This was the RBC Shad Entrepreneurship Cup, an annual face-off among teams from the 12 Shad Valley programs held in July at university campuses across Canada.
Shad Valley attracts top high-school students who gain admission in a nationwide competition. Not surprisingly, they usually travel to a campus as far from their home as possible. They live, work and study together and create major science and business projects around a theme. This year it was Energy in Canada - how we can get more of it or use less.
One project from each campus is selected to go forward for further development. Instead of going to the beach in August, students from each Shad campus slave over a business plan, prototype and website. Since they're scattered across the country, they work in a distributed environment, armed with techno-tools such as e-mail, the telephone and an online portal for exchanging documents and other materials.
"Organizing 20 students over the Internet is one of the toughest tasks I've ever had," says Jonathan Norris, 17, who hails from Toronto.
Norris led the Shad Valley Calgary team, which carried away two of the seven gold medals awarded at the competition. Norris has figured out something that many adults learn the hard way. "The problem wasn't the work to be done," he says, "it was getting people motivated at a distance. It's a lot different from having 20 people in the room talking."
The Calgary group's project, called H2OIL, addresses a real problem in the oil and gas industry - the consumption of natural gas with the steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD) process in the oilsands. Some observers have called SAGD "reverse alchemy," because high-quality natural gas is burned to extract lower-quality bitumen. H2OIL's promotional literature says the average SAGD plant spends $90 million on natural gas, emitting 492,000 tonnes of CO2, equivalent to 70,000 cars.
Their solution? Use the energy under the Earth's crust. They note that the Athabasca region of Alberta has "geothermal hotspots" - areas three to five km under the ground that can reach temperatures up to 300° C. They propose stimulating the hotspot by boring a well into the Earth, then sending water into the well to cause the rock to slightly fracture and increase permeability.
Then they'd use a system of pipes and pumps to harness geothermal energy to make steam.
In their business plan, the students cite Petro-Canada's McKay River SAGD plant in the Athabasca region. "If we feed their system with steam which is already at temperatures above 170° C, we would be reducing their natural gas usage by at least 70 per cent, saving them a minimum of $63 million a year."
Big promises from an as-yet-fictitious student company, but the Shads have been in close contact with PetroCanada representatives who were helpful and encouraging. Who knows? This idea, and maybe even some of the people who worked on it, may wind up in the oilpatch someday. But first they probably need to go to university.
Other ideas that surfaced in the competition may be easier to implement. The Shad Valley Lakehead team created a self-powered hearing aid with a piezoelectric generator designed to replace the conventional hearing-aid battery.
As long as the wearer moves around a reasonable amount, the need for fumbling with batteries should be a thing of the past. A similar idea came from the group at the University of New Brunswick, which made a four-gigabyte Flash Drive MP3 player that uses magnetic induction and a rechargeable battery as its energy source. Imagine one of those flashlights that you shake playing rock music into your ears instead.
Projects on display at the science fair-like session before the banquet also included the GraviChair, a bus/train seat that generates electricity when people sit down, and a speed bump that captures energy as cars roll over it.
The bright minds of Shads also gave us Circo - circular facial tissues. These should save on paper since nobody really uses the corners of a tissue anyway. And, to boot, they're imprinted with "earth-friendly tips on each tissue."
One requirement of the competition is that the products be new and innovative, though of course that's sometimes hard to assess.
Three of the campuses came up with some variant of a home-energy monitoring and control system to show where your energy dollars are going. Great idea, but somebody has beaten them to it. DIY KYOTO sells the Wattson home energy monitor for £350, though so far, only in the United Kingdom.
Still, it's enthusiasm and human energy that count, and every one of the Shad teams felt that they learned a tremendous amount, not just about science and engineering, but also about teamwork and themselves.
The overall winner at this year's competition came from Memorial University of Newfoundland, whose Shads created "The Great Canadian Energy Diet" - a reality TV show that pits small towns across Canada in a competition to save energy. Think "The Amazing Race" with sweaters, set-back thermostats and low-wattage lightbulbs.
"We actually had one of the judges come up to us and say we should do this," says Hannah Webb, the 17-year-old Calgary high school student who captained the Shad Memorial University team.
If you are, or you know, a bright, lively Grade 11 or 12 student, now is the time to apply for Shad Valley 2007 at www.shad.ca Participants universally endorse the experience, even though some feared they were going to Geek Camp.
"Everything that I did when I went to Shad was something that I made for myself, instead of just something that falls into my life," says Webb, who says it's completely different from school and other activities she's done before.
"I travelled across the country, made all these new friends, became the team leader and accomplished all this. You get what you put into it."
Chances are, Hannah and the other Shads who put so much into this year's RBC Shad Cup will indeed get a lot back.
(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He's also the program director for Shad Valley Calgary. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
