Thank you, Mr. Webber. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The process has been used for 130 years. It's a distillation process of hydrocarbon, pure and simple. It was invented by the Rockefellers. We take hydrocarbon and we boil it. We add heat to it and we pull off hydrocarbons, light carbons.
What we have found is a way to do it much more efficiently, with no emissions. That process they invented 130 years ago is, for all intents and purposes, being used today. They take hydrocarbon, use natural gas to heat up water, boil the water to create steam, heat up the bitumen or heavy oil, and drive off light product.
We have a process not a whole lot different from that, because ours wouldn't look any different, ultimately, except you wouldn't see anything being burned. We don't burn any gas. We use an electricity form and take our heavy oil and focus on our diluted bitumen, the one that's going through the pipeline. All we need to do—and they do that to a certain extent right now—is pull off the light ends, what's called diluent, the highly volatile chemicals, the light hydrocarbons that are essentially a carbon chain of five or less, pentanes and stuff like that. That product is what creates the problem of transportation, because we have to add so much of it to a barrel. We have to watch out for it when it goes into a tank car.
What we've done is taken a process that was invented 130 years ago and put some New Age technology to it. That New Age technology is strictly 100% electricity. That electricity creates the energy to drive off the light products, which we collect. It's contained within a vessel, so we don't need to lose anything to the environment and we don't need to burn anything in order to make it happen. We're relying on people who are creating that energy for us, and it doesn't matter to us who it comes from. It should be coming from clean sources, because then it will reduce the footprint for us all, but the process was invented 130 years ago.
Mr. Webber, we have really focused on the transportation now. I'll give you an analogy I like to use. You take a pound of butter out of the fridge. You want to use it, so you cut off a piece, melt it, and do whatever you want with it. If you take that piece that you just melted and either put it back into the fridge or back onto the counter, you'll find it goes back to a solid. That butter really is a liquid or a solid.
That's what our products are from Alberta. They've chosen to take a different approach and make them totally liquid all the time. In my opinion, that's wrong, but that's just my opinion. We focus on the product, which is a solid in the ground, and keep it a solid above the ground and for transportation and storage and only turn it into a liquid when we need to put it into a liquid—like that butter—at the refinery.
With that whole transportation nightmare we have right now of moving liquid hydrocarbon, I don't care whose hydrocarbon it is and whose pipeline, there is the potential for a leak, and we have to recognize that. It's the risk that they've taken. However, do we need to take the risk when we have this different product? This is a different product, and it can be a safer product, and we've shown that it is a safer—