Yes, thank you very much. It's a very good question.
At any large mature site like Syncrude or Suncor, the facilities we would need to put in place, given the volumes of tailings we would handle, cost in the range of $400 million, which you then divide. This sounds like a big number, but bear in mind these oil sands sites have cost tens of billions of dollars to build. When you look at the amount of oil we could recover, which is 6,000 to 7,000 barrels a day for a very long period of time, the capital cost is about $30,000 per flowing barrel to recapture this oil that's going into the tailings ponds. That's versus the costs of building a new mining site and getting that amount of bitumen: $80,000 to $100,000 per flowing barrel.
The point is that if you can recover something from a waste stream efficiently, then it's going to be very attractive in economics, so we're proposing that this be done. The operating costs per barrel are around $10 for that barrel of bitumen that we're going to capture before it goes into the tailings ponds, and that's versus about $23 a barrel for bitumen that's mined and then put into an upgrader. Those are quite common numbers you would find in the public domain. It's about one-third of the cost of getting another barrel on a new project.
We're saying this is the low-hanging fruit, as I mentioned, and throughout the world you will find mining projects that are now going back in with better technologies, attacking their tailings and their dumps because of the higher prices of commodities, and reworking them. We believe that should be done here.