Let me begin by saying a couple of things.
First of all, our industry has worked very diligently at trying to reduce our emissions per barrel of production. It's something we've all done over the years that we've been working in this industry. It's actually one of the steps that has helped to make it competitive, because it costs money to consume energy to make oil, drive your car, or whatever.
We've been reducing the energy consumed per barrel. In fact, if you look at what the industry has accomplished since 1990, we reduced it by about 17% on a basis of per unit of production. We think when going forward we'll see another 17% by 2010-2012. We'll be at about a 30% reduction per unit of production.
We've done it by implementing new technology. You witnessed some of the technology yesterday, where we actually mix the oil sand with water and pipeline it into the extraction plant. We've been able to reduce the transportation costs of moving the oil sands to the extraction facility.
We've also been able to lower the temperature of the process. We've gone from 80 degrees Celsius down to about 40 degrees. As a consequence, we've reduced the energy input for extracting a barrel of bitumen out of the sand by about 40%.
That's one thing we're doing. We continue to strive to try to find ways to reduce the energy consumed.
In terms of the opportunity for sequestration, we see it as something that has some promise. The industry has been working with the provincial Government of Alberta, through the Alberta Chamber of Resources, for some time now on a process that would enable us to take the almost pure CO2 that we make in the oil sands.
It primarily comes from our hydrogen plants, because essentially what we're doing is taking natural gas, CH4, or methane, and converting it into hydrogen, which we then add to the oil. We sell it at a much higher price, by the way, than the value of natural gas. This is secondary and I would even argue it's tertiary manufacturing that we're doing.
When we do it, we make a lot of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide is amenable to then be used for enhanced oil recovery. The dilemma is the transportation costs to get it from Fort McMurray to the conventional fields in Swan Hills, or wherever in the southern part of Alberta, where the enhanced oil recovery techniques are being used.
We see it as a promising opportunity. We need to somehow get the economics to line up. If there was an old pipeline that had been used for some other purpose and could be converted into this, and if the royalty arrangement on conventional crude oil required for enhancing for recovery could be revisited, we think there's a really good chance this could be done.