The technology that I'm using is called supercritical fluid extraction, which has been used on a lab scale to extract bitumen from oil sands successfully.
Right now we're looking at carbon dioxide. It uses carbon dioxide at about 40 degrees and at relatively high pressure. It acts as a solvent that can extract the bitumen from the oil sands, and it can do that with little or no water.
Carbon dioxide is one example of a supercritical solvent, but there are many other compounds that could be used as supercritical solvents. You bring them up to pressure and temperature, you use them, you bring the pressure down, you recover your bitumen, and you recycle your solvent. So it's essentially almost a closed process in terms of the solvent. It needs little to no water.
Right now we're looking at water to develop a continuous process that would be able to handle large masses of ore, but that's what we need to prove on a pilot scale. Can we do this at a large enough scale?
One of the big challenges is looking at changing their infrastructure completely, changing the way things are done completely. It's also a technology that needs development, and it's going to take some time to develop.
The water extraction process is working. We're fine-tuning it, but it's working. How do we impose such a large change?