Thank you for the question.
As I mentioned in my remarks, we have a big challenge, an overarching challenge. Right now we're selling our oil to one customer, the United States. Ninety per cent of our exports of oil go there and 100% of our gas. We are as an economy losing some $50 million a day because of the reduced price in Cushing, Oklahoma in the U.S. Midwest because of a pipeline bottleneck, and so we're talking roughly $20 billion a year, but that amount varies. That is the first problem.
The second problem is that we are confronting an issue of pipeline capacity that is starting to hit our economy. Before the end of the decade this will become very serious because if we don't move the oil out, it will be stranded. Over the intermediate and longer term, because of the immense amounts of shale gas and shale oil that the United States has discovered, they're going to be relying less and less on Canadian imports, and we absolutely must find new markets. Fortunately, those markets are there in the Asia-Pacific area, and 92% of the economic growth over the next 25 years is going to come from non-OECD countries. Energy demand is going to grow by about 36% by 2035, so the market will be there, and there is tremendous complementarity. We have a need to diversify our markets. The Asia-Pacific areas have an intense need to diversify their services and supply, and so we must build the infrastructure, the pipelines, to get the resources to tidewater.
Moving from west to east is one of the ways of doing it. These are not alternatives; they're not mutually exclusive. We have the resources to move in all directions. The advantage of that particular movement—and it can be through the TransCanada Mainline, which is looking at a conversion from gas to oil or the Enbridge Line 9, which is talking about a reversal from east-west to west-east—would be a lower cost Canadian crude coming to the refineries: the Ultramar refinery in Lévis, Quebec, the Suncor refinery in Montreal, and potentially the Irving refinery in Saint John, which is the largest refinery in Canada. They will then have—