Natural Resources Committee on March 21st, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I will call the meeting to order.

I'd like to welcome everybody back from our constituency week. I hope it was very productive and that you got a lot done back in your home ridings.

I'd like to thank Mr. Kmiec for substituting today and joining us for the meeting.

I'd like to thank and introduce our witness today. We're very fortunate to be joined by Mr. Dan Wicklum, who is the chief executive of Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, an organization that needs no introduction around this table.

I want to thank you very much for taking the time today and making yourself available to speak with us and answer some questions. You're joining us from Calgary, I understand.

[Dan Wicklum, Chief Executive, Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance]

I am, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

I welcome you to provide some introductory remarks, and then we can open the floor to questions.

[Dan Wicklum]

Thank you very much.

Good afternoon.

As you said, I have the privilege of being the chief executive of Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, or COSIA.

We were deliberate in choosing our organization's name because we wanted it to reflect the fact that oil sands are a national resource that can be developed sustainably, from coast to coast to coast.

I'd just like to point out that by testifying in front of the committee today, we are saving almost 500 kilograms of carbon from being liberated into the atmosphere. As we enter a carbon-constrained world, we all need to be willing and able to step up and communicate and interact differently.

I have about 10 minutes of presentation that's going to be centred on about eight slides, but I would very much like to preserve most of my time with you for questions at the end.

The slide in front of you now should appear as a circle, or a ring of logos; it's slide 2. At the top of the slide is the vision of our alliance. Simply put, the vision of these 13 oil sands companies, which joined together four years ago inside a new legal structure, is to accelerate the pace of their environmental performance improvement in Canada's oil sands. That's why we're here. That's what we do. We accelerate the pace of environmental performance improvement. We do it through two concepts. One is collaboration; the other is innovation.

I'll unpack a little bit more detail in terms of what that means in the COSIA context. These 13 companies collectively account for about 90% of the daily production of Canada's oil sands. Before COSIA they competed on environmental performance. Through COSIA they collaborate. What that means, to put a point on it, is that they share with each other the knowledge, practices, and technologies that they know and own, all to accelerate their performance improvement. Inside of COSIA, we think that this collaboration is pushed as deeply as in any alliance or industry association we know of anywhere on the planet.

Let me give you an example. All of these companies own proprietary technology. Inside of COSIA, for the first time they give each other patent use rights, royalty free, in perpetuity, and irrevocably if it's going to help them accelerate their performance improvement in the oil sands. Essentially what they've decided is that when it comes to environmental performance, collaboration is a better model than competition. They're still in full compliance with competition law, but when it comes to environmental performance, they collaborate.

The first thing they do is share their technologies. So far they've shared almost 820 technologies that cost about $1.3 billion to develop.

The second thing the 13 companies inside COSIA do, along with 39 formal partners that have been made partners inside of an associate membership program by signing a memorandum of understanding with COSIA, is they develop a planning framework so that they codify and articulate the highest innovation priorities for new knowledge, new practices, and new technologies.

The third thing that they do collectively, themselves, and with a global network of partners is launch new projects to develop and test new technologies. Our current project portfolio is about 250 projects with a price tag of about $450 million.

Let's go to the next slide. I'm going to give you a little bit more detail in each of those areas where the companies share, plan, and deliver. The slide in front of you is a bit complex. I won't go into the details. It's a cascade of rectangles. In the upper left-hand corner is the COSIA charter and vision. The charter is essentially a document that the CEOs of each of these 13 oil sands companies has signed, committing to themselves and to each other that they would do things differently. They would push collaboration to depths that large companies have not done previously in the world.

The bottom right-hand rectangle talks about a project portfolio. This is really a list of our 250 projects. We needed to develop a series of more detailed and technical concepts that would link the ability to make sure we're launching exactly the right projects in the bottom right-hand box with the ability to deliver on the vision of responsible development in the upper left-hand box.

