Tausi Insider

The processing facility at the Suncor oil sands operations near Fort McMurray, Alta., on Sept. 17, 2014. Todd Korol/Reuters Not that many years ago, the idea of showcasing the Canadian oil sands at an international summit on climate change would have been laughable. It is just three years since green energy think tank the Pembina Institute declared the oil sands as on a “collision course” with this country’s climate goals, and fewer than six years since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sparked fury in Alberta by commenting in a public forum that the province’s oil sands industry needs to be “phased out” as part of Canada’s transition off fossil fuels. So the fact that representatives of the Pathways Alliance – a consortium of Canada’s largest oil sands companies – not only attended the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in Egypt this week but made a presentation Friday in the federal-government-hosted Canada Pavilion shows just how far the industry has come in terms of its willing...

A construction worker walks past the steam generating facility at the Cenovus Foster Creek SAGD oil sands operations near Cold Lake, Alta., in 2012. The company is part of Pathways, a group of six companies responsible for about 95 per cent of oil sands production. Todd Korol/Reuters A coalition of oil sands companies eyeing a massive new emissions-reduction project in northern Alberta will this winter begin exploratory drilling of underground reservoirs in which it hopes to store captured carbon, as part of its goal to produce net-zero oil by 2050. But Kendall Dilling, president of the Pathways Alliance, said there’s still another year or two of project development and applications for regulatory approvals before the planned carbon capture project hopefully gets the green light. The multibillion-dollar proposal includes a pipeline to gather captured carbon from more than 20 oil sands facilities and move it to an underground storage hub near Cold Lake, Alta. “We want to turn dirt and...

The Sherloc technology currently installed on the Mars Rover, in a handout photo. HO/The Canadian Press The same technology used to search for signs of ancient life on Mars could be key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the Canadian oil sands. At least that’s what members of the Pathways Alliance – an industry consortium of this country’s six largest oil sands companies – appear to believe. On Thursday, the group announced Impossible Sensing Energy, the Calgary-based affiliate of U.S. space exploration company Impossible Sensing, as the winner in an industry-sponsored global competition aimed at helping to accelerate the wide-scale use of steam-reducing technologies in oil sands operations. The company won with a proposal to use optical imaging technology, adapted from its Sherloc system currently installed on the Mars Rover, in an oil sands application. Just as optical imaging can be used to search for faint traces of potential carbon-based past life on Mars, it can also det...