I'll certainly take a crack at that one. I think there are, unquestionably, other parts of the world that could help us directly with oil sands and that would have a very strong interest in doing so.
I could give you three examples, which just came to mind, on the question of finding an alternative to methane as a fuel. Certainly, these last few days that I've spent with DOE have been particularly revealing. Both of us are doing parallel work, and now I think we're going to do a lot more joint work. I'll come back to the use of nuclear, or the potential use. I don't want to say use at this point; I want to say the potential for nuclear as a heat source and as a hydrogen source for processing the oil sands. In one day's visit and one day of workshops, the word “tar sands”, as they still like to call them, was mentioned 20 times. But they have a major program in nuclear combined with fossil fuel, for their own things--for oil shale, for coal, and so on and so forth--but they're also looking at the applicability to oil sands.
Another example would be found in Germany. The Germans are probably the most advanced in some of the engineering, simply for gasification processes, and so on. But you'd be surprised at some other parts of the world that have some interesting technologies. Because of its apartheid days, South Africa made coal gasification work. Germany, in the Second World War, of course, did with its coal-to-liquids program. China has some nuclear reactor capability that might be suited to industrial-sized plants rather than to the really large plants that were talked about here. It also does some work in heavy oil. There will be a joint Canada-China heavy oil conference in Beijing in a couple of weeks, which I'll be at.
Besides technology, we need investment from anywhere. We can use all the bucks we can get in this country. They always help. Whether they're for electricity or anything else, we need all of them. Electricity is a wonderful resource we have in this country to exploit. But from China, it could be labour. That's a huge constraint. In fact I am working with a couple of groups in Alberta now, and I believe the government has some programs in place to allow temporary immigration of skilled workers where there are real shortages. I might want to order 100 pipe fitters and 60 welders, and to have them here for two years. If we could streamline that kind of thing, I think we could accelerate the construction of some of the things, whether we're talking about dams in Quebec, hydro in Quebec, hydro in B.C., or oil sands in Alberta.