Environment committee  Yes. It depends. There is a large range out there right now. If you look at some of the recent sustainability reports, it's 2, 2.7, and 3, but it's been as high as 4.5 barrels.

Environment committee  They're from the National Energy Board. Also, if you go back to the sustainability reports for each of the oil sands developers, such as Shell, Syncrude, and Suncor, you can actually calculate that number.

Environment committee  There was recently a directive put out by the Alberta government to try to give a bit of a regulatory push to speed up reclamation of tailings ponds. My personal opinion is there's still a lot of work to be done on the research side, in terms of reclaiming those tailings ponds. A

Environment committee  Some of these compounds, as Dr. Gray mentioned, are biodegradable, but this makes for some interesting challenges in the tailings ponds when they do biodegrade. We all think that these ponds are dead and there's nothing there, but micro-organisms exist everywhere, and they exist

Environment committee  The total amount of water is of the order of 12 to 13 barrels, as some of the publications suggest. Of that, about 80% to 90% is recycled. Syncrude, in their last sustainability report, published a figure of 88% recycled. So if you take the 12 to 13 barrels and recycle 80% to 9

Environment committee  I don't know where it's at. I've heard of it, and I know you will be talking to him tomorrow.

Environment committee  I don't think it's treated. It's used for a number of different applications. The water that comes out of the Athabasca River is used for the extraction, but it's also used for the industrial or mining purposes as well.

Environment committee  Yes.

Environment committee  There's a lot of research going on in tailings reclamation basically looking at trying to get the tailings ponds to settle faster so we can reclaim. But the other issue in getting the tailings ponds to settle faster is that if they settle faster, they'll release more water, which

Environment committee  I think.... I'm not sure.

Environment committee  The technology that I'm using is called supercritical fluid extraction, which has been used on a lab scale to extract bitumen from oil sands successfully. Right now we're looking at carbon dioxide. It uses carbon dioxide at about 40 degrees and at relatively high pressure. It a

Environment committee  That's the big challenge.

Environment committee  What you saw were the seepage dikes and the channels around the tailings ponds to capture any of the seepage. These tailings ponds are not lined, so systems are in place to capture any seepage and return it to the tailings ponds. A study out of the University of Waterloo is looki

Environment committee  As far as I understand it, we don't have a clear understanding, from an analytical point of view, whether there is or not.

Environment committee  Right now the science and engineering, as far as I understand it, is looking at the analytical technologies to measure naphthenic acids. As the name implies, naphthenic acids are a group of acids. There's a lot of research going into developing analytical techniques that are sens