Background
The Arctic is of critical importance for Canada: its vast and challenging landscape holds significant natural resources. In order to maximize those resources, the challenges of the operating environment must be understood and addressed through new technology solutions.
Operating year-round in the Arctic, or even offshore Labrador, is an extraordinarily expensive prospect. CARD was established to pursue research activities to fill the gaps currently making many Arctic developments prohibitive.
To realize these ambitious goals, in 2010-2011 the Hibernia and Terra Nova projects together committed $12.5 million over five years ($2.5 million per year) to support leading-edge research projects, programs and technology development. The Newfoundland & Labrador Research and Development Corporation contributed $4 million under its R&D Platforms initiative to allow C-CORE to expand and enhance its facilities at Memorial to accommodate the new researchers and laboratories.
The Centre’s expertise was originally envisioned to be primarily engineering, but it interfaced with experts in many fields.
In 2011 CARD developed an Arctic Development Roadmap through secondary research and consultation with industry and the broader research community to identify, organize and prioritize key R&D themes. The results were an important input into CARDs five-year research plan and highlighted research priority areas relevant to the broader research community and various sectors of the oil and gas industry.
The CARD project is no longer active. Its five year research plan was completed in 2016. However, CARD project findings, including the Arctic Development Roadmap, continue to inform C-CORE’s ice engineering work plan.