Natural Resources committee  Thank you. I'm going to continue going through the slides we've handed out and give you a little more background in preparation for your trip to Fort McMurray. This is just background material, so I'm going to go very quickly. If you have questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Natural Resources committee  Let me just address the first comment you had on accelerated capital cost allowance. The first thing that's important to recognize is that it actually was in place from back in the early seventies. It applied to all mining companies at that point in time. It was in 1996 that it w

Natural Resources committee  So they just extended it to the renewables and other people to try to bring it on a level playing field. That's what I think they're trying to get to as they move forward. On the question you had regarding the decision to build the refining capacity and the agreement that has be

Natural Resources committee  The carbon capture technology is available. The concern that many companies have is that if they take just the regular carbon dioxide that goes out of a stack, at the top of a chimney, it's already at atmospheric pressure. It's very expensive to compress it back down into usable

Natural Resources committee  Let me start with your last question on the science and technology and on the investment in research and development by the industry. I won't be able to answer your question directly on how much is directed at the social cost, because the costs are blended. The industry is spend

Natural Resources committee  No. The hydrogen addition is probably the higher end, near the one, or one and a little. It may be slightly above that. It depends on the exact technology you're using.

Natural Resources committee  It depends on how much you're using and what quality you're upgrading, but the range we are using is a half of 1,000 cubic feet of gas to a full 1,000 cubic feet of gas. In economic terms, that's $3.50 to $7 of gas to create $58-a-barrel oil. So the economics are there. The ther

Natural Resources committee  First off, I have seen the report on the natural gas situation in Canada. One of the things we would supplement to that report is the development of what we're calling unconventional gas. They mention a small amount in their report. Just as we have conventional oil and unconventi

Natural Resources committee  Synthetic. That's the range that goes across it. If you're looking only at the bitumen, it's the lower number. If you're at the higher number, you're using more than that.

Natural Resources committee  It is not necessarily using hydrogen addition. It may be using the coking technology, which is carbon extraction.

Natural Resources committee  But even those plants are reducing the amount of gas they can use, because of the high cost. For example, I mentioned that Syncrude is reducing their water temperature. That will reduce the amount of natural gas they consume going forward.

Natural Resources committee  It depends on how you define enhanced, but with just the CO2 flooding there, it's relatively small from that perspective. Right now, we see conventional oil and oil sands are about one to one, so one out of every two barrels comes from either side of that. As we move forward wit

Natural Resources committee  Associated with the capital cost allowances in general, but specifically with the accelerated capital cost allowance, is a rule called the “available for use” rule, which says if you spend a dollar in capital, normally you can start writing that off for tax purposes immediately,

Natural Resources committee  Certainly. As I mentioned, this is from a report that was done by an external consultancy. They looked at 324 oil royalty regimes and different parts of the royalty regime. In Alberta they looked at four or five, because there's old oil, new oil, third-tier oil. In the U.K. there

Natural Resources committee  Yes, you can kick in. The development of the oil sands draws extensively on manufactured goods and services from across the country. The construction occurs at the oil sands site in Alberta, so a lot of the construction materials are put in place there, but they buy pumps, valves