Environment committee  The water is still going into the tailings ponds, but they are investigating technologies to treat that water to get a sufficiently good quality for extraction. So they have been using that, but they've noticed that the quality.... With the CT process--and I'm not sure how many y

Environment committee  That's what they call the “CT”, or composite tailings, process. They've been investigating it for several years now. There are problems with the quality of the recycled water. There are very high levels of calcium—because they're adding gypsum—that have caused problems in the ext

Environment committee  This is actually a question for a toxicologist, I'd say, an environmental toxicologist.

Environment committee  I would say that's a difficult question to answer, because when we do research and development, it's just that, research and development, and all of those things that are tested in the lab and work in the lab might not work when we go up to pilot scale. For example, there are tec

Environment committee  I know a little bit about in situ, but not as much as some of my work, which is on surface mining.

Environment committee  There are some developments that are happening in the lab, looking at waterless extraction technologies, for example. You might have seen some of the work that I've been doing in looking at a waterless extraction process. We've been working on that in the lab. And I've seen some

Environment committee  There are heavy metals in the ores. These are heavy metals that were present, but the concentration levels of which have greatly increased as a result of the process.

Environment committee  I don't know. You should perhaps consult the data of the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program.

Environment committee  Once again, I don't have the figures with me. I haven't monitored the concentrations. So I'm not sure. Perhaps we should look at the data that Waterloo University has published in this field.

Environment committee  Not as far as I know.

Environment committee  Heavy metals are not very mobile in the environment. You often find them in solid tailings, but not in the liquid part. They are often associated with solids, not with liquids, except if they are chemically combined with other compounds. However, they often stay with solid tailin

Environment committee  Heavy metals are often associated with solids. Consequently, if heavy metals wind up in the rivers, they'll be found in river sediments.

Environment committee  We're talking about the water table, not the river. They do a lot of studies at Waterloo University on the compounds present in the water table around the oil sands. This isn't my field. Consequently, I don't have a lot of information on the subject. However, the toxic compound

Environment committee  My calculations went from roughly 15% to as high as 25%, I believe. Roughly 15% to 30% would probably be the range.

Environment committee  The concentrations weren't high. From what I know, the naphthenic acid concentrations are very low in the water tables. They are very high in the tailings ponds, but the concentrations are quite low, indeed non-toxic, in the water tables.