Thank you. You're right that an awful lot of numbers are being thrown around lately on what the cost of carbon sequestration would be. I was here last week when the Pembina Institute gave out those numbers, which I believe were not for sequestration but for buying your way into compliance through the use of offsets. I wouldn't want to confuse numbers presented as offsets and carbon sequestration numbers.
Because we represent a number of companies that produce different industrial products, ICON has tended to use the common denominator of dollars per tonne of CO2. That's because we have people who produce electricity, bitumen, synthetic crude, different minerals, and hydrogen, and we need a common denominator to do that. It is up to individual companies to do their project-specific work on the cost of carbon capture and storage for their operations. Particularly with reference to the oil sands, as Dr. Keith has said, each of the projects is very different, whether you're in mining or SAGD, or whether you're doing gasification, a minimal amount of upgrading, or a significant amount of upgrading. That all enters into the calculation of what your sequestration costs will be.
As a group, ICON has not gone into differentiating that because we wanted to present a common front. But I understand the interest in having a number like that. Some of those discussions have taken place within the industry association on a very informal basis, quite apart from the association of companies known as ICON.
Gasification is a very topical issue in the oil sands. There was an article in the paper this morning about the amount of natural gas from the Mackenzie delta that could be diverted to the oil sands. There is also the fact that the Alberta government sees value in the petroleum coke and asphaltenes that are byproducts of the oil sands operations. There is interest in that gasification process.
We looked at gasification for a new facility, and costs would be in the range of $4.50 to $7.50 per barrel for a complete system. I don't know if any one company has done those calculations, but my company has started to look at those for our subsequent phases. We believe the cost for a new generation project with collection of CO2 from gasification would be in that range. I do not want to leave you with the impression that that would involve 100% capture, because there are other sources of energy, including some natural gas.