To produce oil from the oil sands, usually you need steam. The way most companies make steam is they have a pipe through which they put water, and then they heat the outside of the pipe to make the water steam inside the pipe. As it turns out, if you put spiralled lines inside the pipe and you spiral the water, it heats much more evenly. This uses less water and up to 6% less energy, which of course would be up to 6% less in GHGs emitted. This is not a huge technological breakthrough. It has been used in other areas, such as the rifling inside the barrel of a gun, but it is the type of thing that our engineers think about every day.
I have two more examples, Mr. Chair. One is the water technology development centre. This is a $160-million dedicated facility that we are building to test technology. What we are finding is that even if we have good ideas about how to test technology, our testing infrastructure has to keep up with the demand. There is enough motivation among these companies for the infrastructure not to be a bottleneck to progress that we are developing a dedicated, fit-for-purpose water technology development centre.
The last example is an eye-in-the-sky satellite. There is a Montreal company called GHGSat, which is about to launch a satellite that could dramatically increase the resolution of monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. Several of our companies are teaming up with this Montreal company in order to improve the information collection in the Canadian oil sands.
Mr. Chair, my last slide is a sum-up of results to date of COSIA. We were launched about four years ago. We have completed and populated a planning framework. We have 104 written articulations of priority needs that we and our 39 associate members are distributing around the globe to key partners to accelerate the development of solutions. The total number of active projects in our portfolio right now is 252, with a $480-million price tag. The number of technologies actually shared is 819, which cost about $1.3 billion to develop. Those technologies are now being implemented, and the actual environmental impacts are being realized, such as, for example, our 36% decrease in freshwater use intensity.
We have developed an associate member program, now with 39 associate members, to increase our leverage and reach literally around the world. We have associate members from Israel and the U.K., and our hub members reach every continent.
We have been actually quite quiet since we were launched. We really felt that we needed substance in delivery before we started to talk about COSIA. We feel that that's there now, so 2016 is a year when we will be speaking a little more to key partners and key opinion leaders about what we are doing.
My last point is about our E-TAP, where not just associate members can plug into COSIA, but anyone—including anyone on this committee—who has a good environmental innovation idea. You can propose it to these oil sands companies for direct and immediate follow-up. Of course, as always, third party intellectual property is protected. These companies are willing to test third party technologies. We are not asking third parties to share. That is not the way the world works. Third party intellectual property is completely protected.
That is my presentation, Mr. Chair. I would be happy to answer questions to the best of my ability.