Without going into detail, I'll just say that these companies have defined the technical concepts. We call them opportunity areas or gaps or challenges. They are exceedingly refined articulations of an innovation need, that is, exactly what type of technology we need in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or use less water, for example. This is the planning framework that we've made fit for purpose and we have populated since COSIA was launched.

On the next slide we have four concepts, all of which we call aspirations. Now that we have these 13 companies working together, we have to define what success is, what they are trying to accomplish. We do that through two main concepts. One is called an aspiration and the other is called a goal. They're similar but different.

An aspiration is what you see in front of you. I won't go into the details, but I'll draw your attention to the bottom box where the companies collectively say that their aspiration in terms of greenhouse gas emissions is to produce their oil with lower greenhouse gas emissions than other sources do. Said otherwise, they want to be the best. They want to be the best in class at what they do.

On the next slide, we have the concept of a goal, which is similar to an aspiration. This is quantitative. We have three goals. I'll give you an example of one right now. This is public and we do report publicly on progress towards this goal. For in situ water performance, the companies have said collectively that they want to reduce their freshwater use intensity by 50% by 2022. Setting this kind of aspiration and this kind of goal allows both technical people inside of these companies and their partners to understand what new technologies they need to develop and test in order to deliver on these goals.

I'm happy to say that we reported for the first time against this goal in the fall of 2015. Between 2012 and 2014, which is within the life history of COSIA, the companies reduced their freshwater use intensity by 36%. We have a similar goal for mining companies, which is to reduce freshwater use by 30%. Again, I'm pleased to say that we're almost at that goal.

Next we have a very busy slide full of logos. This tells you the level of partnership that these companies are at with COSIA. These are our 39 associate members. We have really two major types of associate members. One type is organizations that have innovation capacity internally, which have staff and budgets. In many cases these are some of the most innovative and technologically intense organizations in the world. I'm looking at General Electric, IBM, and Veolia. The second type of associate member is what we call a hub organization. There are just too many companies, organizations, universities, and governments around the world that we need to link into to have a direct relationship with each one of them. We've therefore launched a series of partner hubs, shown in the middle band with a white background on the slide in front of you. We develop a very intense relationship with these organizations. They really rarely understand the opportunity areas, the gaps, and the challenges that the COSIA companies have. They take those innovation priorities and they use them in their existing network. We may not touch partners of these hub organizations, but through those hubs we extend our reach and our touch to literally hundreds and hundreds more people and organizations around the planet. Essentially our goal is to have a very detailed technological innovation ecosystem in which the best minds and the best organizations in the world understand the technological needs of the oil sands sector, and they accelerate solutions that come back to the companies.

On the next slide, labelled “Innovation in Action - E-TAP”, I wanted to flag that there are two real ways for third parties to plug into COSIA. One is very formal, very structured, and frankly, quite intensive, through our associate membership program. E-TAP, on the slide in front of you, is exactly the opposite. Any party in the world, ranging from a large company to a garage entrepreneur, can go to the COSIA website and submit an idea very quickly and very safely by filling out a very simple template. We put those ideas in front of the oil sands companies immediately.

You don't have to be an associate member; you can be an individual, an organization, a student, or anyone to get your innovation idea in front of the COSIA companies very quickly. What the companies do through COSIA is send back direct feedback, again quickly, to the innovation entrepreneur, either with an affirmative “yes, we like your idea and we'd like to advance it” or potentially with feedback such as “your idea may not be pertinent at this time, but here are the types of things you could work on to make it more attractive to the companies”. So far, we have almost 600 ideas coming in through E-TAP.

On the next slide, I'm going to give about six project examples, to give you an idea of what some of the 250 projects we have inside our COSIA project portfolio are like.

The first one on the list is an XPRIZE. The concept of an XPRIZE, you may remember, came into popularity when a prize was offered to the first team that could take a manned space vehicle into orbit, return it to Earth safely, then return it to orbit and again safely to Earth within two weeks. You may remember that a team won that competition and was awarded $20 million. That technology has now been licensed and is the start of a burgeoning space tourism industry with Richard Branson and others.

