Thank you, and good morning. It's a great opportunity to be able to speak with you today.
I'm here to tell you about an organization called Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, or COSIA. COSIA is an alliance of 14 oil sands producers that collectively account for about 90% of the production in Canada's oil sands.
These organizations came together on March 1, 2012, to formally launch the alliance, and at that launch the CEOs of these companies stood up very publicly on a stage here in Calgary and signed a charter. The charter was a collective and very public expression of a commitment to a vision and a commitment to a certain suite of actions and behaviours that would allow the companies to realize their vision.
The vision is to enable the responsible development of Canada's oil sands while accelerating the pace of environmental performance improvement through collaborative action and innovation. To our knowledge, there is no other organization that uses the same model, certainly not at the same scale or size that COSIA has, anywhere else in the world, so we're quite proud of it.
What makes COSIA unique? We speak in terms of “the four Ls”.
The first “L” is leadership. The oversight of COSIA and the work on our four environmental priority areas—water, land, tailings, and greenhouse gases—will include input from the chief executive officers of the companies, with support for our activities extending throughout the individual companies.
The second “L” is what we call line of sight. COSIA is not an organization simply about effort. It's an organization about effort to attain specific ends. The ends are regional environmental improvement and performance goals that we will set publicly, and we will report progress publicly against those goals.
The third “L” that makes COSIA unique is leverage. COSIA will be the collaborative hub through which environmental innovation developed by individual companies will be shared. It will enable participating companies to work together to avoid duplication of effort, to share their innovation defined from things as hard as intellectual property, such as a patent, although it could be the other end of the spectrum of things, such as best practices, research data, and monitoring data. This will be the hub through which innovation can be shared. We will work to avoid duplication of effort; leverage our collective expertise, technology, data, and best practices; and build on one another's successes to improve the pace of environmental performance improvement.
The fourth “L” is linkages. COSIA is founded on the concept of openness, and we will connect with those developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges within and outside of Canada with a view to sharing that innovation to advance performance inside our environmental priority areas. We will listen to, respond to, and work with stakeholders to address evolving needs and conditions.
The oil sands producers have made great strides in increasing the efficiency and reducing the environmental footprint of oil sands production during the first half of commercial development of this resource. Frankly, this progress was made by companies acting independently. By forming COSIA, what industry leaders have done at the highest levels is identify that when it comes to environmental performance, a collaborative model is a better way to advance innovation and accelerate the pace of environmental performance. Through COSIA, intellectual property, funding, and human resource barriers will be removed that otherwise would have impeded progress.
Canada's oil sands represent a tremendous strategic asset for this country. The companies that will realize the value of this asset for Canadians share a solid determination to make the oil sands a showcase of world-leading environmental innovation and environmental performance.
Thank you.