I'm going to discuss specifically the water use and the SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, aspects of the oil sand business. I hope to leave you with three pretty clear messages: that SAGD uses only non-potable sources of water from deep aquifers; that SAGD companies are moving more and more towards saline water use as time goes on; and that the technology is likely to significantly improve water use in SAGD over the coming years.
First of all, I understand that you didn't fly down to Surmont. This slide, nonetheless, shows you the overall footprint of the Surmont phase one development. You can see the central facility in the front of the picture and the two well pads up towards the top of the picture. That's the overall footprint.
The next slide is a picture of the processing facilities. The only reason I included it is that it shows that the processing facilities for SAGD are mostly dominated by water treatment. SAGD, as you know, is steam-assisted gravity drainage, whereby we inject steam into the reservoir to melt the bitumen. That requires a significant amount of heat; and when you're turning it into steam, it also requires that clean water be used in the process. A lot of the process is dedicated towards cleaning up the produced water, so we can reuse it—cleaning up the water we get from the deep aquifers, because it's not potable or clean enough to put through a boiler, and then processing that water through the plant.
The next slide shows at a high level how the water process works in SAGD. First of all, the thinner blue arrow coming up is our make-up water, the water that we take from the Grand Rapids formation. It's non-potable, but is classified as freshwater because it is less than 4,000 parts per million in dissolved solids; it has about 2,500 parts per million dissolved solids.
If you look at the schematic on the left-hand side of the chart, we turn 2.5 barrels of this water into steam in the plant and then inject it into the reservoir. This process recovers one barrel of bitumen. That water is then produced back with the bitumen, and 90% of it is treated and then recycled. Then a quarter of a barrel is disposed into the deep formation you can see there, the Fort McMurray formation. Then that quarter of a barrel is produced from the Grand Rapids sand and is mixed with the 90% that's recycled, and the process starts again. So we use about a quarter of a barrel of water from the aquifer for every barrel of oil or bitumen that we produce.
We also produce water vapour of about a quarter of a barrel of water, associated with the combustion process. That's what the top of the diagram shows. So we actually produce into the hydrological cycle the same amount of water we take from the aquifer, if you follow me. I'll get back to that on that last slide, when I talk about technology.
The reason we're using what's classified as freshwater is that's all we can find near the Surmont lease. It's what's underneath our lease. So we've been exploring over the past five years or more for more saline sources of water, trying to find water that would be in the 4,000 to 10,000 range of salinity. We've gone as far as 60 kilometres away from the plant, and we recently found some sources of water that would be in that 4,000 to 10,000 range. But the water is quite a significant distance from the plant; it could be easily 30 kilometres from the plant we'd have to pipe that water back to Surmont, and treat it and then put it through the process. But we are actively exploring for more saline water so we can reduce the use of the water from the existing aquifer.
On the final slide, as far as the future is concerned, our future projects have been designed for 95% recycling rather than 90%. Of course, when you go from 90% to 95% recycling, it halves the amount of water you need to use. As I said, we're looking to increase the use of more saline water and we're actively exploring for that. We've spent $70 million over the last five years just exploring for saline water to use in the plant.
We have done a huge amount of research—at least $300 million—and will do between $300 million and $500 million of research over the next five years on oil sands activity.
One of the main focuses is to adjust the steam-oil ratio, because that reduces the cost of buying gas, reduces the greenhouse gas emissions, and reduces the water emissions. There are several encouraging technologies for adjusting steam-oil ratio. One example is injecting solvents with the steam.
We are also doing research into how to economically capture the water from the combustion, that quarter of a barrel I spoke about earlier. If we can do that in an economic way, we could virtually eliminate the need for any external water source for SAGD operations.