Natural Resources Committee on Oct. 19th, 2006

[Christian Paradis, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Chair, if I still have some time, perhaps I could share it with my colleagues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Lee Richardson]

You have three minutes. Go ahead.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

I just have a few quick questions here. First, to set the context, you look at the map here and you see all this beautiful brown stuff, the oil sands in Alberta, and maybe you should have had Saskatchewan showing up. I'm a member from Saskatchewan, for those who don't know.

Just how much of the surface area of this is actually used? What is exposed, just to put this totally in context? You don't have a little pink dot or whatever for what actually is the surface area.

[Howard Brown]

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say I'm from Regina.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

We'll forgive you for that.

[Howard Brown]

It was a grave disappointment to me when I saw that the draft deck showed only Alberta and did not treat Saskatchewan symmetrically.

With respect, I don't know the answer to your question on what the percentage is. At a guess, I would say it's one percent of this area.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Roughly how many square miles is it, or, since we're in metric nowadays, square kilometres? Do you have any idea?

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

The tailings—the sand, the water, and so on—that are left are in the order of about maybe 50 or 60 square kilometres.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

If it's 50 or 60 square kilometres, then this is actually a really small area when you come to think of it, for all the imagery of a huge, massive eyesore.

[Howard Brown]

There actually is a dot there, but it's too small to really show up.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

But that makes the point I was going after, which brings me to where I want to go with my further thought. I may ask for a little bit of crystal ball gazing here, but it's interesting that you note the new technologies that are coming online.

Right now, it's mostly open pit mining, with some in situ steam-cyclic mining being done. What would you say would be the mixture right now? Most of the oil produced would be open mine, and massively so, correct?

[Howard Brown]

Yes, and most of the development will be in situ.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Looking into the future—and maybe Dr. Hamza would be the best one to tell me this—what sort of technology evolution can you see that would allow us to go from just beyond the stock and begin to work? I realize Fort McMurray is chosen because it's nearest to the surface, but what do we see for technology that would allow us to go beyond that dot and work more effectively in deeper areas, deeper deposits of oil sands in Saskatchewan and throughout Alberta? If that's possible and it's beginning to hopefully go that way, then I'll follow up with what impacts that will then have on economics, the environment, etc.

Take it away as much as you can go with it.

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

Two-thirds of the oil sands in place are not accessible by either method, by the surface or in situ. If they are deep enough to be exploited in situ, there is no major problem. There are technologies available right now to exploit them.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

And that's deeper than what? What level are we talking about?

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

That may be 100 metres or so.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

It has to be below 100 metres?

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

It's 100 to 140 metres, but I'm not sure about the exact number.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Okay, but roughly it has to be below that for in situ.

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

Maybe, but I'm not sure.

Kevin is saying 400 metres.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

The problem is the two-thirds that are in between. That's the point.

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

Yes, 400 metres. The surface is down to 80 metres, so down to 80 metres you can do surface mining; 400 metres and deeper, you can do in situ, which is known technology, and we have been using it in the heavy oil all along in Saskatchewan and Alberta and so on. The problem is in the middle. The middle has a number of characteristics that make it difficult to exploit by either method. One of them is that it is not very continuous, not uniform and continuous; and two, if you use in situ methods, there's not enough pressure to keep the driving force for the oil and the pressure may break to the surface. For in situ methods, it would be very expensive to remove all the surface material to get to it.

So what we did very recently when we realized that was we commissioned a road map. We tried to look into this and we tried to get all the industry people and all the researchers in a brainstorming environment to see what could be done to achieve this. So we did this in two workshops. There was a report written on it, there were areas identified that were possible to exploit, and there were also some technologies and technology gaps identified. Now, just before coming here, I heard that the Alberta government has commissioned a follow-up to this, and they had a workshop that would take this further to try to identify technologies that can access this area. Technologies are non-existent right now, but hopefully when we bring everybody together we may be able to find technological help.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

So right now for that 80 metres to we'll say 150 metres, for the sake of argument here, there's really nothing that's even in the hopper. They're still theorizing and the engineers aren't doing the field experimentation at this point.

[Dr. Hassan Hamza]

Yes, for the larger part of it.

[Bradley Trost, Conservative, Saskatoon—Humboldt, SK]

Okay.