COSIA’s podcast series Innovative Minds is available on Spotify, Apple and Google.

Heather Kaminsky has a passion for clay and a professional goal of solving one of the most complex challenges in oil sands mining. A materials engineer, Kaminsky is the NSERC Industrial Research Chair for Colleges (IRCC) in Oil Sands Tailings Management at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). COSIA is one of the research partners.

GHGSat launched its first commercial satellite “Iris” in September 2020 and its second satellite “Hugo” in early 2021.

With finite resources, we asked ourselves at COSIA how we could best support these entrepreneurs to develop their technology to the point where we could adequately assess its commercial potential.

Woodland caribou are one of Canada’s most iconic animals. But today their populations are under threat. They face loss of habitat and are increasingly hunted by wolves, which travel along old man-made pathways that cross the northern landscape.

In Canada, many see a strong future for blue hydrogen, an energy source with low greenhouse gas emissions derived from natural gas.

The world is looking for ways to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and oil sands producers are among those who have made ambitious commitments to achieve net zero, or near net zero emissions by 2050 or earlier.

There are many pathways to get there and one with great promise is carbon utilization.

Where once there was a large open pit mine, the wood bison now call it home.