COSIA has partnered with an American energy company called NRG to offer a $20-million prize to any team in the world that can take carbon dioxide and change it into a valuable product. What we feel we're doing with this is reconceptualizing or reimagining carbon. Right now, it's a waste. What would happen if we could make it into a valuable resource? It would fundamentally change the way we look at carbon and fundamentally change the climate change game.

That's not to say that many of the COSIA projects are not developing technology that would decrease emissions in the first place, but we believe in developing as many tools in the tool box as we can, and the COSIA carbon XPRIZE and the $20-million prize to reimagine carbon is one of them.

The second project on the list is the SkyStrat, a flying rig. It's essentially a new type of oil drilling platform that can be lifted by helicopter into an area, negating the need for any type of connecting road and dramatically and markedly decreasing the fragmentation of the landscape and the amount of disturbance of it.

The third is a fuel cell. There are fuel cells that use a compound called molten carbonate for electron transfer. They're now being used commercially in the Orient. We have taken that technology and are in the middle of testing it in the oil sands context. If initial modelling is correct, it could decrease GHG emissions, even using existing technology, by up to 30%.

The fourth project is rifle tubes. Many of the technologies that we work on are transformative; they will fundamentally change the technological landscape of the oil sands and other adjacent sectors. Sometimes lots of small innovations can add up to big things as well. This is the rifle tubes. Right now, in order to produce oil in the oil sands, you usually need to produce steam. The way that—

[Technical difficulty—Editor]

We're back. I'm just going to assume that I can keep going, in the interest of time.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Yes, we lost you. You were discussing rifle tubes.

[Dan Wicklum]

To produce oil from the oil sands, usually you need steam. The way most companies make steam is they have a pipe through which they put water, and then they heat the outside of the pipe to make the water steam inside the pipe. As it turns out, if you put spiralled lines inside the pipe and you spiral the water, it heats much more evenly. This uses less water and up to 6% less energy, which of course would be up to 6% less in GHGs emitted. This is not a huge technological breakthrough. It has been used in other areas, such as the rifling inside the barrel of a gun, but it is the type of thing that our engineers think about every day.

I have two more examples, Mr. Chair. One is the water technology development centre. This is a $160-million dedicated facility that we are building to test technology. What we are finding is that even if we have good ideas about how to test technology, our testing infrastructure has to keep up with the demand. There is enough motivation among these companies for the infrastructure not to be a bottleneck to progress that we are developing a dedicated, fit-for-purpose water technology development centre.

The last example is an eye-in-the-sky satellite. There is a Montreal company called GHGSat, which is about to launch a satellite that could dramatically increase the resolution of monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. Several of our companies are teaming up with this Montreal company in order to improve the information collection in the Canadian oil sands.

Mr. Chair, my last slide is a sum-up of results to date of COSIA. We were launched about four years ago. We have completed and populated a planning framework. We have 104 written articulations of priority needs that we and our 39 associate members are distributing around the globe to key partners to accelerate the development of solutions. The total number of active projects in our portfolio right now is 252, with a $480-million price tag. The number of technologies actually shared is 819, which cost about $1.3 billion to develop. Those technologies are now being implemented, and the actual environmental impacts are being realized, such as, for example, our 36% decrease in freshwater use intensity.

We have developed an associate member program, now with 39 associate members, to increase our leverage and reach literally around the world. We have associate members from Israel and the U.K., and our hub members reach every continent.

We have been actually quite quiet since we were launched. We really felt that we needed substance in delivery before we started to talk about COSIA. We feel that that's there now, so 2016 is a year when we will be speaking a little more to key partners and key opinion leaders about what we are doing.

My last point is about our E-TAP, where not just associate members can plug into COSIA, but anyone—including anyone on this committee—who has a good environmental innovation idea. You can propose it to these oil sands companies for direct and immediate follow-up. Of course, as always, third party intellectual property is protected. These companies are willing to test third party technologies. We are not asking third parties to share. That is not the way the world works. Third party intellectual property is completely protected.

