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Whether we’re reenvisioning the industries that built this city, or exploring new frontiers, Calgary’s innovation economy is making strides. From energy and agriculture, to health care, finance, knowledge and more, there’s a spirit of progress afoot. Meet some of the Calgarians moving our city forward and, in doing so, making it a hub for innovators of all kinds.

BY GUST OF WIND STUDIO hange happens, whether we’re ready for it or not. To be competitive in the global energy market, especially amidst the next great energy transition, innovation is key. Innovation helps drive growth and create new opportunities, as well as improve efficiency and costeffectiveness. Perhaps most importantly, innovations in the energy sector help build a more sustainable future for all of us.

Calgary has a long history of energy innovation. Richard Masson, a longtime energy project development consultant and executive fellow of the University of Calgary School of Public Policy recalls that in the early 1990s, there were only three main oil sands projects in Alberta — and it took ingenuity to make them work. “Oil sands are a tough resource. We had to figure out how to get it out of the ground ourselves,” he says. “Getting those first projects off the ground was a huge accomplishment in innovation.”

Masson points to continual innovation since then, involving academics, engineers and companies, resulting in oil sands production growing from around 400,000 barrels a day to more than three million barrels a day. “We’ve had that kind of innovative culture for decades,” he says.

Now, this culture of innovation is poised to take Calgary in a different direction, as the energy sector prepares for the approaching global energy transition. “The only way we’re going to be able to produce this resource in a responsible way for the world is if we can address climate change,” says Masson. “We have an ecosystem of companies and organizations who are aligned on this and have been for a long time.”

Brad Hayes, a geoscience consultant and instructor at Mount Royal University, agrees. “Innovation in the energy sector right now takes a lot of forms” he says. “In oil and gas, it is focused primarily on reducing [greenhouse gas] emissions footprints by devising new means to produce the evergrowing volumes of oil and gas that society demands.” He lists examples, including switching to nuclear energy for steam production in heavy-oil extraction, powering liquefied natural gas facilities with hydroelectricity, and using novel detection devices on drones and satellites to identify methane emissions. This represents a huge change.

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“Every analysis of future energy production, including from the International Energy Agency, points out that much of the technology we need to ensure energy security and to minimize emissions in the future does not exist in commercial form today,” Hayes says.

That means there’s an urgency for continued innovation in the global energy industry, making events like the upcoming World Petroleum Congress, happening in Calgary in September, all the more timely and critical. This will be the first time at the World Petroleum Congress that the global oil and gas industry will collectively address the theme of energy transition and the path to net zero, and it’s a chance for Calgary and Canada to affirm its position as an energy leader.

“We sit on one of the biggest hydrocarbon deposits in the world, so we need to do everything we can to reduce the environmental impact of the hydrocarbon we’re producing,” says Masson, who is chair of the World Petroleum Council-Canada, the host of the congress. “The congress brings people from all over the world — CEOs, energy ministers, academics, companies — to talk about how we tackle this issue,” he says. “It’s a key opportunity to showcase what Canada is working on.”