Finance committee  Thank you. I don't plan on going through the full extent of that, but I thought it would be useful to provide your committee with the background documents associated with what's going on in the oil sands industry right now. I will touch on a couple of them to help clarify some o

Natural Resources committee  Or some other limitation. That's correct.

Natural Resources committee  Just very quickly, in the interest of time, I agree with the comments you've made on that. In this particular thing I want to emphasize again that the accelerated capital cost allowance is not just for the oil sands. It started in the mining industry, and it's now being extended

Natural Resources committee  That depends on price, but currently there really is a lot of reserve out there, and as prices move up, the more uneconomical reserve that isn't counted today comes into the fold. So the number I gave you of 175 billion barrels is at today's price and today's technology. If tec

Natural Resources committee  That is correct. The reference I gave you was actually for the conventional oil industry. For the mining industry, which you'll be going up to see in Fort McMurray, they actually recover about 95% to 98% of the oil.

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

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  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  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.