That is my presentation, Mr. Chair. I would be happy to answer questions to the best of my ability.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you very much.

I am going to open the floor to questions now. The first segment of the questions will come in seven-minute installments, Mr. Wicklum.

Mr. Lemieux, you are up first.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Wicklum, thank you for that great presentation.

Our committee is currently studying innovation, sustainable solutions, and economic opportunities in the oil and gas industry. What your alliance is trying to do, in other words, speed up the discovery and development of environmental technologies and close the gap between an idea's inception and implementation, is precisely what we are concerned about.

My first question is this, Mr. Wicklum. How can your alliance help the oil sands industry improve its reputation around the world when it comes to sound environmental practices?

[Dan Wicklum]

I'd say there are two elements to that question. I'll touch on this notion of accelerating implementation which is a core part of COSIA's mandate.

One of the benefits when COSIA companies share is that they can share test results. We have many situations where one company tests one piece of technology and then shares the test results with all the others. The understanding and the expectation is that other companies test as well and also share their results. Before COSIA, each company had to test every technology. With COSIA now, for example, each company could test one water technology, share the results, and each company would have the results of 13 tests. That's the acceleration and it's much more cost-effective.

In terms of how our organization can be used to influence our reputation, I feel that reputation is a function of substance and communications. We are the one organization in the Canadian oil sands that deals with substance collectively. Each of these companies holds the burden and responsibility to improve their performance, but we are the only organization within which they come, work together, do things quicker, do things more effectively, and do things cheaper. We are about substance.

In terms of communication, there are many organizations that have roles to play in international communication. The Government of Canada has a strong role, as do the provincial governments, individual companies, and individual commentators. That space is actually quite packed. There are many organizations that have a role in communication.

We're the organization that has the role to actually deliver on substance, to help companies improve their performance more quickly. Because of that, I don't want to get pushed out of our strategic space, so I want to ensure that we concentrate on substance.

Having said that, the companies have said, in 2016, they would like our organization to play an increasing role in communications as well.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you.

I'm also quite interested in the progress the oil sands industry is making around water savings and reduction. You're doing a lot of work involving accelerated dewatering, waste, and centrifugal action.

How do you manage to integrate your dynamic flocculation ideas and principles into the dewatering and centrifugation processes?

[Dan Wicklum]

In COSIA, we have four environmental priority areas. One is water. One is tailings, which of course is mining waste. One is greenhouse gas emissions. The last one we call land. You can think of that as landscape. It's decreasing disturbance to begin with, and when the land is disturbed, to speeding its reclamation.

As it turns out, in many cases, a technology that's developed by our water group, for example, has implications and ramifications for the other three. We have very formal structures and planning processes to ensure that the planning that happens by each of these four groups is integrated. I'll give you an example.

Many companies are working on ways to use the water that's contained in tailing ponds as a source feed of water for their production capacity. It's actually taking a waste, again, and turning it into a resource. In this case it's tailings ponds water.

For another example, I'll go back to my rifled tubes example. This is a piece of work that was done by our GHG group that was looking for ways to use less energy and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The group came up with the rifled tubes. As it turns out, it has a co-benefit of using much less water as well.

When we take a look at almost every technology, almost everything that were working on is linked to at least one, if not all, of the other EPAs. It's very important to take an integrated view, and we have the structures and processes to ensure that happens.

[Denis Lemieux, Liberal, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

I care a lot about Canada's energy sector and the oil sands. I do what I can to promote them, in fact.

As far as oil sands research is concerned, what are the success stories that you think should be shared with the public, to show Canadians that the industry wants to take the appropriate action to overcome the environmental challenges facing this generation as well as future generations?

