Let me begin by addressing some of the points that have been raised, which will relate to some of your questions.
We've heard from several of the witnesses today who've repeated this figure of $50 million lost per day. This is based on the assumption that if we were to get better access to markets, such as the American market or the international market, we could get parity for our prices for bitumen.
I just want to make it really clear that this is kind of a fantasy. This $50-million-a-day number is based on a fantasy that we could get for bitumen the same price that lighter oil, under WTI, gets. The bottom line is that our bitumen that comes out of the ground is not really oil. It needs to be upgraded at heavy cost.
In some ways, we should look at the low price we get for bitumen as opportunity, because if we're upgrading, that means the input costs might be a little bit lower. We see this with companies that are what we describe as “integrated” companies. They have upgrading sides and they have export sides. These are companies like Cenovus and Suncor. Oil prices go up and down; that's inevitable. But if you're an integrated company that has an upgrading side, you actually benefit on both sides. When the price for bitumen is high, you can make money on your export side, but when it's low, you get a low-cost input that allows you to produce a higher-cost product like synthetic crude—which, by the way, trades at pretty much parity with WTI.
It's in the interest of Alberta and the Canadian community to have a more integrated approach to developing the resource rather than simply ripping it and shipping it. Otherwise, someone else will benefit on the upside when the price is low, and that will be foreign countries with refining capacity.
Our question is this: we own the resource, so why shouldn't we benefit on both sides of the price spectrum in terms of upgrading or refining when the price for bitumen is low, and then benefiting on the export side for raw bitumen when the price for that product is high?
I'm sorry if I didn't answer your questions directly, but honestly, I'm running out of time and I wanted to get some of that on the record.