Oil and gas in our lives: Women’s World Cup of Soccer

Players react moments after Australia’s forward #16 Hayley Raso (unseen) scored her team’s second goal during the Australia and New Zealand 2023 Women’s World Cup Group B football match between Canada and Australia at Melbourne Rectangular Stadium on July 31, 2023. Getty Images photo

This article from Shawn Logan of the Canadian Energy Centre Ltd.

‘The beautiful game’ wouldn’t look the same without petroleum products

The Adidas OCEAUNZ, official ball of the 2023 Women’s World Cup of Soccer, soars through the air, its polyurethane skin a blur as it arcs toward the goal.

The goalie makes a desperate dive across the emerald green natural turf – strengthened at the root for durability by flexible polypropylene fibres – to make the stop.

The ‘keeper’s hands, sheathed in high-tech gloves made primarily from latex and polyurethane, reach for the streaking ball.

The crowd leaps up from their moulded plastic seats as the ball hits the back of the net, an interlacing spiderweb most commonly made from polyethylene or nylon.

As soccer fans prepare for the Women’s World Cup final in Australia and New Zealand, it’s difficult to imagine how different the event, which is expected to be viewed by a staggering 2 billon people around the world, would look and feel without products derived from oil and gas.

At field level, nearly every practical aspect of the game relies on or is impacted by petroleum-based gear.

From the synthetic leather turf cleats and polyester jerseys to the players’ benches, water bottles and medical equipment that adorn the sidelines, all are made possible from the contributions of oil and gas products.

When a referee flashes a yellow or red card, it’s often made from a sturdy polyvinyl chloride, more commonly known as PVC.

Extending beyond the field, that trend continues.

From plastic spectator seating to polycarbonate scoreboards to advertising placards in and around the arena, all are thanks to the contributions of oil and gas. The event lights that encircle the arenas and the broadcasting equipment that allow the world to cheer their countries also rely heavily on products derived from petroleum.

Even the competing nations’ flags that drape the facilities are made from nylon and polyester.

With an expected 1.5 million spectators taking in the action in Australia and New Zealand, most will have had to travel by air or vehicle, which largely require oil and gas to operate.

And when Canada’s women return home – unfortunately without the result they wanted (Tokyo’s Olympic gold medal helps to ease the pain a bit) – they’ll arrive on an airplane built with light-weight polymers and carbon fibre that will touch down on a smooth runway made of asphalt and concrete, neither of which would be possible without oil and gas.

So while some may yearn for a return to the days of less aerodynamic leather balls, heavy cotton jerseys and fragile natural turf, the impact on “the beautiful game” would be enormous.

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Alberta

Nobel Prize nods to Alberta innovation in carbon capture

Published on October 30, 2025

Todayville

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Grady Semmens

‘We are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world’

To the naked eye, it looks about as exciting as baking soda or table salt.

But to the scientists in the University of Calgary chemistry lab who have spent more than a decade working on it, this white powder is nothing short of amazing.

That’s because the material they invented is garnering global attention as a new solution to help address climate change.

Known as Calgary Framework-20 (CALF-20 for short), it has “an exceptional capacity to absorb carbon dioxide” and was recognized in connection with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

A jar of CALF-20, a metal-organic framework (MOF) used in carbon capture. Photo courtesy UCalgary

“It’s basically a molecular sponge that can adsorb CO2 very efficiently,” said Dr. George Shimizu, a UCalgary chemistry professor who leads the research group that first developed CALF-20 in 2013.

The team has been refining its effectiveness ever since.

“CALF-20 is a very exciting compound to work on because it has been a great example of translating basic science into something that works to solve a problem in the real world,” Shimizu said.

Advancing CCS

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not a new science in Alberta. Since 2015, operating projects in the province have removed 15 million tonnes of CO2 that would have otherwise been emitted to the atmosphere.

