Edmonton scientist Karl Clark patented his oil sands breakthrough in 1929. It took nearly four decades, until 1967, for the first plant to begin producing Alberta’s resource crown jewel using his hot water separation process. The industry wants to get better at adopting inventions.

A group effort to collect and spread oil sands ideas – especially for improved environmental performance – began this summer. CBTAP, short for clean bitumen technology action plan, is the brainchild of the Petroleum Technology Alliance Canada.

The initiative opened with an appeal by PTAC president Soheil Asgarpour for companies to resist temptation to make green innovation a field for trade secrets and competitive advantages. “If we keep it close to our chests, collectively we are going to suffer,” warned Asgarpour, an industry veteran and former oil sands development chief in the Alberta Department of Energy.

“We need a big investment in technology,” agreed Rick Hyndman, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers’ climate policy chief. “And we need a good process for doing it,” he emphasized.

As a former Alberta deputy energy minister, Hyndman urged PTAC to make its planned catalogue of oil sands innovation include performance reports. Planners need disclosures about whether inventions make it as far as experiments or technical trials and where to look for results.

Hyndman recalls a 34-year history of modern government involvement in the field that continued a tradition begun by Clark, who was the Alberta Research Council’s first employee and assigned his patent rights to the University of Alberta. The current era of hybrid industry, scholarly and government science started with creation of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority in 1975 as a Crown corporation. It continues to this day after AOSTRA was disbanded by 1990s budget cuts and replaced by the smaller Alberta Energy Research Institute plus ARC project partnerships with companies.

“There has always been questions about how to throw your money behind innovation,” Hyndman said. “There’s a lot of snake oil. There’s a lot of good stuff.”
A vast number of ideas are in circulation, said representatives of oil sands companies and engineering firms that attended a meeting to launch PTAC’s clean bitumen knowledge collection campaign. Development owners hear as many as 200 sales pitches a year from inventors and technology companies.

The industry pours creativity into the oil sands, calling them its technology frontier. Syncrude Canada’s 41-year-old Edmonton research center has an annual budget of $40 million to $50 million and about 120 staff, often with PhDs after their names. No detail of oil sands operations is ignored because every aspect of them is big, expensive and open to improvement. Inventions range from a method of patching the $50,000-plus tires on $6-million jumbo mine trucks to hydro-transport pipelines that move a rotating stew of ore and water and simultaneously start the bitumen production process.

The number of oil sands patents runs into hundreds, said engineer Marc Godin, a collaborator in the PTAC effort whose Portfire Associates Inc. specializes in
energy and petrochemical processing. There is currently no way to know how many inventions have been made or to browse through them to identify candidates for field trials and commercial use because no catalogue exists, he reported.

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