Environment committee  You can try us.

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  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  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  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  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