I appreciate that, Mr. Chairman. Let me make a bit of a preamble comment as a follow-on to Alan Scott's comments.
It's virtually certain, I think, that the oil sands will be producing three million barrels a day within the next decade or so. In Beijing last week, one of the economists from the energy and utility board suggested that by 2047 they'll be producing nine million barrels a day, which would put Alberta, if not at the front, very close to the front as number one producer in the world. Of course, that brings pressures, not only the labour pressures that we've talked about but actually the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emission pressures. We'll be talking about hundreds of millions of tonnes of emissions. What's fascinating about that is what we've said and concluded, that this will put Canada in the position of having the world's largest resource of CO2, as opposed to the biggest problem.
We're looking at a number of options for dealing with it. The obvious one is to hide it away, which is what sequestration largely is. You kind of stuff it in the basement and forget it, and that's okay. You may get extra value by trying to enhance oil recovery or coal-bed methane production. But the real value comes if you turn it into a product. And we have a scheme we're pursuing to actually convert CO2 into algae, use the algae to then produce hydrogen and methane, take the remaining biomass and turn it into other products and materials, ranging from biofuels to plastics to whatever.
We're quite excited, and so is industry, about the potential of this. We've been trying to encourage the federal government, NRCan, to support this work; so far, I might add, without success but with good encouragement. We're hopeful the two will come together soon.
The final thing to comment on is not only that oil production or hydrocarbon production creates problems, but we have many things that have been classed as wastes that, with new kinds of thinking, you can turn into value. I'm referring to what we call our integrated manure utilization system, which actually takes cattle manure from feedlots and turns it into power, takes clean water out that can be used for the cattle, and creates compost and chemicals for fertilizers and various things. So there's a lot of actually exciting things happening nowadays, really positive things.