Well, I'll start on that one.
First of all, I think we need to go back to history a little bit. The project itself would make a lot of money. There's no question that it would have been able to charge a toll that many shippers were interested in. Why? Because it was an opportunity to sell oil to either California, where there was a need for more heavy oil, or Asia, where the margins were sufficient enough. From the financial side, there was no need for government subsidies whatsoever, because both the proponent at that time, which was Kinder Morgan, and the shippers themselves could have easily handled the costs associated with it.
As we know, we've had a regulatory system that keeps moving the goalposts when it comes to approvals. As soon as you start changing the goalposts all the time, and the length, and the delays and everything else, the costs start rising. Kinder Morgan, quite intelligently, said they'd had enough, that there's too much political uncertainty in this country and there was no point in making an investment when these goalposts are continually changing. They said, “We're going to get out of this.”
At that point, because the government said it does believe in responsible energy development, it said that it would support this project because it thinks it's important for it to get built, from the point of view of responsible energy development. The government has now bought the project. It is an asset. It might make enough money to cover it. There might be a loss. We'll have to see.
However, I think we have to ask the more serious question. It is on our regulatory system in Canada, which is absolutely throttling the energy industry right now. Is that something we want to have in this country? It's one of the biggest assets we have. That can be done in a responsible way.
In fact, there were all sorts of very interesting carbon analyses done. I really enjoyed the presentation done by your friend from England, sitting in England. I do know that one technology that people are thinking about in climate change is just actually drawing the carbon, the CO2, out of the air. That could actually be a far better approach than trying to go through a huge energy transition, with huge costs. It also means that we could also continue to develop our resources, which create huge benefits for the country as a whole.