Environment committee  This is a very good question, actually. I am very optimistic with what we see around. The technology that we are investigating now will be in the very near future. There's also a change in the pace of the industry in trying to experiment with us in many cases with these new tec

Environment committee  This is a very critical question that, with the permission of the chairman, I don't like to answer. We look at all technologies and we have opinions about them. We actually produced reports for Mr. Gradek and others. If he's interested, he can make the reports and the conclusions

Environment committee  I'll give you a general answer. The oil sands industry deals with huge amounts of materials being moved, and they have to be moved fast in a certain way. They go mainly with technologies that can deal with huge amounts of materials. They don't want to have any kinks in the operat

Environment committee  Actually, I have a correction. I tried to get away from--

Environment committee  --intimating anything. I said that there are other technologies. There are many of them, and the industry is looking at all of them and they will select the one that would be in their best interest. This is the case with the industry all the time. There are a lot of technologies

Environment committee  Actually, I don't have the numbers with me, but it is in manufacturing and in secondary-type industries. It's in equipment, monitors, and this high-tech type of activity. The numbers are available, and actually CERI published a report maybe three years ago that has all of the num

Environment committee  They have similar principles, but the application is different. There is another company called Minminer that's almost at the same stage as Mr. Gradek and is working currently with Suncor. They are all trying very hard to convince the industry that these things work. We looked

Environment committee  I think maybe one of them will move much faster than the others, depending on the acceptance of the oil industry. Talking about government money to support these things is a good push, but ultimately, no matter how much you spend on supporting the technology, if the industry is

Environment committee  In principle, what you need to do is remove the oil from the sand, or from the soil that it's attached to, with any process that will dislodge the oil from the sand. The way they used to do it in the oil sands, in the early days, was like a washing machine. You put all of the oil

Environment committee  I can answer that. As part of our activities we actually look at different technologies, and we look at it for small companies like Mr. Gradek's. We also look at it for maybe larger companies that are interested in certain technologies. So we actually evaluate a lot of these tec

Environment committee  If I can add one thing, the dry stackable tailings have only 15% water left. The other tailings have much more than that. The tailings in the tailings ponds have 75% water. So having only 15% water in the tailings is great.

Environment committee  First of all, the statement, if I can just say it again, is that the lack of science at the beginning caused the situation where there was underestimation of the size required for the tailings ponds. When you put the tailings in tailings ponds, the fluid tailings stay in the pond

Environment committee  I'm coming to that. I'm sorry, I just wanted to set that straight first. We have been working in this area for maybe twelve years or so. You have visited the oil sands and seen how large they are. It is very difficult to move all that huge machinery. So we have worked with the i

Environment committee  I think Dr. Kasperski can answer that.

Environment committee  Not in my area. I really cannot answer that question. I think it's a very valid question, and it's based on scenarios that some economists can dig down into it and get the information.