CMC-NCE 2012 CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS

Mar.27, 2012:  Reviewers have been allocated and notified.  The Research Management Committee will meet on May 10 to make their recommendations, and the Board will meet on June 14 for final approval.  Proponents will be notified shortly after that. 

Feb.16, 2012: The competition is now CLOSED.  Proposals are currently in the Review Phase.

Jan.6, 2012: Automatic notifications have been sent to each Lead PI and Co-PI.  The full proposal system has been activated.

Jan.4, 2012: The Letter of Intent stage of this competion is now CLOSED.  The LOI review is complete, and notifications have been emailed to the Lead PI's of each LOI.  Successful LOI proponents will be invited to submit a full proposal shortly.

Carbon Management Canada (CMC-NCE), a Network Centre of Excellence, is issuing its third Call for Research Proposals.  CMC-NCE expects to allocate around $7.5 Million to this call.

New for this Funding Round

• This is a paperless Call for Proposals.  All applications must be made through the Carbon Commons.  For details see the Online Submission Instructions.
• To submit, an applicant must be a member of the Carbon Commons.  Register here.
• It is compulsory that applicants submit a Letter of Intent.
• In addition to its fossil fuel focus, CMC-NCE is now encouraging research to develop strategies to eliminate and reduce CO₂ emissions from mining, metallurgical operations and construction materials manufacture.
• There is a much greater expectation of supporting industrial funding in this round than in previous rounds.

Timelines

Application Requirements and Submission Process

The following pages give details of the application requirements and submission process.   Please read them carefully. 

• Application Requirements and Details
• Online Submission Instructions
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

CMC-NCE Research Mandate and Past Calls

Carbon Management Canada is a not-for-profit corporation, funded by the Canadian Government Networks of Centres of Excellence (NCE) program, the Government of Alberta and by industry, promoting and supporting research by Canadian academic and research organisations into carbon management in the extraction and use of fossil fuels. CMC-NCE seeks to create the technologies, insights and social enablement mechanisms that can be used to quickly decarbonise fossil energy use at large scale, to train highly qualified people to innovate, implement and guide this transformation, and to facilitate the rapid exchange of information and technologies among researchers, industry and governments. Research is focused on five major objectives:

• Creation of carbon-efficient oil, gas and coal recovery, processing and use technologies (CERP);
• Design of technologies, protocols and tools for safe, secure, and verifiable carbon storage;
• Reduction in the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) through innovative solutions; 
• Analysis of risks, business and regulatory options to inform policy and investment, engage the public, and develop the supportive frameworks necessary to develop and deploy viable technologies at appropriate scale to decarbonise fossil fuel use; 
• Facilitate and accelerate social and technical innovation processes across industry, academia and government in the areas of fossil fuel carbon management.

In past calls, CMC-NCE asked for for innovative ambitious research to make a real impact on greenhouse gas emissions in fossil fuel recovery and use and specifically to:

• Create carbon-efficient recovery, processing and use technologies (CERP) that are dramatically more carbon efficient than current systems; 
• Reduce the cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) and seek novel carbon capture and storage routes including biological, geochemical and air capture approaches with the potential use of novel carbon storage vectors in addition to carbon dioxide;
• Design protocols and tools for safe, secure and quantitatively verifiable carbon storage;
• Develop business and regulatory options to enable deployment of publicly acceptable technologies at large scale;
• Inform policy and investment, engage the public, and develop the supportive social, legal and political frameworks necessary to permit deployment of effective carbon mitigation technologies at appropriately large scale to substantially mitigate emissions from fossil fuel recovery and use;
• Bring into the fossil fuel energy recovery and carbon management sectors technical and policy advances in innovative sectors of our scientific, technical and social revolution, including but not limited to, natural and synthetic biology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and robotics, highly networked computing, social networked innovation and internet science.

CMC's Four Program Areas

Carbon Management Canada's research programs are organized in four areas.  Note that these themes are notional administrative groupings and many projects span several themes.  It is not crucial that a project fit within any one of them although you will be asked in the submission forms to choose a principal theme for your application.

