HI-Q is something that MEG has been developing. We've been playing around for probably almost 15 years. It is a partial upgrading technology. When we looked at things, we saw upgraders are expensive. You can see that now the economics of them just aren't making sense, and we haven't seen a new upgrader built in northern Alberta for numerous years.
One of the things that HI-Q does a little differently is we don't upgrade the barrel as far as conventionally has been done in the past. We're able to remove some of the capital costs for doing that. That helps. I guess it's the economics of it.
What we're doing is upgrading the barrel just enough to eliminate the need for diluent to be mixed with the bitumen to put it into the pipeline. That reduces our cost significantly. It's about access to that lighter oil. There's a risk that it may not be there as production continues to come up, and diluent is a big cost to our business. That's a very big thing for us. Eliminating the diluent that's mixed in with the bitumen to go into the export pipelines is very important. For the diluent that MEG Energy uses, we use a light condensate, and we add approximately half a barrel of that condensate for every barrel of bitumen that we're putting into the pipeline. Other companies are using synthetic oil to blend that in a one-to-one ratio. When you think of how much diluent is going down the export pipelines alone, if we can remove that, that frees up pipeline space. That's very important for us as well as we move forward, because it does free up pipe space.
The marketability of our crude is also increased when it's partially upgraded. It increases the number of refiners that can actually take our crude. It helps us get better value for the product. From that aspect, it helps increase taxes and royalties, and everything is staying in Alberta, in Canada. That's another big piece that helps us among differentiating markets—