That's a great question. I'm glad you asked me that one, because the thing about the Canadian oil sands is they have a 37% interest in the Syncrude oil sands project. I don't know if you had the chance to visit that one, but that's the second oldest. It has been in business for about 30 years, has a lot of history, and is very profitable. If you look at the bottom here, you have the existing oil sands operations, which are ranked at the top of our list in terms of returns, so that makes them highly desirable investments. Everyone wants to be in this business.
Does the accelerated capital cost allowance impact this return? Well, probably not at this point, because Syncrude is paying taxes. Did it help them get to this level? Yes, probably during their evolution it did.
What makes these numbers work—this is what you have to understand about oil sands—is that they take that raw bitumen and convert it, in the case of Syncrude, into a barrel of high-quality light oil. That's the upgrading process. They add a lot of value to that barrel. They mine it and upgrade it; and as well, what you're looking at with oil sands is large reserves. I forget the exact number of reserves at Syncrude, but when you depreciate those reserves over their life, you get a low investment cost. So if you put the fact that they maximize the value, maximize the revenue, and put that against the cost, which is spread over millions of barrels, the economics look great.
This is mainly historical, and this is the whole key to the oil sands. You have to separate the accounting from the economics of it. For those companies that are in business, this is why they want to be in oil sands. What we're talking about here with the accelerated capital cost allowance are the projects that are to be built. Syncrude and Suncor, to a certain extent, are benefiting from history, because they've been in this business a long time. They have established their resource base over a long time. It's tough to compare these numbers to a new project.