With the growth in demand for electric vehicles and mobile devices powered by rechargeable lithium batteries, demand for lithium is expected to increase by over 200% in the next decade. Current lithium production comes primarily from Australia, South America and China. There are significant lithium reserves in the same Saskatchewan aquifers currently being exploited for their concomitant oil reserves.

Renewable sources of electricity continue to increase in market share across all jurisdictions. New wind and solar energy projects in Alberta will be the main drivers to reach the province’s 2030 target to have 30% of its electricity derived from renewable sources. Alongside these projects the power generation companies like TransAlta Corporation will need to look at energy storage solutions to help these intermittent sources of electricity provide reliable and consistent power to the consumer.

The ever-growing market of portable electronic devices (e.g., laptop computers, tablets, smartphones) has resulted in the penetration of AC adapters in households greater than ever. Accordingly, the portability of such devices entails substantial demands for light-weighted and compact devices. This necessitates the critical need for high power density and highly efficient adapters. In particular, consumers continuously expect to have a more compact adapter with higher efficiency. Besides, the current technology has reached mature stages.

An Indigenous community living near Alberta’s oil-sand mines is concerned that mining operations may be harming the rivers and lakes where they fish, hunt and trap. The research looks at finding the locations along the edges of rivers and lakes where there is evidence that mining operations may be affecting these waterbodies. The unique part of the research is that Indigenous knowledge, which is the wisdom owned by the community, and Western science are being combined in complementary and respectful ways to find the affected locations along the edges of rivers and lakes.

Microorganisms living in marine seafloor sediments are of scientific interest for many reasons including their role in cycling nutrients, their metabolic diversity, and the relatively few investigations of their existence due to their habitation of such an extreme and isolated environment. In addition, subsurface microbes can provide insight into their surrounding environment, including signalling the presence of hydrocarbon seeps.

What is left after late-life SAGD production is a large amount of valuable energy in the form of heat contained in the reservoirs. Instead of leaving behind the stored energy in a hot reservoir after many years of SAGD operation, considering energy recovery from post-SAGD reservoirs leads to lower carbon emissions by saving energy already injected in the reservoir rather than leaving it to avoid burning more natural gas; saving money for SAGD operators and helping to make operations more sustainable.

In the last decade optimization is expanded in many applications from food production to sophisticated applications such as engine fuel efficiency. In the proposed package, it is tried to apply optimization techniques along with physics based analytical and semi-analytical methodologies to create a compelling framework which can help thermal-process based oil industry to reduce their GHG and also better evaluate their CAPEX. Many SAGD projects are overspent on their facilities due to under prediction or overprediction of their oil production expectations.

In southern Canada, wolverines share their natural habitat with humans. Forestry, for example, alters local ecosystems and leaves behind road networks that give access to people, also including recreationalists. Finally, many valley bottoms contain human infrastructure. This research project examines if wolverine numbers are impacted more by human or natural factors, determines if population connectivity is interrupted by human infrastructure and asks if those patterns are different for reproductive females.

The proposed project is designed to address the gaps in knowledge as described above and critical issues by capturing a large amount of student-athlete sleep data using the Athlete Sleep Screening Questionnaire© (ASSQ©), which is a sleep screening questionnaire specifically designed for athletes. It is a highly efficient and convenient tool, given training and travel time constraints where polysomnography, the gold standard of objective sleep measurement is not feasible.

Multiphase flow represents a significant portion of the products transported in Canadian pipelines. Each of the many phases in a multiphase flow has its own unique characteristics, all of which will contribute to an added layer of complexity in the detection and subsequent localization of a leak. Current technology that compares pressure variations to identify a leak is unreliable for leaks that are less than 1% of the flow volume [1].