Article content

[np_storybar title=”Innovation heads west: Oil sands pick up Canada’s tech slack” link=”http://business.financialpost.com/2012/09/03/innovation-heads-west-oil-sands-pick-up-canadas-tech-slack/”]

Half a century of fighting over every speck of Alberta’s oil sands now behind them, Canada’s largest heavy-oil producers are now embroiled in another decades-long battle.

[/np_storybar]

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.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Army of innovators lines energy's road to success Back to video

“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.”