• Theme A - Recovery, Processing and Capture 
  Theme Leader John Grace, University of British Columbia; jgrace@chbe.ubc.ca.
  Theme A focuses on improved technologies which must be adopted to improve carbon utilization efficiency and more effectively and economically capture CO₂, from within power and heat generation and material process plants from product streams and at large scale directly from the atmosphere. It emphasizes Canadian expertise in gasification, catalysis and subsurface engineering. It looks at enhanced processes for more efficient recovery of coal, petroleum and natural gas. It also seeks to incorporate non-fossil carbon (e.g. biomass) into process streams and aims to innovate on bitumen upgrading.  It also aims to to develop new large scale uses for CO₂ as a fuel or chemical feedstock precursor.
• Theme B - Enabling and Emerging Technologies
  Theme Leader John Shaw, University of Alberta; jmshaw@ualberta.ca.
  The energy industry has not been effective at incorporating technology from areas such as biology that are undergoing revolutionary change. This theme will provide underpinning and emerging technologies from both within and without the energy sectors. It focuses on incorporating understandings from biological, chemical and engineering science advances to enable novel energy recovery processes and routes to emissions reduction, novel sensors and sampling systems for monitoring both industrial and subsurface environments and innovative chemical and electrochemical routes to novel carbon storage vectors.
• Theme C - Secure Carbon Storage 
  Theme Leader Don Lawton, University of Calgary; lawton@ucalgary.ca.
  Theme C focuses on carbon storage issues including both the current systems envisaged and novel alternatives. Of paramount importance to the geological storage of CO₂ is the ability to track injected CO₂ plumes in the storage formations and to detect and remediate any leaks through the caprock into overlying formations, shallow aquifers or release into the atmosphere. Verification of storage is vital for public acceptance of CCS and will become a regulatory requirement for commercial projects.  Comprehensive monitoring protocols need to be established, using a wide range of existing technologies but also next-generation sensors, tracer technologies and robust borehole sensing devices.  Novel, energetically and economically viable non CO₂ carbon storage vectors will also be sought and large scale geochemical carbon capture and storage routes evaluated.  A key component of carbon storage implementation and commercialization is having trained and qualified personnel to deploy at actual storage projects. Thus the network also focuses on training programs for students, postdoctoral fellows and industry technologists. 
• Theme D - Accelerating Appropriate Deployment of Low Carbon Emission Technologies
  Theme Leader James Meadowcroft, Carleton University; james.meadowcroft@carleton.ca.
  Theme D focuses on developing routes to improved linkages between technological innovation (Themes A, B and C) and enabling social, economic and policy dimensions. It deals with the evaluation of existing options for energy provision and GHG abatement, the management and communication of risk and opportunity and seeks to develop routes to adjust business and academic practices to promote innovation and rapid deployment of low carbon fossil energy technologies. It does this by design of suitable policy and regulatory regimes and examination of process to promote the development of public understanding, discussion and decision-making.  Economic, social and policy issues are often the most important barriers to deploying wide-scale innovation and establishing appropriate frameworks for managing change, are of critical importance in the drive towards achieving a low carbon emission energy future. This theme underpins the whole CMC-NCE network approach and will for the first time link technology developers and social scientists in integrated projects.

CFP General Information

The 2012 call for proposals is in three parts. Action is only needed for parts 1 and 2 of the process at this time.

1. General call for proposals: CMC encourages innovative developments in any area within its broad remit and thus part of the call is a broad call for any potential game-changing research proposal. To avoid people putting a lot of work into full proposals without context we have a compulsory letter of intent stage for all potential projects so we can feed back comments at an early stage to optimise all our efforts.
2. Focussed call for proposals:  While we are open to any new areas, some focus is needed for the bulk of the budgeted spend and so part of the call relates to specific areas of interest identified below in the section General and Focussed Call for Research Proposals.
3. Innovation and Entrepreneur Acceleration awards:  While our universities are doing a good job at basic research we are not doing well at converting clever research into practical solutions. It is a problem we must solve quickly. While the universities cannot do this by themselves, and we must work with the investment community and industry, we can prime the pump and provide support for people trying to commercialise technology.  Thus the third part of the call for proposals looks specifically at support for entrepreneurial students and staff already working with existing CMC related projects funded by CMC or any other funding body. These innovation and entrepreneurship funding awards for graduate students and postdocs will be described in a separate callposted on the website at the end of December, 2011.
   • We welcome input into what these innovation and acceleration awards might look like.  Please contact Steve Larter (slarter@ucalgary.ca) with your ideas.

