Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance is an alliance of 13 oil sands companies that I think actually just spoke to a lot of what Ms. Leslie and Mr. Leach were just speaking about around innovation. A natural part of research and development is failure; a natural part of research and development is learning. If you're in an industry such as ours which is so vested in technology and needs technology to continually improve, it is far better off to share those learnings and those failures rather than repeat them over and over again and hoard them.
So the 13 CEOs got together and signed an agreement, and it's the only kind in the world, actually, where intellectual property is shared among all of the companies. Each company is required to put a certain amount in each year, so you can't just ride on the coattails of others. You actually have to participate actively in research and development and share it. It started two years ago, and right now there's a billion dollars' worth of intellectual property that's being shared, 560 projects to be exact. We are starting to see some of the benefits.
I can speak to a small example at Suncor. Another company did some research with an initiative called Faster Forests. It allows us actually to plant trees. It saves us about $5 million and allows us to reclaim land much faster. We didn't have to do anything to that, for example.
On some of the centrifuging technology around tailings, Syncrude developed it, and Shell is using it without having to use the technology. In fact, there are actually some parallels to some of the steel industry. Erosion is actually one of the biggest challenges in our industry. The sand can be quite abrasive, as one would imagine. So development of new kinds of steel.... There's some technology now that rather than it just happening and the rest of us having to figure it out, we're using it industry-wide. That's, of course, to the benefit both from a safety and a cost perspective.
It's very innovative, and I would venture a guess if I were to come back here in two or three years, there would be some absolute breakthrough technologies that were a result of COSIA and the sharing of technology.