Environment committee  We will now move on to Dr. Guigard.

Environment committee  Thank you, Mr. Vice-Chair. I'm delighted to be able to meet with the committee this morning. I'm in perfect position to follow your tour of the oil sands yesterday, as well as your meeting with the community in Fort Chipewyan. I'm a professor of chemical engineering at the Uni

Environment committee  Once the bitumen has been transformed into synthetic crude oil, it takes about 10% further energy use to make transportation fuels, transport it to the end user and so on. The refining side, once you have a synthetic crude, is quite efficient. The only other comment on the energ

Environment committee  That would be an average.

Environment committee  I think the appropriate comparison is to look at alternate technologies. Don't look at conventional crude oil, because we don't have that available, and don't look at normal natural gas. The two comparisons I like to make are to coal, which is abundant in western Canada and weste

Environment committee  May I add to Dr. Guigard's comments? The heavy metals are extremely difficult to remove from the bitumen. They have no mobility in the ecosystem. My own personal research has been in finding ways to try to remove those metals from the oil sands system. So far we have not succee

Environment committee  Yes, I think they are. But the other side of it that you need to keep in mind is, at least in the industry as it stands now, when a new mine is opened, it's opened after a regulatory process that approves the plan of how that resource will be developed, how the tailings will be m

Environment committee  I think you need to look at which impact you're concerned about. You need to partition them, I think, a little bit. The impacts that I see are on land and land reclamation, water use and tailings, energy use and greenhouse gases. The first two I think are much more amenable to r

Environment committee  For our innovation centre, the priorities are set by the people who are providing the funding, along with the University of Alberta. So we have an executive committee that consists of representatives from industry, the Government of Alberta, and from the University of Alberta, th

Environment committee  You can try us.

Environment committee  I'm a professor of chemical engineering, so I have to beg ignorance on the detailed medical aspects. I know I've tasted the water. As I mentioned to Monsieur Ouellet, the key is in concentration. The big issue for anyone who's interested in the effect on drinking water is what is

Environment committee  In terms of hydrocarbons, which I can answer your question on, hydrocarbons, in general, do not typically bioaccumulate in humans. That doesn't mean there's no health impact. Some of the light hydrocarbons that are present in gasoline, for example, can cause cancer in humans, but

Environment committee  The addition of gypsum, or calcium sulphate, has been quite well known for a long time. What's been more transformative is the techniques the companies have developed to mix it. They take the tailings, mix in gypsum and sand, and then they can put that mixture back into the mine.

Environment committee  No.

Environment committee  Stackable tailings, I think, are the dream for the mining side of the industry. It would mean you could immediately put tailings back into the mine and start reclaiming right away. One of the unique characteristics of these mines is that because of the tailings, they have a ver