General and Focussed Call for Research Proposals

CMC welcomes appropriate applications from eligible groups of researchers in any area of Carbon Management Canada’s remit. We especially welcome applications from groups looking at research and development in the areas of:

INNOVATION AND PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

• Factors impeding technical and social innovation in the carbon management area and development of routes to accelerating the innovation processes within Carbon Management Canada and its associated industry and government partners including internet science and social science applications. Focus on university innovation processes and barriers therein is especially welcome.
• Public understanding of carbon management technologies and public perception of risk associated with climate change and deployment of low carbon emission technologies.

INNOVATIVE INDUSTRIAL PROCESSES

• Innovative proposals for large scale utilization of CO₂ with substantial savings in net greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon neutral fuel studies.
• Proposals involving innovative sorbents with improved potential for capture of CO₂;
• Innovative proposals for cutting emissions of methane and other hydrocarbons to the atmosphere;
• Innovative processing of minerals, metals and construction materials including cement to eliminate CO₂ emissions from these industries;
• Novel low or zero carbon emission routes to coal and oil utilization for direct energy generation, methane or hydrogen production, including in situ processing;
• Applications of nanotechnology and sensor technology to any aspect of carbon management; Applications of microbial biology and biochemistry to any aspect of carbon management;  and
• Net negative carbon emission processes including biomass energy generation coupled with carbon capture and storage (BECCS).
• Innovative proposals for the use of CO₂ as a fuel or chemical feedstock precursor.

INNOVATIVE CARBON STORAGE SYSTEMS

• Design of protocols and tools for high resolution quantitative monitoring of safe, secure and quantitatively verifiable carbon storage including novel geochemical, geophysical and tracer technologies (Note: Qualitative tools for monitoring carbon storage are of much less interest);
• Methods for innovative sampling and quantitative observation of carbon storage reservoirs including low cost, secure drilling technologies. Development of effective means of characterizing caprocks and reservoirs over large areas with limited in situ sample material;
• Methods for assessing wellbore integrity and mediating containment failures/leakages during carbon dioxide injection procedures;
• Biochemical or chemical processing of carbon dioxide in situ to viable long term carbon storage products including insoluble salts, carbonates or other species;
• Novel CO₂ capture & storage systems coupled with distributed power generation systems;   and
• Large scale geochemical carbon capture with demonstrable, high CO₂ capture and storage rates.

Funding Criteria

The projects we wish to fund will meet the following criteria:

1. The work is novel, substantive and is being carried out by a group with a demonstrated track record as evidenced by peer reviewed publications or technology deployments. In exceptional cases, new groups can demonstrate they have the capability to carry out such a program.
2. The workers are aware of existing international research and clearly add to it, and the program of work forms a sensible part of the network program. Projects must have multiple interacting groups.
3. In exceptional cases, to build capacity in Canada, or to provide baseline studies for technology demonstration projects, some work may be funded which does not completely meet the above criteria.
4. The project is realistic in terms of resources, is sensibly staffed and budgeted and does not overly rely on junior staff or students.
5. Research results would be expected to help substantially mitigate carbon emissions or lead to technologies or policies that will mitigate emissions. Interesting small scale uses of CO₂ or peripheral research is not fundable.  Large scale uses of CO₂ which result in large scale emissions reductions are of interest.

Game Changing Scope

Desired proposals will have ambitious objectives aimed at game-changing technical developments and social policy change, rather than incremental developments of current approaches. Substantial emissions mitigation would be effected by socially accepted technologies individually capable of potentially reducing Canadian emissions by 10-50 M tons CO₂ pa or more, with the anticipation that such technologies could be deployed worldwide. Technological and commercialisable outputs are desired and industry involvement is expected. However, some more basic work will be supported to underpin technological development activities. Interesting uses of CO₂ or peripheral research is not fundable unless it mitigates net emissions at large scale.  Carbon neutral fuel cycles based on large scale conversion of CO₂ to hydrocarbons or other reduced carbon forms are of definite interest.

Ambitious and thus risky proposals are welcome and are expected to demonstrate appropriate staffing with experienced personnel as well as graduate student participation! Industrial collaboration/ co-funding are desirable and it is expected many projects will have an element linked to industrial piloting of technologies. 

Application Requirements and Submission Process

The following pages give details of the application requirements and submission process.   Please read them carefully. 

• Application Requirements and Details
• Online Submission Instructions
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Note: deadlines / dates are assumed to be midnight (PST) of the indicated day unless otherwise noted.