Alberta has nearly 60 proposed facilities for new CCS networks including the Pathways oil sands project, according to the Regina-based International CCS Knowledge Centre.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three of Shimizu’s colleagues in Japan, Australia and the United States, for developing the earliest versions of materials like CALF-20 between 1989 and 2003.

Custom-built molecules

CALF-20 is in a class called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — custom-built molecules that are particularly good at capturing and storing specific substances.

MOFs are leading to new technologies for harvesting water from air in the desert, storing toxic gases, and capturing CO2 from industrial exhaust or directly from the atmosphere.

CALF-20 is one of the few MOF compounds that has advanced to commercial use.

“There has been so much discussion about all the possible uses of MOFs, but there has been a lot of hype versus reality, and CALF-20 is the first to be proven stable and effective enough to be used at an industrial scale,” Shimizu said.

It has been licensed to companies capturing carbon across a range of industries, with the raw material now being produced by the tonne by chemical giant BASF.

CO2 pipeline at the Quest CCS project near Edmonton, Alta. Photo courtesy Shell Canada

Carbon capture filter gigafactory

Svante Inc. has demonstrated its CALF-20-based carbon capture system at a cement plant in British Columbia.

The company recently opened a “gigafactory” in Burnaby equipped to manufacture enough carbon capture and removal filters for up to 10 million tonnes of CO2 annually, equivalent to the emissions of more than 2.3 million cars.

The filters are designed to trap CO2 directly from industrial emissions and the atmosphere, the company says.

Svante chief operating officer Richard Laliberté called the Nobel committee’s recognition “a profound validation” for the entire field of carbon capture and removal.

CALF-20 expansion

Meanwhile, one of Shimizu’s former PhD students helped launch a spinoff company, Existent Sorbents, to further expand the applications of CALF-20.

Existent is working with oil sands producers, a major steel factory and a U.S.-based firm capturing emissions from other point sources, said CEO Adrien Côté.

“The first users of CALF-20 are leaders who took the risk of introducing new technology to industries that are shrewd about their top and bottom lines,” Côté said.

“It has been a long journey, but we are at the point where CALF-20 has proven to be resilient and able to survive in harsh real-world conditions, and we are excited to bring this made-in-Canada innovation to the world.”

Business

Bill Gates walks away from the climate cult

Published on October 29, 2025

Todayville

MxM News

Billionaire Bill Gates — long one of the loudest voices warning of climate catastrophe — now says the world has bigger problems to worry about. In a 17-page memo released Tuesday, the Microsoft co-founder called for a “strategic pivot” away from the obsessive focus on reducing global temperatures, urging leaders instead to prioritize fighting poverty and eradicating disease in the developing world. “Climate change is a serious problem, but it’s not the end of humanity,” Gates wrote.

Gates, 70, argued that global leaders have lost perspective by treating climate change as an existential crisis while millions continue to suffer from preventable diseases like malaria. “If I had to choose between eradicating malaria and preventing a tenth of a degree of warming, I’d let the temperature go up 0.1 degree,” he told reporters ahead of next month’s U.N. climate conference in Brazil. “People don’t understand the suffering that exists today.”

For decades, Gates has positioned himself as a leading advocate for global climate initiatives, investing billions in green energy projects and warning of the dangers of rising emissions. Yet his latest comments mark a striking reversal — and a rare admission that the world’s climate panic may have gone too far. “If you think climate is not important, you won’t agree with the memo,” Gates told journalists. “If you think climate is the only cause and apocalyptic, you won’t agree with the memo. It’s a pragmatic view from someone trying to maximize the money and innovation that helps poor countries.”

The billionaire’s change in tone is sure to raise eyebrows ahead of the U.N. conference, where climate activists plan to push for new emissions targets and wealth transfers from developed nations. Critics have long accused Gates and other elites of hypocrisy for lecturing the public about fossil fuels while traveling the globe on private jets. Now, Gates himself appears to be distancing from the doomsday rhetoric he once helped spread, effectively admitting that humanity faces more immediate moral imperatives than the weather.

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)