Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.
My name is Richard Adamson, and I'm president of CMC Research Institutes. We're a federally incorporated not-for-profit organization with one key mandate, and that is innovation for the elimination of greenhouse gas emissions from the industrial sector.
My key reason for being here today is to talk about how Canada can turn some of its critical climate challenges into opportunities for economic development, ensure market access, develop new export opportunities, and create jobs.
I'll start with a snapshot of CMC and how we operate. I'll focus on the implicit opportunities for Canada's innovative natural resource sectors in the context of global decarbonization, and then I'll discuss a specific example, one of many prospective solutions in which CMC is engaged.
CMC is a unique organization in Canada. The company is developing a series of institutes with each one focused on a different industry challenge relating to elimination of carbon emissions and forming the core of a clean-tech innovation cluster. Currently we operate two, and we have plans to develop more in other areas of the country. The Containment and Monitoring Institute is headquartered in Calgary, and the Carbon Capture and Conversion Institute is located in Vancouver.
The Containment and Monitoring Institute is focused on developing measurement and monitoring technologies for detection of movement of fluids underground and detection of near-surface leakage. Our primary focus is the storage of CO2, but the insights gained through research and field demonstrations conducted at this institute can be applied to other situations in the oil and gas sectors.
The Containment and Monitoring Institute operates a field research station in southern Alberta near Brooks, for those of you who know southern Alberta. When completed later this year, the site will contain one injection well with a small plume of CO2 stored at a depth of 300 metres, and two observation wells for monitoring the use of different types of downhole equipment. This is the first of two horizons we'll be injecting at.
This site is unique because of its size—three-quarters of a section of land—and because it operates at an intermediate depth, simulating what could be expected if there was a small loss-of-containment event at depth with CO2 percolating up to shallower horizons. It's already attracting technology developers and researchers from across Canada, the U.S., Norway, the U.K., and Germany, who are testing technologies and conducting baseline studies in preparation for injection of CO2. In fact, those various countries have now committed almost $29 million to projects that we'll be involved with at CaMI.
The Containment and Monitoring Institute also operates a mobile geochemistry lab for rapid detection and analysis of soil gas and atmospheric gas, groundwater and surface water, and produced fluids. A key feature of the unit is a truck-based mobile methane detection system that offers real-time drive-around detection and characterization of methane and other gases. The intent is to develop and prove cost-effective means to maintain a rigorous response to methane leaks and to enable resources to focus where the impacts are the greatest.
The Carbon Capture and Conversion Institute is at an earlier stage of development. It is a unique partnership between CMC, BC Research, and researchers at the University of British Columbia. Its purpose is to accelerate the development and scale-up of the industrial processes that capture CO2 and convert it to other products. The institute provides leadership to help clients characterize, de-risk, and accelerate the development of innovative industrial CO2 capturing and conversion technologies from bench to large-scale implementation.
The institute will be headquartered in a new technology commercialization and innovation centre under construction in Richmond. When completed in early 2017, the 40,000-square-foot facility will provide technology developers with access to the specialized equipment required to test and pilot capture-and-conversion technologies. The institute provides clients with the unusual opportunity of being able to access the expertise of early-stage researchers at the university and throughout CMC's worldwide network, through to experts on process engineering, scale-up, and fabrication of equipment.
These two institutes concentrate on driving technology innovation to find solutions to one of Canada's critical challenges—greenhouse gas emissions associated with the industrial sector.
What I really want to address today is turning the country's critical challenges into opportunities.
The best place for Canada to focus its innovation efforts is to identify our most critical challenges and focus efforts on solving those problems. In general, Canada's traditional industries have mostly been resource extraction and processing, and all of them have emission issues. Whether it's oil and gas, mining, forestry, cement, or metallurgical processing, these industries with the biggest emissions are the areas where we have opportunities to develop leadership.
We solve our domestic problems by helping to ensure access to markets increasingly sensitive to climate impacts, but we also develop expertise and solutions to export internationally. We can use our challenge areas as laboratories to develop the technologies and innovate the solutions that we can take to the world. By taking a lead role in reducing emissions associated with our products, we help guarantee market access and differentiate from commodity products from lagging competitors. This approach is similar to how Sweden and Finland came to dominate the forestry industry's harvesting equipment markets.
CMC grew out of an earlier network of centres of excellence named Carbon Management Canada. One of the technologies we funded at that time focused on developing a broad tool kit for capturing and storing carbon in solid form in mine wastes. This process focuses on waste streams from mines hosted in magnesium silicate-rich bedrock, such as the deposits in the Ring of Fire. Natural weathering of these mine wastes consumes CO2, capturing it directly from the air, which makes carbonate rock in the process called carbon mineralization.
The mine wastes have the capacity to store 10 times more carbon than is emitted by mining and mineral processing. If even a small fraction of this capacity is tapped, it provides an opportunity to generate significant carbon offsets. Dr. Greg Dipple, a geochemistry professor at the University of British Columbia, leads a team, including three Canadian and three Australian researchers, that has developed approaches to accelerate the absorption of atmospheric CO2 that could allow individual mines to offset carbon emissions from mine operations, possibly even becoming net carbon sinks.
Working with international mining companies and with experience from a half dozen mine sites around the world, Greg and his colleagues have developed a tool box approach. The tool box takes into account the geology, climate, mine design, local infrastructure, industrial carbon sources, operational costs, and carbon pricing to provide carbon solutions tailored to individual site characteristics. The approaches also have to look at the processes and work with engineers on site in order to work out the most cost-effective ways to integrate carbon mineralization with mine operations. The challenge they face now is to scale up the work that's been happening in labs over the past several years and demonstrate it at a pilot scale under real-world operating conditions.
If the objective is to develop, for example, the Ring of Fire with the lowest carbon footprint per unit of delivered product, it may require identification of operational mines with similar conditions where these methods can be piloted. If they show promise, the results of that work could guide the development of a mining operation that could serve as an example to the world that decarbonization is not incompatible with natural resource development.
The critical role that these types of programs and field-testing facilities play in moving industrially relevant solutions to market is exactly why CMC was formed as an independent, mission-driven organization. This is an important role that stands outside of academia, is often too early for industry, and may involve international and cross-disciplinary collaboration, including private and government labs.
This type of large-scale platform for accelerating scale-up and de-risking of industrial technologies requires significant investment. The time frame and level of uncertainty for development and commercialization of full-scale tools, technologies, and solutions do not meet the investment criteria for strictly private sector funding. It represents a public good that enables Canadian natural resource developments to demonstrate global leadership in a decarbonizing world.
CMC is itself an innovation. As such, it does not fit easily into the traditional funding models available to universities, for-profit technology developers, or government labs. It is an engine and vehicle for identifying and overcoming barriers to moving critical climate-related technologies from the lab bench into the field. We are working actively with federal and provincial governments to overcome this critical gap in Canada's innovation funding system.
Thank you.