The way I look at it, my career spanned about 20 years in the oil sands industry. As a young engineer, I was working on one of the first pilots of the technology 20 years ago, so my entire career has been innovating and developing technology. When you look at SAGD in general, it has only been about 20 years since this technology has come to market and operators have been implementing it. There came a time from moving beyond the AOSTRA, an underground test facility, an Alberta-supported initiative, to piloting within industry, and then beyond that, probably in the last 15 years it's become commercial.
That's the way I look at it. It's been continual innovation, and we're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish from that. Even just figuring out how to get the bitumen out of the reservoir has been a huge thing, unlocking billions of dollars in value for Albertans and Canadians. Especially on our oil sands part, I think it's inherent that we're continuing to innovate just to get the bitumen out of the resource most efficiently, and we want to do things right as well. I think that's the other thing here. As well, it's an energy-intensive industry, so doing things energy efficiently also helps reduce our costs.
That's probably one of the nice fits that we have here. We're continuing to strive to reduce our steam-oil ratios so we can use less natural gas to produce each barrel of bitumen. There's a lot of innovation in the reservoir technologies. That helps reduce our costs and also helps reduce energy intensity. I think it's a natural fit out there as well. There's a combination of multiple things, but we're innovating to keep driving our costs down and get better as well.