Industry committee  You're right about the first factor, Mr. Généreux, because 90% of the electricity we now use to produce aluminum in Saguenay comes from our own hydroelectric power station. Just imagine the situation 10 years from now, with all the uncertainties that scenario entails. When we consider our ambitions for aluminum production growth and its limits, including aluminum produced using ELYSIS technology, and when we consider how we want to decarbonize other elements in the value chain, including the alumina refinery in Vaudreuil, we have to admit that we'll need to electrify some things that aren't electrified today.

Industry committee  No, no—

Industry committee  I want to give the committee the right information. The billet centre is one of the first projects I looked at when I took up this position. What that project involves is carrying out projects that are downstream in the value chain, which is important. When I took up this position, work had already started on that project, but given the state of the art, it was going to cost about two times more than had been projected.

Industry committee  Yes, it was in October, and I took up the position in September.

Industry committee  No, there's no lack of transparency. Objectively speaking, the union partners from Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean are remarkably transparent. Once again, we don't want to do projects that undermine our credibility. We want to do projects in a way that's smart for everyone.

Industry committee  No, no. I arrived on October 23. I put the project on pause in November. We are currently determining whether it has to be resized, and, if so, how to do that intelligently. On the one hand, we want to preserve the objective of creating jobs. I want to point out to the committee that we are talking about several dozen jobs here.

Industry committee  It's because we were pouring way more concrete than what was anticipated in the initial plan. You may say that's surprising, but it surprised me too. The project isn't on hold. It's being revamped. What everyone's intending to do is find a way to do it in normally healthy financial conditions.

Industry committee  You may have been told that, but not by me.

Industry committee  Look, I—

Industry committee  It has gone towards building equipment like the first electrolysis pot, where you put the aluminum ore; building the anodes and the cathodes that allow you to produce aluminum out of this aluminum ore; building around that, the logistics equipment that allows you to move anodes into the pot and take them out; starting to build the second facility, where we'll do the same thing on a scale that is three times bigger, which is a different location; hiring 100 R and D people and funding R and D work in the central labs of Rio Tinto and its partner; and building laboratory equipment that allows us to do a number of tests that are necessary to validate what we are doing.

Industry committee  I don't think we have communicated the number of tonnes, but we have produced this. We and our partners have sold some tonnes of this to real industrial users for industrial use so that they could qualify it in their process. We have not produced anything close to the amount of aluminum that we produce today with traditional technology.

Industry committee  The technology works. It works out of the lab. It works on something that is one-third the size of real equipment. We now have to make it work on something that is the size of the real equipment in a repeatable manner. We did manage to do that, but sometimes we failed. Then we tried again.

Industry committee  We don't know yet. It's far from certain—very far.

Industry committee  We know there are some attempts to do it in Russia and China, particularly in Russia. We are not aware of similar programs anywhere else. It is a joint venture between us and other major North American producers. We went together because we have complementary investigation fields on the topic.

Industry committee  When you do aluminum, the first step is to mine bauxite. Typically, bauxite mines are close to the equator. Then, you put this bauxite in an aluminum refinery, where you do some processing, cleaning, washing and heating. From that bauxite, you produce alumina, which is what we are doing in Saguenay—Lac-Saint-Jean and Vaudreuil.