February 2025
Owen Henshaw is going deep – 6.4 kilometres deep.
Straight down.
“The rock down there is granite – like a kitchen countertop,” says Owen, who is a Senior Innovation Engineer at Cenovus Energy. “It’s hard rock under extreme pressure. And we have to prove that we can stimulate rock at that depth to access the heat underground.”
Leveraging Cenovus’s subsurface expertise, which we use to develop oil and natural gas resources, Owen and his team is exploring the opportunity to drill Canada’s deepest geothermal well in northern Alberta, tapping into the heat of the earth’s core as another source of energy.
“Geothermal energy is clean, but unlike other renewables, it’s always on so there is no intermittency to it,” he says. “It doesn’t depend on the sun shining or the wind blowing – it provides a consistent baseload of power.”
Owen was one of more than 60 people presenting their ideas at Cenovus’s bi-annual Innovation Summit in November.
Cenovus staff share innovation ideas with colleagues in the dedicated poster sharing space at the Innovation Summit. Source: Cenovus.com
Nearly 2,000 employees from across the company gathered in Calgary to share ideas and knowledge to help identify new technologies with the potential to disrupt the energy industry or improve our business.
“The summit is an opportunity to showcase innovation across the company, to inspire people but also to connect people so hopefully they can apply a technology they see in one area to another,” says Rob Baillargeon, Director of Innovation at Cenovus.
Drilling the nation’s deepest well was just one of the ideas discussed at the summit.
Jeremy Wolfe, a Senior Staff Integrity Engineer within our Downstream Operations, also presented his team’s latest tool – a robot that can be lowered up to 30 meters into a storage tank to safely inspect its structural integrity.
“The robots have several key functions they perform – the biggest one is they eliminate the need for confined space entry,” says Jeremy. “Honestly, the possibilities are unlimited. They are great at gathering very detailed, accurate information for us and can even create a 3-D map of the tank bottom.”
As part of our work to improve our environmental performance, Karo Afiegbe, a Staff GHG Tech Engineer, showed off new methods of making carbon capture and storage (CCS) more efficient.
“Given the financial hurdles related to large carbon capture projects, we’re finding alternative, easy-to-construct technologies that we can integrate with our assets that are more economical," he says.
While the summit focused on innovations being developed by Cenovus staff, it also included international speakers who’ve worked for Disney and Netflix, discussing breakthroughs at their companies.
“It just goes to show that Cenovus’s leaders are supporting a culture of innovation and ideas here,” says Gayle Fontaine, a Mineral Lands Contract Advisor. “I think it’s really important for people to be heard and have the resources they need.”
“Honestly, this is important,” says Patrick Quan, a Project Controller for Offsite Projects. “It shows that the company values innovation and the need for people to innovate.”
The summit is a great demonstration of how Cenovus uses data, information technology, geosciences, engineering, mathematics and many other disciplines to solve complex problems and develop our resources safely, responsibly and efficiently.
“We make this business look too easy sometimes, but there are some extremely talented and passionate people that drive this business to be as successful as it is,” says Rob Baillargeon. “Innovation is key to remaining competitive. The fact that we can still produce a barrel of oil for similar costs that we have been for the past five to 10 years, despite rising costs in all other facets of life, is a testament to the value of innovation.”