Army of innovators lines energy’s road to success – by Jameson Berkow (National Post – September 11, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The challenges facing Canada’s energy industry — to turn one of the most energy-and emissions-intensive resource extraction processes in the world into something more environmentally sustainable — dwarf the innovation hurdles facing other industries. To overcome them, an interconnected army of innovators is key.
 
“People always ask me why this is so hard,” said Robert Donahue, a consulting research engineer at the Syncrude Ltd. research-and-development (R&D) centre focusing on the restoration of depleted mine sites to their natural state, and a former University of Alberta geotechnical engineering professor. “I tell them I’m trying to reconstruct the earth and I’m trying to do it without geological time on my side. I need to do it in human time.”
 
Mr. Donahue is part of a growing collective of PhD-toting, private industry-sponsored academics who have been taking research and development in the energy sector to higher and more commercially viable areas.
 
In traditionally R&D-intensive industries like technology or pharmaceuticals, academic support often comes from the odd breakthrough in a lab or from networks of scientists working in silos that are disconnected from the industries for which their research is intended. Such dynamics explain why academia is so often criticized for spending immense time and resources developing projects that never find a commercial application.
 
In the energy sector, however, the commercialization gap is often mitigated by a much closer integration of academia and private industry.
 
“Traditionally, universities have pushed their knowledge out to society, but what we’re trying to do is pay much more attention to the needs from society,” explained Ed McCauley, vice-president of research at the University of Calgary (U of C). “My job is to try and match the considerable strength we have on campus with those societal opportunities.”

Those strengths, when brought to bear on a specific problem or issue, truly are considerable. As a mid-sized Canadian university, the U of C brings in approximately $285-million each year in external research funds, ranking it seventh in the country.
 
Compared against Canadian corporate R&D spending figures from industry monitor Research Infosource Inc., the figure would place U of C among the nation’s top 10 R&D spenders. Yet beyond the cash, what the university and similar research-focused institutions across the country provide to Canada’s energy industry is the ability to leverage top outside minds to focus on solving some of its most daunting challenges.
 
In return, energy companies provide ongoing support and incentives for Canadians to further their scientific and technical education at a time when the national economy is suffering from an increasing lack of workers with those skills.
 
For the rest of this article, please go to the National Post website: http://business.financialpost.com/2012/09/11/army-of-innovators-lines-energys-road-to-success/