Joy Romero—Innovating bitumen production

It was something that I promised myself that I would do for many years. I am an engineer, and my other love is economics. I also had transferred industries. I thought that if I did an MBA and focused it on project management and energy, I would understand my job and the industry better. The other thing is that I was working out of the Horizon site, which is 80 km north of Fort McMurray in a camp environment. It was not possible for me to go to a bricks-and-mortar university.

I did the communications plan for the entire Horizon project, internal and external. I still use that. The discipline of determining who are the internal stakeholders that you need to communicate with, who are the external stakeholders, and what are the forms in which you communicate. Every time you map it out, you see that you’re more than likely over-communicating to a group, which is a waste of time, and you’re probably under-communicating to others.

As we were bringing up the Horizon operations, there was a lot of work with respect to Lean Six Sigma for protocols. So ‘lean’ is, “Are you doing more steps than you need to do?” ‘Six sigma” is your number of mistakes, and they should fall inside of a range. It has numerous steps that allow you to increase your productivity. We started the formal LSS training across our department and now it’s across CNR. I had heard of it before starting the MBA, but I hadn’t studied it in enough detail to be able to apply it.

Absolutely. Mostly I live in the technical world, so developing new technologies that improve both environmental footprint and productivity was very valuable to me. An MBA is about the systems that allow you to do that efficiently, effectively, and quickly. It’s taking an idea through to commercialization. Those pathways are definitely enforced in AU’s MBA program.

In working through the project, our designs were based on proven technology, but we ran parallel designs in which we piloted new technologies as we were building the operating facility. We managed to bring in new technology in every component of bitumen production. We brought forward a new tailings technology that reduced tailings pond footprints by 50%, reduced water use by 30%, and reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 16%. The next step that our company is doing now is developing processes that eliminate tailings ponds altogether.

One of the things that has been so beneficial is having the courses available online; that ability to learn, to communicate digitally, was amazing. Our classes would have people from around the world. We had assignments where somebody would start it, then the next time zone would take it, and whoever was the last time zone would do the last part. My teams and the different organizations I work with today are virtual, and we set them up as such.

I would certainly start some courses and have no clue as to how I was ever going to have time to finish them, but I always managed. It never ceased to amaze me how the pedagogy worked. You finished basically looking at the world differently than when you started it.