CALGARY

More than 400 delegates gathered to kick off Canada 3.0 2014 Tuesday as part of the Canadian Energy Supply Chain Forum.

This year’s event marks a departure from the typical Canada 3.0 formula, which has annually brought together tech industry leaders, researchers and policy makers in a conversation about Canada’s digital economy. The Canada 3.0 2014 event is hosted by TRTech, and embeds the digital community with another industry. The new format is an effort to cross-pollinate two of Canada’s leading industry sectors with the goal of increasing productivity.

Bill Whitelaw, CEO of June Warren-Nickle’s Energy Group, kicked off the day’s events by outlining the fundamental question that his team and its partners at TRTech and CDMN are trying to answer: “How do we talk to the energy sector about innovation?”

Whitelaw assured the audience that there’s a great deal of innovation already happening in Canada’s energy sector, though it is often isolated in pockets. To illustrate, he invoked an energy industry metaphor: “There are lots of pores, but very little permeability.”

Over the course of the afternoon, panels of digital and energy industry experts endeavoured to illustrate the advantages of permeability. Case studies of successful tech-energy partnerships were highlighted through a series of video vignettes.

Tom Jenkins, Chairman of OpenText and Dawn Farrell, president and CEO of TransAlta both highlighted the opportunity inherent in big data and the Internet of Things to transform the energy sector. “Everything we operate runs 24/7,” said Farrell. “We bill in 10-minute increments, and we look at profitability weekly… Our [profit margin] goes away really fast if we don’t know what we need to do. We need to innovate like crazy.”

This opportunity was reinforced during a panel about “The Next Game Changers.” Panelists enumerated trends they predict will shape the future of Canada’s energy industry, including:

  • Data analytics – new ways to interpret data
  • Nanotechnology and microtechnology – leading to new injectants
  • Predictive analytics – predicting when maintenance is needed to reduce down time

Venture capitalist Whitney Rockley of McRock Capital summed up the Internet of Things opportunity for the energy sector this way: “We’re embedding smarts in equipment and big iron. It’s about asset performance optimization, without increasing our capital spend.” To highlight the potential of this opportunity, she noted that companies are currently spending $9.1 billion annually on machine maintenance data analytics, and this is expected to grow to $24.7 billion by 2019.

Environmental technology was also highlighted as a priority, with the Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) calling for technology companies with potential solutions to submit them through the ETAP process to be evaluated by professionals in the industry.

Drawing the connection between the Canada 3.0 sessions and the broader CECSF event, executive producer Ian MacGillivray appealed to delegates to seek to answer the question “What now?” at the end of every session. By his reckoning, the Forum offers 73 speakers, 28 different topics of discussion, and close to 900 attendees.

We’ll have more coverage on the opportunity that technology companies attending this year’s Canada 3.0 hope to gain by intersecting with Canada’s energy industry leaders.