Oil sands producers form new alliance

Canada's oil sands production companies have established a consortium to improve environmental performance by scaling up and accelerating the discovery and development of environmental technologies and reducing the time between idea and implementation. Canada's Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) consists of 12 founding firms including BP, Imperial Oil, Total, Nexen, Shell, Suncor Energy and ConocoPhillips. COSIA follows the creation of another consortium — Oil Sands Tailings Consortium — to develop and implement technologies to reduce and clean wet tailings generated during surface mining (R$, September 28/11). COSIA will establish structures and processes to allow companies to collaborate on new approaches to intellectual property management and better working relationships with universities, research agencies and other stakeholders. Areas of focus include innovations targeting challenges relating to oil sands use of water, land, greenhouse gas emissions and tailings. Dr Dan Wicklum has been selected as COSIA's inaugural CEO. Wicklum was previously a senior policy advisor to the minister of Natural Resources Canada and director of strategic alliances for NRCan's Canadian Forest Service....