and the heavy oil.

Environment committee  I don't know, sorry.

Environment committee  Dry stackable means that you don't need containment. It means you can put them anywhere; they will not flow. You can then reclaim the areas if you have this solid surface. That's the difference between that and the tailings ponds, where you have to contain them. With dry stackabl

Environment committee  Not really. It was something Dr. Hamza mentioned earlier. Anything you do to the tailings to improve water recovery--and one that was commercially applied was adding calcium sulphate to the system to improve water recovery and, ultimately, reclamation. Unfortunately, the extra ca

Environment committee  There are two main drivers. One is the government coming down with new directives saying they must do this, that they must accomplish this amount of fines capture by this year to produce this kind of trafficable solid. That has happened with the Alberta government. Also, the comp

Environment committee  We're mainly looking at what leads to certain amounts of VOC release and any way to reduce that. We are not looking specifically at the impacts of VOC release on the environment. We're looking at technologies, the science behind reducing those releases, and technologies to reduce

Environment committee  Our particular focus is mostly on surface mining issues around the VOC release to the tailings ponds from solvent use and so on.

Environment committee  During the extraction process they add solvents, which are quite volatile. They do try to recover as much as they can during the process, but some is lost to the tailings streams they send to the pond. We're asking why they can't recover as much and then what technologies can imp

Environment committee  That observation has been made at the Syncrude ponds, but not at the Suncor ponds. Why do you have different populations of microbes in one versus the other? I'm not a biologist, so I can't address that.

Environment committee  You're asking me the same question?

Environment committee  I'm sorry, I would have no idea what that would be.