We're trying to build basic infrastructure. We're trying to build a big distribution system for CO2, and some days I feel like a truck driver trying to build a number one highway. We're trying to build something that's going to last for 100 years. It's going to be the CO2 equivalent of a highway. It's going to take the CO2 from, not just our plant but all plants from the Edmonton area, capture that CO2, and take it to central Alberta.
We've been producing oil in Alberta since 1914 in quantity, and most of the places where oil came out is a place where you can put CO2 back in. When you put CO2 in most of those places, you get more oil out, so it pays for the costs of managing the CO2.
I'm sure you're all familiar with the Weyburn project. My partner and I used to own 11% of that. It's one of the largest projects in the world that uses man-made CO2 as a feedstock for a downstream industry. The quantities are truly amazing. In central Alberta we think that there are enough places to put CO2. You could put in about two billion tonnes, which is about 25 years of the total annual emissions of the oil sands industry in Alberta. We think we can take the equivalent of those CO2 emissions and use them as a profitable feedstock with the system that we're building. We think there are other places in Alberta where you could do it, but we're trying to start where we think it's relatively easy.
The challenges in doing this are that you have to own the reservoirs, you have to have the infrastructure, and you have to have the CO2 sources. We made the decision early on that we were just going to do it ourselves, and we're going to connect all of those things together. That's what we've done.
When we're finished, the diesel that comes out of our plant will be the lowest carbon diesel made in the world today. We think that's a real achievement, because when we start with oil sands diesel, we start about 20% worse than the light average oil sands. The oil sands materials, the embedded CO2 costs in the diesel you make, are about 20% worse than the average U.S. crude slate. When we finish up, we're about 7% better. We think those things can make Canada competitive, but there can also be clean tech projects where you're trying to do something that really does make a difference.
My own view is that you have to do these things on an enormous scale or it's not very interesting. We're thinking we're going to have a business that gets 100,000 barrels a day of light oil out of the ground using CO2. We think we're going to have something that's the equivalent of taking every car in Alberta off the road.
I'd like to put it in terms of windmill equivalence. We've been putting up windmills in Alberta for 30 years. Over that time we have put up about 900 windmills. What we're doing with the CO2 pipeline is about the equivalent of 3,200 windmills. Our little piece of pipe is about three times what we've done in Alberta in the wind energy business in the last 30 years. For me, for Canada to get on the map, we have to be doing things at that scale. We can't be dicking around doing little things. Sorry.