Energy for the Common Good
Research Strategy
For more than 40 years, UCalgary has been a global leader in energy research and energy technology development. This stems from its early research in petroleum including heavy oil and bitumen oil sands reservoirs, reservoir characterization and simulation, oil recovery process design, oil and gas properties, process modelling, natural gas, and more recently, energy history, energy politics and policy, energy in society, hydrogen, hydraulic fracturing, and extraction from tight rock.
UCalgary’s central vision is to enable and support safe, clean, secure, socially responsible, and affordable energy supplies for the world.
New and urgent energy and economic challenges confront us — epitomized by the conflation of issues posed by climate change, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, rising energy prices, inflation, renewed energy security concerns, the desire for low greenhouse gas emissive energy. Responding to these will require resolute public and private effort and massive financial flows.
Addressing the array of research questions posed by these challenges requires an open, imaginative, and comprehensive approach drawing on multiple disciplines across the university. This transdisciplinarity defines the institution’s new Energy Research Strategy — Energy for the Common Good. It builds on our historic successes and expands research and training activities to promote collaboration across the campus with a focus on ensuring sustainable, climate-appropriate, secure and affordable energy services for society.
Moving beyond “comfortable”, traditional interdisciplinary research within the silos of the national research funding councils, we shall reach outside the campus community to engage more systematically with the public and targeted stakeholders. Through a transdisciplinary focus on challenges rather than discrete disciplines, the academy will grow its capacity and impact — whether on scientific, technical and business innovations, public policy, or understanding how different communities view and are affected by the evolving energy system.
Launching a New Era of Energy Research
The world faces the existential threat of climate change while ensuring safe, reliable and affordable energy supplies. This presents a complex array of technological, economic, social, and political challenges. It will require fundamental changes in how society exploits, transforms and uses energy resources to meet its energy needs. The aggressive, substantial reduction of the emissions intensity of our energy system underpins the need for a new era of energy research at UCalgary.
The shift to new energy systems requires the combined use of novel materials, processes, and resources (e.g. water, land, people, capital), which pose their own set of environmental, social, policy, and economic issues. This energy transition, which is among the largest and most daunting challenges facing humanity, is also a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
Core principles guiding energy research
Impactful and Relevant
While we focus on grand challenges, they do not constrain our research. Given the manifestly dynamic nature of the energy system and its governing policies, we will adapt and evolve our research.
Open to All
Energy research at UCalgary is open to all our scholars, creating a vibrant research community and a welcoming intellectual home for all disciplines to contribute and influence ideas.
For the Common Good
Energy research at UCalgary will enable impactful outcomes for the common good.
Grand Challenges
Our strategy focuses on four Grand Challenges: Unconventional Hydrocarbon Resources, Hydraulic Fracturing, Toward Low Carbon Energy, and Cumulative Effects of Energy-related Processes