Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) is an alliance of oil sands producers focused on accelerating the pace of improvement in environmental performance in Canada’s oil sands through collaborative action and innovation.
The alliance was launched March 1, 2012, when companies came together in Calgary, Alberta to sign the COSIA charter, signifying their agreement with COSIA’s vision, their support of our alliance’s beliefs, and their pledge to uphold the commitments put forward in the charter.
We bring together leading thinkers from industry, government, academia and the wider public to improve measurement, accountability and environmental performance in the oil sands in four priority areas. These four Environmental Priority Areas (EPAs) are tailings, water, land and greenhouse gases.
We accomplish our objectives through a continued focus on collaboration and transparent exchange, by setting environmental performance goals, and by reporting publicly on progress towards these goals.
Progress towards these goals will be achieved by breaking down barriers to innovation, and by identifying, developing and applying solutions-oriented innovation to the most pressing oil sands environmental challenges.
By focusing on four Environmental Priority Areas—Greenhouse Gases, Land, Tailings, Water — we bring the brightest minds together to face specific challenges, shortening innovation timelines across the oil sands industry. COSIA members work together, drawing on and combining each other’s technology expertise and innovation to create breakthrough technologies.
Through COSIA’s open sourcing approach to identifying solutions, technologies that may have been created for purposes other than oil sands are looked at for their potential to close gaps in the oil sands. And anyone, from large innovation hubs and multi-nationals to garage inventors, can submit an idea for consideration through COSIA’s Environmental Technology Assessment Portal (E-TAP).
Projects include everything from theoretical papers to lab tests to field trials and everything in between. COSIA is the world hub for industry experts, vendors and suppliers, innovators and inventors, technology developers, academic researchers, and government scientists and representatives, to focus on innovation for the oil sands.
COSIA aspires to produce oil from the oil sands with lower greenhouse gas emissions than other sources of oil. COSIA’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) EPA (Environmental Priority Area) has 10 open innovation challenges exploring new ways to achieve our GHG goals.
COSIA strives to reduce the operating footprint intensity of in situ operations by 10% by 2022. To achieve our goal, COSIA’s Land EPA (Environmental Priority Area) has 120 projects currently active.
COSIA aspires to be a world leader in water management, producing Canadian energy with no adverse impact on water. COSIA’s Water EPA (Environmental Priority Area) has 77 active projects underway to achieve our water goals in in situ and in mining.
COSIA recognizes the challenges posed by tailings - the sand, silt, clay and water waste found naturally in oil sands after processing. The Tailings EPA (Environmental Priority Area) has 78 active projects in its portfolio that include treating fluid fine tailings and process affected water and accelerating the reclamation of tailings deposits.
Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA)
Mailing Address
520 5th Avenue SW, Suite 1700
Calgary, Alberta T2P 3R7
Phone
403.444.5282
Email
info@cosia.ca
