First of all, most of the oil sands companies, which are the higher emitters, are publicly traded. They are competing for capital in global markets. People can choose not only other oil and gas producers but any other commodity or any other sector, so they have to find a really good return on investment to get that money.
Obviously, that's been very difficult in the last few years with the policies we've had. Having an emissions cap on top of that tells investors, “I don't know if I can grow. I don't know if I can produce more in the future. With this policy, I can't; I know that for sure.”
No one wants to invest in capital-intensive operations without the promise of future growth. Even though the cap has not yet been implemented, it has really been a downer on the ability to track investment. Even with LNG—and everyone seems to like LNG nowadays—that still increases the emissions, as was mentioned already this morning.
When you're trying to go to Asia and commit buyers to offtake agreements and to spending billions of dollars, they do ask these questions: How does the emissions cap play into this? Will you be able to produce that LNG that I'm now committing billions of dollars to? Can I get that offtake? Will it be producing in 15 years?
There is no good answer to that question with the emissions cap in place. For the purposes of this committee, I want to point out that in the paper.... I went through it with some economists. Canadian heavy oil is higher emitting. It is on average, however, now only 1% to 3% higher emitting than the global average in archetype oil. It is not exceptionally higher emitting anymore. I think that's a bit of a misconception from 10 years ago.
The important thing for you to note is that it is less high emitting than other heavy oils. You can't easily displace heavy oil with light oil. We aren't getting cleaner Permian or Saudi to displace Canadian heavy oil; we'd be getting more Venezuelan and more Iraqi, which have higher emissions.
On a global level, you will not reduce emissions by displacing Canadian heavy oil. You will be trading a larger market for Venezuelan, Iraqi and Colombian in particular.