Grant: Canada Excellence Research Chairs

A Hobson’s choice – meeting energy demand from available fuels or reducing drastically society’s environmental footprint – constitutes humankind’s greatest technical challenge in the 21st century. In the next few decades Alberta’s oil sands will be a crucible: a world-class petroleum resource, whose exploitation has left a legacy of environmental problems on surface and increasingly in the subsurface. Current exploitation methods require large invested energy, water use and CO2 emissions. Future exploitation is imperilled under a “business as usual” mindset, as social/political engagement ebbs, uncertainty in market access grows, and disruptive developments enable competing fuels and/or alternative transportation modes.To address this challenge, this CERC proposes a revolution in oil sands innovation and technology development, both for near-term problems and long-term opportunities. It starts small, at the scale of 100 atoms, where mesoscale science begins and remarkable properties of nanomaterials emerge, but reaches the 100 km span of an entire oil sands region. Though in its infancy, mesoscale science holds tremendous potential for this application: new nanomaterials that enable energy conversion, materials manipulation, and remote activation -- all with unprecedented deployment capabilities. We will invent and use such nanomaterials to develop new platforms and minimize process footprint, e.g. by increasing steam-conformance efficiency to reduce SAGD’s CO2 and water footprints, controlling/containing/monitoring in-situ processes and practical rapid decommissioning of tailing ponds and produced water. We will create game-changing processes that convert the enormous chemical reductive potential of in-situ heavy oil into low emission, alternative energy vectors (methane, hydrogen, electricity).The program will not be merely technical but will, through technology team building and managed collaboration, advance the scientific basis for directed design and low-cost synthesis of nanomaterials. We will train a new breed of students to bring these advances to the field and usher in an era of innovative energy production.