Clement Bowman - Career

Career

After working several years with DuPont Canada on the production of nylon, Bowman returned to the University of Toronto in 1957 for postgraduate work. In 1958, he attained a MASc and then a PhD in 1961.

He then joined Imperial Oil Limited, an affiliate of Exxon Corporation, at the Esso Research Centre in Sarnia, Ontario.

In 1964, Imperial Oil selected him as one of the staff to test the process of bitumen separation on a variety of oil sands by taking the plant to the oil sands formation in Alberta. He worked for Syncrude Canada Limited for the next six years, conducting studies on the molecular and interfacial properties of the oils sands and the mechanism of the Clark hot water separation process., leading to a paper presented at the Seventh World Petroleum Congress in Mexico City in 1967.

In the late 1960s the government of Alberta decreased the rate of oil sands development, and Bowman returned to Imperial Oil's research department in Sarnia.

In 1975, he was became chairperson of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA), a crown corporation with a fund of $100 million (worth 400 million today). He was responsible for starting a project to obtain access to the deep oil sands deposits by sinking a shaft and drilling horizontal wells by directional drilling, now the basis of the widely adopted method of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).

In 1984, he returned to Imperial Oil as Vice President—Research for Esso Petroleum Canada, a division of the company, with responsibility for the Sarnia Research Centre. In 1986, he returned to Alberta as President of the Alberta Research Council, an Alberta crown corporation. At the Council, he led the organization into joint research ventures with the private sector, with the oil sands and their environmental issues remaining a prioriuty. In 1989, five years after leaving AOSTRA, he received the K. A. Clark Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to AOSTRA.

On completing his term there, he opened his own consulting practice .

At 61, he was inspired by the work of Alex Lowey and Phil Hood in their book The Power of the 2×2 Matrix to devise a methodology, called ProGrid, for practical decisions such as selecting research projects, choosing corporate strategies, and making decisions on proposals, grant applications and awards in a number of Canadian research institutions and Centres of Excellence, such as Alberta Heritage Foundation of Medical Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Centres of Excellence .

In 2006, her wad one of a large group that prepared a report under the auspices of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) on energy options for Canada .