Thank you. I'll take the opportunity to comment on it.
Over the last five years, from the oil and gas sector, some of the major innovations have been both on the recovery and on the environmental side of things. Let me start with a few of them, just to give you examples.
For example, to both reduce the amount of energy going in and thus have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions and also to increase recoveries in the whole area of drillable oil sands—or what we call the in situ—there has been a massive change from using just heat in the past, or just steam going underground, to putting some light hydrocarbons in with that steam, light propanes and butanes.
That actually increases recovery, but it also then reduces the amount of steam that's needed, which of course then generates back to less gas being used to generate that steam. It not only increases the economics but also reduces the environmental footprint by having less greenhouse gas. That's been a really major thrust, I would say, over the last three years, and it's not yet mature. It's still being developed very strongly.
Another one, probably over the last three years, as well, in that same area—and then I'll broaden out to some of the other ones—is what we call infill drilling in the oil sands. If you're putting two horizontal wells down to warm up the ground underneath, there's this little space between those two that actually gets warmed up, but you can't get the oil out of it.
Many companies, over the last three to five years, have been drilling—what they call infill drilling—a well right down the middle of the two. There, you don't have to put in any steam, because you've already warmed the underground resource, so you're getting oil out of the oil sands without any additional steam or heat at all. Of course, that really helps the overall project with its recoveries, but it also reduces the environmental footprint on a greenhouse gas basis.
Those are just a couple of examples.
A third one I would give from across the whole sector, as mentioned earlier, is the concept of cogeneration. If we're going to need steam anyway to develop the oil on the oil sands, then companies have been very strong at putting in cogeneration. They're using the heat from the natural gas they're burning more than once, and they're using cogeneration to generate electricity to put on the grid. As you well know, here in Alberta we still have a significant amount of coal on our grid as well, so it helps supplement that by at least burning natural gas for the grid and then using the steam that comes out of the back end of that to go underground to warm up the oil and get the oil out.
I'll look out five years on that to some examples that are really just starting now, then I'll ask the services companies to talk about some of the things there.
One of the real keys is looking at things like waterless recoveries. Can we actually get into the extraction of this oil and gas without using water at all? Again, it's very leading-edge. It's at a bench scale, at a test tube and beaker scale right now. As you know, in our industry it's always hard to make the jump from that scale up to the commercialization scale. That's where some of the things are being looked at over the next five years. Waterless recovery is a big one that's going on.
Again, we're already using an awful lot of solar power in the conventional oil and gas business because we have these remote facilities, as was mentioned by Pembina—the remote towns. We have remote facilities everywhere. We're actually one of the largest users of solar panels throughout western Canada, because we need power at our remote well sites. That's another area that's being developed heavily by our industry. They're not connected to the grid. As we go more and more into the unconventional tight oil, tight gas, and shale gas areas, we are going to be in remote locations.
There are some examples to get started with. I'll turn the time over to the petroleum services group.
