Good morning, and thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm the chief executive of an organization called Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, or COSIA. COSIA was launched about four years ago when the CEOs of the 13 largest oil sands companies in Canada signed a charter. The charter is not a legal document; it's a moral document. What it did was commit those organizations, at the most senior level in this country, the CEOs, to work together or to co-operate on two things: environmental performance improvement and cost-cutting.
This is a world precedent-setting arrangement among some of the largest companies in Canada, where they've decided that it's in their best interest, in the sector's best interest, and frankly in Canada's best interest, if they co-operate and collaborate rather than compete. Collaboration is just a better model to accelerate environmental performance improvement.
What do we do? We align these 13 organizations so that they can articulate their innovation needs and their technology needs in four key areas: water; land; tailings, which is mining waste; and greenhouse gas emissions. We create the framework within which the organizations come up with a single list of technology priorities for the oil sands sector. Then what the companies do is that they launch projects to fill those innovation gaps or develop the technologies that they now all understand they need. So far right now our project portfolio is about 250 projects, with a price tag of about $500 million. But the key difference with COSIA, compared with any other organization that we know of on the planet, is that once these technologies are developed, these large companies, which a short number of years ago were true competitors, for the first time globally that we know of, inside of COSIA, give each other free use rights to their technologies. So far the companies have shared about 820 technologies that cost $1.3 billion to develop.
If you think about it, what this means is that not every company has to develop their own environmental technologies. In the old days, every company would have to develop their own and they would try to license them to each other. Essentially, there was a great amount of effort for a small net amount of outcome. But, inside of COSIA, and the fact that the companies have decided to give each other royalty-free use rights, what it means is that each individual company can develop one technology and share or give use rights to their collaborators. They give one piece of technology away in terms of use rights and they get back 12 pieces of technology. They've leveraged up their investment, their leadership potential, by well over an order of magnitude, and this has the potential to speed up the progress they are making on cost-cutting and environmental performance by well over an order of magnitude.
In our four years, we now have a direct line of sight to prove that this is not just a theoretical concept; this actually works. We have a direct line of sight from setting a priority, developing a technology, sharing it, and implementing it. The proof point is on the company's water consumption. The companies have set a goal inside of COSIA to decrease their freshwater use intensity by 50% by 2022. Between 2012 and 2014, inside of COSIA, they have reduced their freshwater use intensity by 36%, so we have gone from the theoretical and the possible now into the real, and the idea that the concept has been proven.
That's what we do. What do we do into the future? Literally last night we convened a group of the most senior leaders in innovation in the oil sands. We convened presidents and vice-presidents of research of our major universities in Alberta, we convened senior leaders from the provincial government, and we convened over 10 senior leaders of CEOs and vice-presidents from oil sands companies. Now we're taking the COSIA model, where the companies themselves are very organized in terms of aligning on sector-level priorities, and we're raising that level of organization up to all of the innovation providers from academia, from government, and from industry.
We think this model has potential, frankly, to lay out a grand vision for this country in terms of, especially, greenhouse gas reduction technologies, where Canada, through this type of model, can assume a leadership role on the global stage, not just for reducing our own emissions but for developing technological solutions for the globe so that this country can move into the solution space for developing a clear technology path forward to address the global issue of GHG emissions and climate change.
What would be a specific ask?
The current government has signalled an intent to invest into three to five what they are calling “innovation clusters”, through Minister Bains's ministry. We feel that we are uniquely placed to partner with the Government of Canada on one of these superclusters that would, by definition, bring together disparate groups of innovation providers, which now are not fully communicating as much as they could.
We have the core already. We have COSIA. Through our organization, we've signed MOUs, memorandums of understanding, with 40 organizations globally, ranging from the global General Electric to more local universities. We already have the architecture and the culture of setting priorities and linking globally with potential innovation providers. Now we are raising our game to include the most senior leaders in academia and government.
I would like the government, and potentially this committee, to consider the possibility of investing, through its existing announcement of superclusters, into COSIA.
Thank you.