OLDS COLLEGE
Olds College Research Showcase Highlights Projects by Faculty & Students

The first-ever Olds College Research Showcase underlined the wide range of what's happening at one of the top research colleges in Canada.

About 49 presenters ranging from students to faculty and staff explained their research as part of the showcase. Projects included using microbes to break down contaminants from crude oil, employing drones to estimate hail damage in crops and surveying producers on the expected impact of autonomous farming.

It also included a project that could help make it easier for oil and gas wells in Alberta to be provincially certified as reclaimed, said George Gaeke, who is a land use planning and Geographic Information Systems instructor at the College.

Many of these sites involve inactive orphan wells that were owned by companies that have become financially insolvent, raising concerns about safety for farmers and other rural Albertans as the wells deteriorate. It has been estimated that the total cost of cleaning up unreclaimed wells could be in the tens of billions of dollars.

There are more than 300,000 wells, including many that are still active, that will eventually need to be reclaimed, said Gaeke during a presentation of his research at the one-day showcase March 28. "If you take those wells and you put them on a map of Alberta, there's hardly anywhere you can go in Alberta where you don't run into an oil and gas well."

The research showcase demonstrates the College appreciates the importance of not only investigating, but also sharing and publicizing scientific research, said Keith Friedlander, who is the College's Research and Scholarly Activity Lead.

His job focuses on raising awareness of all the research conducted by faculty and students, including agriculture, environmental sciences, social science and other fields. "We want to actively promote it, so one of the first ideas that we came up with is that we should have events."

The showcase included a research poster fair and was attended by more than 100 people at the College's Werklund Agriculture and Technology Centre. Each presenter was each given a certificate recognizing their participation in the showcase.

An award for best student presentation was given to Vishnupriya, who is part of the Post-Diploma Certificate program in Horticulture. Her research involved optimizing radish growth by exploring the impact of pelletized biomass amendments on radish biomass.

Meanwhile, an award for best student poster was presented to Lacey Drozdowich, Amanda Holowath, Amy Vandenhoven, Cole Mueller, and Corbin MacMillan of the Bachelor of Applied Science Degree - Agribusiness program. They were honored for their poster on how feed affects butter fat in the dairy sector and drives value to farmers.

Olds College ranked 14th on a list of Canada's top 50 research colleges in 2024 as determined by Research Infosource Inc. Gaeke's project involved the Olds College Centre for Innovation (OCCI), along with energy industry partners Ember Resources Inc. and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL).

His research used high-tech approaches such as Earth Observation (EO), which involves things such as drones and computer analysis using digital mapping. It could help speed up the reclamation of oil and gas wells on cultivated land by allowing the process to be more quickly and easily documented, he said.

Such evidence would be examined and certified by the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER). The provincial agency currently requires time-consuming visits by technicians involving things such as direct, in-person sampling of sites, said Gaeke.

"We're hoping that within the next few months, AER will issue a statement saying that rather than doing the field analysis for vegetation assessments on cultivated sites, we can actually use this EO method."

"The Olds College Research Showcase is expected to become an annual event," said Nicole Zukiwsky, Associate Dean of the College's Werklund School of Agriculture Technology. "It is a perfect and excellent way to highlight students, staff and faculty to be able to show what they've been doing, their interests in research, and where it is to go in the future."