There is indeed a lot of work that's being done in the oil and gas area at the University of Alberta and at NINT as well.
One of the advantages of nanotechnology is that the materials at that scale offer new properties. That's because you have more and more access to surface area, and it means that if you include nanomaterials in existing materials there, they have a higher performance. If we think, for example, about lubricants, if you use nanomaterials in lubricants, they work at different temperatures, have better properties, and so on. That's important for the oil and gas industry.
We work on other problems that are related to the use of equipment in drilling, for example, and the fact that you have equipment that uses batteries in conditions of very high temperatures. Most batteries that we use now do not sustain the very high temperatures that are used in drilling rigs, so how can we use nanotechnology to increase the performance of batteries? We're working on materials for new types of batteries for the oil and gas companies.
These are only two examples, but again it's a type of technology where you have access now to different properties and that's what we try to go and fetch. Nanotechnology is not an industrial sector. It's actually an enabling technology that has applications in all industrial sectors. You just have to choose which sector that you want to have an impact in.