The technology is there today. As I'm sure many of you know, carbon dioxide is being used as an enhanced oil field recovery agent by EnCana in southern Saskatchewan. Interestingly, we're buying the CO2 from the U.S. when we've got plenty ourselves, but that was the practicality of the situation.
There are a number of proposals to build CO2 pipelines from the oil sands to the oil fields of Alberta, where it can be used in a valuable manner to recover more oil. The truth is, if you look at the total CO2 emissions from the energy industry in the western Canada sedimentary basis, it exceeds the capacity of the western Canada sedimentary basis to use it for economic purposes, that is oil recovery.
That said, the geology of the western Canada sedimentary basin is ideal for straight sequestration storage, permanent storage in underground aquifers, but that will be a cost. So if I'm from the private sector, the question is, what are you going to do for me that says this guy isn't capturing CO2? I'm ready to go ahead and do it, and the technology is there and I could deploy that, but if it's costing me $15 a tonne to stick it down into the ground and helping GHG emissions, what are you going to do for me? How can I build that into some kind of a cost recovery?
So we must be able to provide mechanisms for the private sector to internalize those externalities.