Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
In terms of its applicability to the oil sands, this technology is potentially very applicable. The product is 600°C heat. You can create steam very efficiently with that.
You can also potentially drive chemical synthesis for hydrogen production. The Canadian petrochemical industry has a tremendous hydrogen demand to upgrade its Alberta crudes. With nuclear heat you have, then, the capability of both creating the steam necessary for the extraction of the oil from the oil sands and also upgrading it chemically with hydrogen.
The opportunity here is to offer technology that is potentially cost-competitive with natural gas combustion. The challenge is that you have an industry.... The natural resource sector is a risky business; it's defined by booms and busts, and commodities are volatile. If you're an executive at one of those companies, you seek to mitigate your risks. What you wouldn't naturally want to do is to take on new technology risk. Your job is to extract, for profit to shareholders, as efficiently as possible your product from your natural resource and then sell it to your market.
This problem is generic for all clean technology capital equipment companies. We're a capital equipment company. We're looking to develop our capital equipment, and that has certain risks to it that we are looking to mitigate as well. Then we're looking to sell it to our customers.
The customers are the natural resource firms in, for example, Alberta. They have to be incentivized to adopt new technology. They can be incentivized through the bottom line—namely, it's cheaper. We can provide that incentive, but to really support early adoption, as has been the case in wind and solar, you have to provide the customer who's going to buy that capital equipment—going to be the first adopter and early adopter of that capital equipment—with some risk mitigation support, either through a loan guarantee, a production tax credit, or some type of mechanism to encourage early adoption. Otherwise, you will have a wait-and-see attitude.
We want the lowest risk point for the adoption of this technology, and that lowest risk point is when three other people have done it already. If everyone in your community does it, no one is the first mover.
You would not expect anyone in the Alberta oil sands business to become an operator of a nuclear power plant. That won't happen. However, they would potentially be very interested in taking our product, which is hot salt, just as much as they'd be interested in the takeoff of power. We as a company have to develop that capital product, that capital equipment, and seek to mitigate the risks as well, and then our customers have to be incentivized to actually be early adopters.