Well, part of the problem for our industry is that we're not price setters; we're price takers. We take whatever the price is in the world market.
It's probably easy today to say the oil industry is doing well at $56 a barrel, or whatever it happened to trade at today. It's not that long ago, 1998, when it went down to $11 a barrel. It was tough going in the oil sands business at $11 a barrel. You were barely able to make the cashflow. These projects can't easily be shut down. We're subject to the vagaries of the commodity markets.
Our real competition is in the Middle East, in Saudi Arabia. They're putting a barrel of oil on the market for $5 U.S. a barrel. We don't get to set the price. When that happens, we obviously have to be very diligent about what we're doing.
It's a lot more complex than it appears to be today, with what's happening as we speak and with crude oil pricing being where it is. In order for the business to be viable, we have to really take all of those things into consideration, because we're going to have those swings and those ups and downs.
If you took crude oil prices in 1995 and you took them back a hundred years, which was about the length of time crude was being produced, and you brought it into 1995 dollars, crude oil averaged about $20 a barrel in 1995 dollars over that whole time period. It went up and down depending on whether there was a world war or a major invasion going on in certain parts of the world.
We're probably at a different plateau today. I think most people would say we're not back at $20 oil, but I don't believe we're at $60 oil either. We're again going to be faced with those challenges as we go forward.