VANCOUVER — The B.C. Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy is launching this fall with $70 million in combined funding from the provincial government and Shell Canada, and an eye toward securing more cash from corporate partners. The federal government, meanwhile, will provide up to $35 million to support projects the centre leads.

“This centre will allow that innovation to take place in a collaborative way with industry, government and academic to meet the objectives of the future,” said Premier John Horgan at a press conference Friday announcing the details of the funding. He was joined by provincial Jobs And Innovation Minister Ravi Kahlon, federal Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough, an assortment of provincial and federal cabinet ministers, and Shell Canada president Susannah Pierce.

The provincial government first announced its intention to create the centre in September 2020 as part of its economic-recovery plan. It committed $35 million to the venture and formalized the funding in its 2021 budget. The federal government promised to contribute $35 million in its budget, which included $17.6 billion for “green-recovery” spending. The federal funding will come from Natural Resources Canada’s Energy Innovation Program.

“This is a bold step forward, and I’m very excited about it,” said Horgan, noting it does not relieve the province of the responsibility to contend with pollution from the past. “But I think it sets us on a course for the future that will meet the needs of generations to come, and that’s our obligation today.”

Shell Canada’s $35-million commitment will help it achieve its net-zero emissions by 2050 goal, wrote spokesperson Tara Lemay in a statement to The Logic. That includes emissions from the “production, processing, transport and use of the energy and energy products” the company sells, she said, and requires partnering with others in sectors that are difficult to decarbonize, such as aviation and shipping. Its support for the centre “is a tangible way to scale up clean energy and technology companies and projects needed to decarbonize various sectors.”

In return for its investment, Shell will be a member with ongoing voting rights, though the centre will operate independent of government and private entities, Lemay said. A board will guide its activities, and board members will be appointed from the centre’s membership.

Shell and the provincial government hope other industry players will pony up funds for the centre, too. “We are challenging other like-minded businesses and companies to join us to maximize the diversity and the impact,” said Shell’s Pierce at the event. Horgan confirmed the government is looking for more corporate participation, but “we wanted to launch,” and that the first corporate commitment “puts a lot of capital in play, a lot of opportunity to get going.”

The new centre will be a member-based organization, spanning people from government, academia and industry. It will review proposals as they come in and then fund them, said Horgan.

That aligns with B.C. energy minister Bruce Ralston’s original vision for the project. “My personal inclination is to model it a bit on the digital supercluster here in British Columbia,” with its tiered membership model, he said in an interview with The Logic in early May, when plans for the centre were still in their infancy and the province’s NDP government was developing a business plan. He was unable to attend the announcement. Its hope was the centre would bring in innovators from the public and private sectors, and facilitate interactions and research. “That really, really can drive the whole thing forward,” Ralston said.

The centre will focus on clean fuels, renewable natural gas, low-carbon hydrogen and carbon capture, utilization and storage. “That’s where it will start,” said Ralston. “It’s not a closed list or anything like that.”

It will have a physical location. The precise spot is yet to be determined, though Horgan hinted at a home within an academic campus, suggesting the University of British Columbia, whose president attended the event, and Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus as possible spots. The government will work with the centre’s board in the coming weeks and months to finalize a location, he said. 

A spokesperson from the energy department said in a statement that “there are many communities that would be well suited to host,” with more details expected in the coming months.

Prior to Friday’s announcement, Jeanette Jackson, CEO of cleantech accelerator Foresight, who also attended the event, had imagined the centre would combine a physical space with virtual offerings. Her organization had been pushing for the province to create a cleantech cluster after a six-month research project found gaps in the industry. The group focused on a hub-and-spoke model for its proposed cluster solution, noting that Vancouver is a natural centre, but that there is also “so much amazing work” happening in other municipalities, including Kelowna and Squamish. “We really want to make sure that all of these initiatives are connected,” Jackson said in an interview in May. Physical or virtual, she hopes the centre provides “a focal point for stakeholders interested in tackling climate change to convene and collaborate.”

The centre can help address some of the issues in the province’s cleantech industry, she added, including attracting talent and capital, the ability to enter new markets and serve domestic needs, and the speed of validating technologies. “Something like this could be a great mechanism to support those needs and those gaps that we see in the province.”

The first priority, said Ralston in May, was to develop a business plan for the centre and then recruitment. Hires would likely include an executive director, a board of directors and governance opportunities for companies in the sector looking to get involved. “We’re looking for broad participation by interested parties.” Some companies, which he declined to name at the time, had already expressed interest. An interim executive director will be appointed soon, wrote Lemay, followed by additional staff with roles to be defined by the board in the near future.

Measuring the centre’s success may be challenging. “The objective is … to find solutions to the challenges of our time. That does not lend itself to measurement at the beginning, but certainly the outcomes will be evident,” Horgan said.

The premier also revealed changes may be coming to the province’s “continent-leading” CleanBC plan after the European Union revealed a package of proposals to reduce greenhouse emissions by at least 55 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030. “We need to adapt and change as new evidence and new information becomes available,” he said, adding that’s what Environment and Climate Change Strategy Minister George Heyman has been tasked with. “We will amend targets. We will amend our objectives, bringing in smart regulation to meet our needs as required.”