I think this discussion about what else you could do with the competencies and the resource is going to be incredibly important going forward, so I set out a storyline around what else you could liberate besides transportation fuels if you're looking at the oil sands or the vast resource in the western Canadian sedimentary basin. Certainly there are opportunities around mobilizing the electrons themselves, so creating electricity through technologies such as in citric acidification. There's liberating the hydrogen. There are bio-pathways, or actually bacteria, that consume the hydrocarbon and produce hydrogen as a by-product. Also, there are actually experiments under way right now looking at how to recover the heavy metals from the oil sands, rather than produce transportation fuels.
The first piece is thinking through what market the world needs. Are we going to need more lithium if the world is electrifying its transportation fleets? Absolutely. Could Canada be a leading producer of that lithium? Definitely. We have a huge industry built around extracting resources from our oil and gas sector, so we need to think about that.
We should also think about what to do with asphaltenes, which are a unique element of oil sands. The pipelines that connect Alberta, the resource source, to one of the world's leading manufacturing hubs in Ontario are already there. The question is, what could you do if you had the world's cheapest source of carbon fibres, and how many industries could you disrupt if Ontario were the cheapest place to produce that? That's a significant storyline that I think deserves to be investigated.
I think the point was made, though, around whether the industries that are in place right now are capable of making that kind of innovation. I think the answer is that they're under an existential threat right now, and as Canadian companies they have nowhere else to go. They've in many ways doubled down, buying out the oil sands' assets from their international peers, so the incentive to experiment and try new things is there.
I think the experience of AOSTRA, the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority, is illustrative, with $1 billion invested by the public sector over 10 years, at times with the opposition of the international oil and gas sector. Companies didn't want to do that. Their time horizon for return on R and D investment is much shorter than what the public sector was forcing around trying to crack the opportunity that was the oil sands.
You need that decadal view, a long-term horizon, that no company can do on its own, but the impact of that is pretty significant. A single $1-billion investment by the public sector translated into over a $100-billion investment by private investors in a single year into the oil sands. We need to think at that scale and that does require picking winners. That's what government needs to do. It needs to focus. It needs to pick winners.