[Dan Wicklum]

One of the challenges that we have with 13 very large companies working together is that there are an awful lot of what I call moving parts. Our planning framework and the work that we help the companies with cannot be an added layer of bureaucracy to slow them down. We have structures and tools that allow the companies to share. Projects are constantly coming online; new projects are being launched, and projects are closing down. On our website, we have about 30 to 40 examples of either active or concluded projects that people can go to. We have a communications department that is at people's disposal if they want more information. We have just come to an agreement with select federal departments that will provide them with quarterly update sheets of active projects, completed projects, breakthroughs, and outcomes, so that the Government of Canada can use that in their day-to-day business however that may be.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

Thank you, Mr. Wicklum.

Mr. Barlow, over to you.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Dan, thank you very much for being with us today. I appreciate it. My riding is Foothills, in the southwest corner of Alberta. It's great to have an Albertan with us today to talk about this industry.

One of the things you talked about at the end of your presentation was communication and substance. One of the things that our committee has to do, which we've heard so much about, is get the message out about some of the extraordinary innovations and partnerships that are developing in the private sector.

We've heard over the last couple of weeks, certainly not from the members of this committee—we have a great group here—but from some other members of government, that we will not be able to explore our fossil fuels, specifically the oil sands, without increasing greenhouse gases. Our best solution to this is to leave up to two-thirds of our energy resources in the ground.

I look at some of the things that your group and your partnership have been able to do. Over the course of the weekend, I read over some of the projects you've done. For example, 90% of the water is already recycled. Today you talked about direct hot water production. One that really caught my eye was a CNRL, Canadian Natural Resources Limited, project to convert algae and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about it, if you have some more detail. They were talking about the potential to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, or the equivalent of taking 300,000 vehicles off the road. It's projects like these that will make a huge difference. Can you talk about that project a little bit and how far along it is?

[Dan Wicklum]

Yes, I sure can.

One of the things that COSIA does is it brings an overarching collaboration hub to all the individual companies' projects. Current innovation theory suggests that you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. It's sort of like investing. Frankly, you want to take a portfolio approach and invest in many different types of projects, some big, some small, some quite expensive, some not, some absolutely transformative but probably higher risk, and some, frankly, not as transformative but very meaningfully incremental, with a high degree of success. I'll tell you about a couple of examples of projects in our portfolio.

The Canadian Natural Resources one essentially takes waste heat, waste carbon dioxide, and puts it into a bioreactor with designer types of algae. Through a series of processes, refinements, and fermentations what you get is a product that could be used for anything from a solvent to synthetic jet fuel. Fundamentally, it's the concept of taking waste and turning it into a resource, turning the paradigm upside down. That's one that we have.

Another one that just came to mind is something called solvents. Right now, in our in situ practice, much of it is injecting steam deep into the ground, melting the bitumen away from the sand, and then bringing the water, steam, and bitumen to the surface. Some companies are working on solvents so they would never have to use water, and because of that, they wouldn't have to use energy to turn it into steam. They would inject solvents deep into the ground, dissolve the bitumen away from the sand, then bring it all to the surface, extract the bitumen and recycle the solvent. That is the type of fundamentally disruptive technology or transformational technology that companies are working on in many cases.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

In your opinion, Dan, and certainly from speaking with your partners I know this is the reason that you've been brought together as a group, with the technology and the innovation of groups like COSIA, do you see any reason why, from today into the future, we cannot continue to explore our energy sector and extraction projects like the oil sands, and at the same time be able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

[Dan Wicklum]

I don't see any reason.... I mean, here's what I know. I'm a scientist, and I know that when you create a framework that focuses what you're trying to accomplish, you harness all the capacity of smart people and smart organizations and you solve problems.

As for what we're doing inside of COSIA, I'm quite proud of it, but the companies deserve all the accolades. I don't know of any other sector anywhere in the world with companies of this size, historically competitive, that are focusing as quickly and as sharply and are creating this global innovation ecosystem as quickly and in as focused a way as they are. We are seeing results now after, frankly, in innovation scale timelines, what is a rather small length of time. We're very excited about the projects pipeline.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Speaking for my colleagues on this committee, I think, you talked about starting to market yourselves, for a lack of a better description, in 2016, and I hope that one thing we can do is help to bring about some awareness of some of the projects you're doing. I can't say enough about how impressive it is to see a group like the one you've been able to put together in COSIA. Hopefully, it can be a template for other industries such as mining, for example, which would be able to do something like you're doing to share those patents and share your research.

