I'd be delighted to. I totally agree with you that the use of methane natural gas as a fuel in the oil sands is now a major issue. It needs to be looked at; it needs to be addressed. On the other hand, you can't take an oil sands plant that was built five years ago and has legitimate supplies of its own natural gas and then say you can't have it any more. But we should be doing everything we can to move technology towards the stage where we have alternatives to natural gas. I presented to you a significant number of alternatives for using fuels other than natural gas.
I'm very surprised at the figure of 600 megawatts as the hydrogen need for 60,000 barrels a day. I can't confirm those numbers; I don't believe they are accurate.
As I mentioned, I just got back from DOE's Advanced Test Nuclear Reactor at the Idaho National Laboratory, and we are working with them on the application of nuclear energy as a heat source to co-produce fossil fuel. This might be able to provide the heat to gasify coal, to cook coal and produce liquids. It might be the heat for the oil sands.
One of the issues in the oil sands is that conventional nuclear plants are too big. We need more smaller, industrial-sized nuclear plants that are reliable, safe, and in the order of perhaps 100 megawatts of electricity production, in order to match the right size for an oil sands production of 100,000 barrel a day .
You cannot put a giant nuclear reactor in place in the oil sands, because you can't pipe steam that far. You'll never get 10 leaseholders to agree to the same supplier of steam, hydrogen heat, electricity, and so on—all from what, a utility that sets this purposely? Why not let them have their own reactor that's sized to their project?
Reactors are now being developed and demonstrated that can do this. That's part of the study we're doing with DOE, to look at the whole concept of co-production, of using nuclear to encourage this.