The Clean Resource Innovation Network (CRIN) is a pan-Canadian network founded with the purpose of enabling clean energy development by commercializing and adopting technologies for the oil and gas industry that reduce environmental impact. We bring together industry, entrepreneurs, investors, academia, governments, and many others to enable solutions that decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from source to end use. We believe that these solutions will be applied across Canadian industries and around the globe, and that energy development and environmental stewardship together will have local, national and international benefits.

We leverage the relationships, diversity and expertise within industry, entrepreneurs, funders, academia, governments and many other sectors to enable innovation. We leverage our members’ strengths in large-scale collaboration by aligning research and technology priorities, addressing gaps, and incentivizing innovation across all ecosystem players. This allows us to create efficiencies to accelerate and deliver transformative solutions towards a low carbon, low-cost oil and natural gas industry.

Our strategic focus is on the later stages of technology development (higher Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs)). This allows us to consolidate and enable the ‘industry pull’ to scale innovation through commercialization and then widespread adoption. It also enables earlier stage technology development that fuels future development. Additionally, we endeavour to extend the ecosystem to create the critical ‘end-user pull’ to enable broad adoption of technologies beyond immediate industry implementation and into other industries.

One of our key roles is to provide clear communication of the industry’s needs to the myriad of solution providers to:

• Focus resources

• Shorten development time

• Accelerate adoption

• Encourage more ideas and new innovators into the system

We are open to the full range of ideas at different TRL that feed into the platform areas identified through CRIN. When evaluating technologies that are more commercially ready with a path to deployment, areas we have identified as a gap will rank higher.

Our $100M in funding from the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) has been allocated in the following way:

TRL 6-9 - $5M/$25M/$50M

• Three Oil and Gas Technology Competitions -

  • Digital

  • Low Emission Fuels and Value Added Products

  • Reducing Environmental Footprint

• Three competition coordinators

• Technology projects to progress to commercialization with producer partners

TRL 2-5 - $20M

• Ecosystem development; CRIN managed

• Administration and management

We welcome everyone working in the energy innovation space, including Indigenous technology businesses and associations.

According to a 2018 research report by Global Advantage, Canada’s energy companies lead the way as the largest investor in clean technology. We provide the platform to connect innovators across many disciplines to further accelerate the development, deployment and commercialization of cleantech solutions, supporting a robust cleantech sector.

The development of clean technologies that are cost competitive and contribute to cleaner energy production and use is critical to our collective energy future. The clean technologies developed and supported in Canada can be exported around the world, supporting the global transformation of energy systems that are efficient and meet long-term climate objectives.