Quickly, there's a last question I have. You talked about reducing GHG emissions and a low environmental footprint. Is there anything COSIA is doing in terms of preferring to transport bitumen and oil sands through pipelines rather than rail and in terms of the advantages of pipelines over rail, trucking, or any other transportation?

[Dan Wicklum]

We actually don't do that. One of the things that I think makes COSIA special—but legal, frankly—is that we've signed a series of joint venture agreements among these companies, one for each of our four priority areas. Those joint venture agreements define the technological scope within which the companies operate on COSIA terms—shared patents—and outside of that scope, the companies don't deal with it at this point.

It's always a trade-off between focus and impact. At this point, the companies have decided to focus on the upstream environmental performance of water, land, tailings, and greenhouse gases. At some point in the future, they may expand that, but at this point that's legally outside of our mandate.

[The Chair, Liberal, James Maloney]

That's perfect timing again.

Mr. Cannings, it's over to you.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation. It's an impressive concept that you're heading up there, and I appreciate that.

You've mentioned that you're looking primarily at environmental areas. Considering that the reason we're here today and talking about all of this is the effect that the economic downturn has had on this industry and the world with the global price of oil, I want to know if there's anything in COSIA's innovations, taken altogether, that will help bring companies closer to profitability. Are there some limits to the technological innovation, especially in the short to medium term, when we have such a miserable outlook for the price of oil?

[Dan Wicklum]

I'll approach the answer to that question in two ways.

One is that the model itself is designed to leverage. What that means, of course, going back to my water technology testing example, is that companies don't have to do everything. They don't have to test every technology. They can count on their collaborators inside of COSIA to do an awful lot of work, because they know they're going to get those results back. Just the concept of leverage itself, by definition, is about 13:1, all things being equal. It's a little more complex than that, more complex than you might have expected, but basically, a company can get the same amount of innovation done—discovery, development, demonstration, and deployment—much more cheaply and quickly because they're actually in the alliance itself. That's one thing I would say.

The second thing is that much of the environmental performance improvement that these companies are relentlessly pursuing, frankly, is about waste. It is about how we could use less energy and how we could waste less energy. How could we use less water? How could we take the waste of tailings and turn it into a resource, or not produce it in the first place?

Fundamentally, the concept of producing waste is not good for these companies, just like it's not good for any company, any individual, or any sector. Fundamentally, if they produce less waste, it's almost always an economic advantage to those companies, because it reduces their operating costs in a co-benefit way. If we find them a way to decrease GHG emissions, it really means that they're not using as much energy and they're lowering the cost base. It's the same for water. It's the same for not disturbing wetlands to begin with. It's the same for not producing as much tailings to begin with. Fundamentally, at the environmental nexus is an issue of cost and environmental performance.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thanks.

You talked about one of your aspirations as being the lowest greenhouse gas producers in the oil industry of all types of oil. I wonder how realistic that aspiration is, and how close you are. Related to that, what would a price on carbon do to drive faster adoption and incentives for further innovation?

[Dan Wicklum]

On the first question relative to our aspiration, it's basically to be the best in class. On how that is going or where are we, I can tell you about many of the new production projects that are coming online. I'm thinking of one by Imperial. The major shareholder of Imperial Canada is ExxonMobil. They have a new project they call the Kearl project. They use a series of interrelated technologies. Basically, they are there already. They are as good as anything out there in the baskets of crudes.

I'm thinking of other new technologies like the solid technology I've talked about. Suncor has a project they call ESEIEH, which is an acronym. They heat the bitumen deep in the ground by using radio waves instead of solvents. In that type of technology the promise is also the fact that they are already there.

Many of these operations came into existence many years ago using existing technology, and they have a certain type of performance. The new oil sands with the new technology is basically there in many cases. I think the future is quite bright and promising for this.