Bonjour, et bienvenue a Calgary.
I'm going to talk about three topics that are fairly exciting for Canadian Natural in terms of water and water use in the oil sands.
The first one I want to talk about is our new technology of carbon dioxide use in tailings. It is much the same as what Mr. Fordham talked about in reference to CT usage; we use carbon dioxide to achieve much the same results.
As you can see, in our case we use carbon dioxide to create NST, non-segregating tailings. The picture shows graphically how the material has settled into the bottom part of the cylinders, which essentially is the fines settling out of it. This reduces our use of fresh water and gives us a smaller tailings footprint. Our tailings are solidified sooner, which gives a reclamation surface. It reduces our carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 11%, and overall, through an integrated process, it just saves a lot of factors together.
Borrowing from Mr. Fordham's slide showing you his technique of demonstrating the process, I'm showing a very similar slide so that you can see the similarities between the two processes. We had a thickener of tailings, a carbon dioxide injection to produce thickened tailings or, in our case, non-segregating tailings.
The second item I want to talk to you about is water storage. It's a new feature in the oil sands development, but it's now a common practice for all new projects to develop water storage on-site. We have developed a 1.7 million cubic metre storage facility of raw water from the Athabasca River. This provides us with approximately 30 days of operation, assuming there are 1.3 metres of ice on it.
It was designed three years prior to the IFN coming into place, so it was not the IFN that drove us; it was actually our own recognition of the issue of managing water properly. We made sure it was operational two years prior to the operation of the Horizon project to ensure that we had that water while we were coming into operation, not afterwards. It is the best management practice, and it was designed to meet stakeholder and aboriginal concerns.
The third and last item I want to talk to you about is developing a compensation lake for the fisheries habitat loss. It was a Fisheries and Oceans Canada requirement to do this, and we have done so. We have created a lake, and we filled it in May 2008. To date it has exceeded our expectations. The water quality exceeds what we expected it would be, and already we have fish in the lake; five of the eight species we wanted in this lake are there presently.
The lake replaces the lost habitat in both the Tar and Calumet rivers. It replaces it at a ratio of 2:1, so for every one unit of habitat lost, we replace two into the lake. This design was based on four years of intensive stakeholder consultation and scientific workshops. We brought in science and we brought in traditional environmental knowledge. We brought in a number of factors, and this met the federal requirements under Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Finally, I wanted to provide you with some statistics on the lake. They are there for your interest.
This summarizes the three topics I wanted to bring to your attention, and I believe I've done so within your timelines.
Thank you.
I'll pass it over to Mr. Fox.