Thank you for the question. It's excellent and covers a lot of different things that I'd love to respond to. In fact, Chris Bataille and I responded in The Globe and Mail to Mr. Wall's proposals.
Absolutely, carbon capture technologies, whether that's storage or utilization, are going to be critical, especially to decarbonizing the industrial side of our economy. Decarbonizing the electricity sector can be done by a number of different pathways, but the industrial side is much more challenging.
The types of technologies we're looking at on the mining side are not conventional carbon capture and storage, but making use of the mine tailings themselves as the destination for the carbon dioxide in mineral form. Essentially, the tool kit that I referred to that Greg Dipple and his team have developed ranges from improvements of practice without a significant change to the capital investment—simply operating procedures—to much more intensive types of activity.
Some of the processes can be implemented relatively quickly. One needs to sit down and look at the overall operations of the mine to find the minimum impact approach and the lowest cost—the low-hanging fruit, if you will—and where the other opportunities are for perhaps larger impact but with some capital investment. There's a spectrum of types of approaches.
To give you a quick example, the mine tailings will naturally react with carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to create carbonate, but if you deposit the tailings rapidly, then the tailings coming in next will smother the reactions on the earlier tailings, meaning that if you build up your tailings rapidly, you wind up with much less than the total potential uptake. If you instead change your practice to deposit your mine tailings in different areas and switch locations more frequently, you actually open up the opportunity to increase the amount of carbon dioxide uptake without substantially changing your operating costs.
There are a number of those types of practices that can improve performance, and the level of impacts and things such as that will really require some field testing.
When I talk about the cost, it's really the cost of getting reasonable scale pilot testing done. I look at cost from an R and D perspective, not from an operating mine scale, so when I say “substantial”, I'm talking in single-digit millions, not billions.