Steve Williams
Analyst · RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead
I mean again, you sort of nailed it in the question there, Greg. If you think of Firebag, nameplate capacity is 180,000 barrels a day. As I said, with the exception of the plant maintenance, we've been at about those levels. The -- we were moving into over the last couple of years there, particularly into -- because of the age of the facility the opportunity to start drilling the first infield wells. They've been working very well. The whole strategy was meant to optimize it through the cycle, not at the beginning of the cycle, but the whole way through the cycle of the wells. And what we're seeing are the SORs now consistently below the three level. So very encouraged by that. You'll see us continuing that strategy. What it's demonstrated to us is that we do have -- the first part of the debottleneck is going to come free, or very close to free. So you will see us bring the plant up to 190,000, maybe even beyond 190,000 with very little investment. So what that means is the investment debottleneck step will go back, because we'll be able to take first advantage of it with virtually no capital. So very good news around Firebag. On the mine, what I would say is, it was always -- the mining operation was always a much slower burn project in a sense. It was about getting operational excellence to work, and then the steady continuous improvement there. So if you go back a couple of years, you will have seen 250,000, 260,000 barrels a day of mined bitumen. We're now regularly approaching 300,000 barrels a day. In fact, in Q3 it was 295,000 barrels a day. So I'm getting confident that we will be able to get up over the 300,000 barrels a day, but yes, it's about maintaining at that level. Lots of high-wearing equipment and it's about continuous attention, continuous operational discipline, and sticking to that ops-excellence principal we put in there, and I'm comfortable we will get to stay at over 300,000 barrels a day.