In terms of the question of reclamation, we don't share the same optimism that some of the industry has given to that. There hasn't been the widespread reclamation that would actually demonstrate that they can successfully put back diverse boreal systems. In particular, once both ground water and surface water is moving through these reclaimed areas where you're incorporating tailings material into that landscape, there is the potential liberation of various toxins, etc. What does that mean for the long-term ecological viability?
In terms of water use, there have been improvements on a per barrel basis, but what we've seen amongst all of those companies, and certainly with the new entrants into that industry, is that the total demand for fresh water from the Athabasca River, from ground water, continues to grow very rapidly. And when it comes to that water use, it is for the extraction process. The tailings are a by-product. Consolidated tailings are addressing some of that tailing stream; there are also non-segregating tailings, the mature fine tailings that they currently don't know how they're going to effectively manage in the longer term. The current theory is to use what they call end pit lakes. Pitch that slurry that would still have residual toxins into the end of the pit, cap it with water, and then allow it to drain into the Athabasca.
That's not something that's been demonstrated on a small scale or a large scale, so the industry often notes that these aren't the types of questions you can simply address at a bench scale in a university, and we don't dispute that. We are already taking a gamble with a very significant amount of land, and the question we have is, how much bigger should that gamble become as we have more and more of these projects using these technologies and processes that haven't yet been fully demonstrated or proven?