Canada Oil-Sands Producers To Share Environmental Technology
02 March 2012 - 6:23AM
Dow Jones News
A dozen of the largest Canadian oil-sands producers agreed
Thursday to share funding for environmental research, saying
pooling their resources will speed the creation of new technologies
to reduce the negative effects of oil-sands development.
The 12 companies involved in the new organization, called
Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, have agreed to jointly fund
environmental research and then share the intellectual property
rights for environmental technologies.
"We will remain competitors and will continue to compete
aggressively in the market with our products, but when it comes to
the environment, we know we'll all win when we start working more
closely together," Suncor Energy Inc.'s (SU) chief operating
officer and incoming chief executive, Steve Williams, said before
signing the charter of the new group at a press conference in
Calgary.
Oil-sands development is being targeted by environmental groups
and politicians for the higher greenhouse gas emissions it creates,
as well as the land destruction and waste ponds created by strip
mining in northern Alberta. Resistance to the Keystone XL oil
pipeline from Canada to Texas - rejected by the U.S. government
earlier this year - focused in part on what the environmental
groups called "dirty" oil from Canada's oil sands.
The oil sands in northeastern Alberta is the world's
third-largest oil reserve and is expected to roughly double in
production to 3 million barrels a day by the end of this
decade.
The companies that signed onto the agreement include BP Plc
(BP), Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNQ), Cenovus Energy Inc.
(CVE), ConocoPhillips (COP), Devon Energy Corp. (DVN), Imperial Oil
Ltd. (IMO), Nexen Inc. (NXY), Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA), Statoil
(STO), Suncor Energy, Teck Resources Ltd. (TCK) and Total SA
(TOT).
The group is already working on two technologies to improve
environmental performance, executives of the companies said. One
technology will speed up the land reclamation process after
oil-sands strip mining, the other is a new fuel technology to
reduce the carbon-dioxide emissions from oil sands produced from
underground steam-injection.
"A technology that has the potential to substantially reduce
reclamation times would traditionally be held very close by an
individual company, while other companies would work to develop
something very similar," Devon Canada President Chris Seasons said
at the signing. "This slows down progress, is redundant, and ties
up valuable people and resources," he said.
The seeds of the new group were started in 2010, when seven of
the companies agreed to share technology specifically related to
the clean-up of tailings ponds - large pools of waste water created
from oil-sands mining. That group will be merged into the new
group, the companies said.
-By Edward Welsch, Dow Jones Newswires; 403-229-9095;
edward.welsch@dowjones.com
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