Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to participate by video conference this afternoon.
I would like to bring my perspective as a university researcher and leader with a particular interest in energy research and development and significant activity in oil sands processing.
The Centre for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta was established in 2005 as a collaboration between universities, industry, and government. A $20-million commitment from Imperial Oil was leveraged in partnership with Alberta Innovates, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and Natural Resources Canada.
Currently we have 20 active projects with seven universities across Canada and with government labs as well. We're focused on breakthrough technologies for oil sands mining, focusing on reducing the footprint of the mining operation; trying to extract the bitumen without freshwater consumption, and with minimal creation of tailings; and upgrading the bitumen to valuable products with less rejection of resources and higher energy efficiency.
The Centre for Oil Sands Innovation is only a small part of an extremely large effort on energy at the University of Alberta, where we estimate we have as many as 1,000 researchers, faculty members, graduate students, and lab technicians working on not only oil sands but a range of fossil and renewable energy sources.
It's with that basis that I would like to comment on the questions posed by your committee with respect to the role of the federal government in energy innovation.
In terms of the current status of research and innovation, let me comment specifically on the oil sands industry, where the industry as we know it is largely the result of the application of Canadian inventions and continuous innovation to an extremely significant world-class resource. We have a thriving ecology of industrial innovation that is supported by both university research and government laboratories, such as the CANMET labs of Natural Resources Canada.
The investments by government in the 1970s and 1980s provided some of the key prerequisites for the oil sands industry as we know it. One was a range of new ideas that have been subsequently commercialized and developed into important new technologies. The other was highly trained personnel to actually move into the industry and make that happen. I think it's important to keep both of those aspects in mind when we look at the long-term strategic role in supporting energy research.
As an example, the research partnership program of NSERC was essential for the expansion of university capacity since 1990, especially at the University of Alberta, by supporting university-industry partnerships.
I'm very happy, Mr. Wamboldt, that Suncor is one of our most important partners in many of these efforts.
During that period, though, NSERC did not actually identify oil sands as an area of strategic importance; rather, their general programs enabled a broad range of industry partnerships to develop and flourish and launch a huge amount of very important work.
I think the point here is to think about enabling a broad range of activities and not try to pick too many as high priorities. An example is the national centres of excellence program, which for most of its history has had no particular activity whatsoever in the oil sands, with the exception of one recent effort that includes work on carbon dioxide emissions only.
In terms of comparison with other countries, clearly Canada is a world leader in research and innovation for production and processing of oil sands and heavy oil. The oil sands technologies in many areas are moving internationally and are having a significant impact.
I won't spend too much time talking about new technologies except for two that I'm particularly excited about. Since they're launched from university labs, they have a longer timeline than the kinds of developments you've heard about so far this afternoon.
The first is non-aqueous extraction, where we take the mined oil sands and extract the bitumen without using water. By using solvents and other chemicals, we have promising results that show that we can create dry tailings instead of some of the wet tailings materials that Mr. Wamboldt was talking about with the TRO process. This approach uses an insignificant amount of fresh water and leaves no tailings ponds.
The second technology that's further down the road is a new class of very high-activity catalysts, using cheap metals like iron and nickel, that would enable much cheaper upgrading of bitumen from the oil sands into high-quality crude oil.
From the university perspective, we've seen many new technologies developed in the oil sands. As I said, we see a very rich level of innovation and commercialization going on.
The main barrier we've seen on the university side has been intellectual property. It was delightful that the oil sands companies, with Suncor as a leader, were able to put aside intellectual property issues and combine efforts to form COSIA last year.
In terms of what role the federal government can play in strengthening the foundation, the federal government is responsible for international relations, but from the perspective of the University of Alberta, we see relatively weak support for international research linkages related to energy in a range of other areas.
The University of Alberta is internationalizing its research effort. For example, we have a very large collaboration with the Helmholtz Association in Germany focused on oil sands research. We're building a new collaboration with the top university in China, Tsinghua University, focused on coal conversion and carbon capture technologies.
Unlike many other western countries, the federal agencies that work with universities on research have a much narrower mandate to help support and encourage international linkages. This is an important gap. It's not unique to energy but cuts across many different sectors.
Major problems of research like the oil sands need not only the best brains in Canada but also international cooperation to bring the best available minds to bear. We think the support, not for money to go overseas but to help fund and support Canadian efforts in joint international efforts, is an important opportunity to advance energy leadership not only in Canada but internationally.
Thank you for your attention. I'd be delighted to answer questions.