Thank you for your comments about the presentation. You've raised some very good points, but I'd like to paint a more optimistic picture than you perhaps outline.
Yes, you're right. There is a rush to develop oil sands, but I don't think we'll see all of the oil sands proposals that have been put forward reach the construction stage, for a whole variety of reasons. That should allay some concerns.
Also, these projects take a long time to plan and put into place. As I say, simply for economic reasons, we are seeing that economics are driving a move away from water-intensive processes and a move away from energy-intensive processes, to some of the new technologies that I've indicated here. Those technologies are actually at the pilot plant commercial scale. If you take something like the Nexen/OPTI process, everything but their upgrader is actually being built as we speak. Their recovery process is about three-quarters complete, but their upgrader is only about 20% complete.
So there are new technologies coming along. I think it would be prudent to allow growth in the oil sands, in keeping with the existing resource capabilities of the area, and to accelerate new technologies. Do both at the same time. But as I say, the most critical step of all of this is to accelerate technology development, because there is actually an awful lot of good technology there that is certainly being developed by the universities or government labs. However, it hasn't moved beyond that because of this awful gap that we see in the middle of the innovation cycle about which I've spoken.
There are certainly technologies beyond this that are now moving into the construction phase. If you provide some regulatory certainty, if you provide long-term opportunity for the private sector to make an appropriate investment in responsible extraction, the private sector will use those technologies.
I do not know one executive in Calgary who says he wants a dirtier planet. Nobody wants a dirtier planet. Sure they want to make money, as you said, but the thing is that if they have the opportunity—and I think many of these companies are becoming, to a greater or lesser extent, very responsible about the environment—we need to encourage them. I'm not the expert on what the right combination of measures is, but it should be put in place.