Project List
This initiative will engage and collaborate with Indigenous organizations and communities to foster greater inclusion and participation in OSC projects and activities and build direct and meaningful partnerships. Canada’s Ocean Supercluster is investing $230 thousand in the first phase of the initiative to shift towards fulsome and meaningful engagement of Indigenous communities as outlined in Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, inclusive of Elders, youth, and those historically excluded living away from their communities.
This project answers the call to improve operations and meet regulatory requirements. The technology developed in the Fishing Smarter Not Harder Project reduces by-catch, avoids endangered species, and limit seabed impact. Included in the work is the development of an integrated Fishing Smarter Platform that includes data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to aid in situational awareness, species identification and quantity characterization.
This project is creating a digital engineering platform called Virtual Ocean. A collection of custom software ‘apps’ will be built on the platform that will capitalize on specific needs in every ocean sector, including marine aquaculture, marine renewables, defence, and offshore energy. Virtual Ocean will benefit the ocean community by improving safety, supporting economic growth through the development of sustainable marine engineering projects, and providing accessible and affordable technology for businesses of all sizes, with a particular emphasis on smaller enterprises that otherwise may not be able to access marine engineering software at a reasonable cost.
Oneka Technologies will work with project partners AF Theriault who is supporting the manufacturing the hull and structure of the Glaciers’; H2O Innovation who is providing the process plant for the desalination portion of the Glacier technology; and government partner, the City of Barrington, NS who will provide a coastal site for buoy installation at Cape Sable Island. With a total project value of $14.1 million, Canada’s Ocean Supercluster will provide $6.7 million in funding with the balance of coming from project partners.
Through Training Works flagship educational technology Skilltinuous, the project will give marine workers the tools to recognize, understand and anticipate fatigue while providing moment of need microlearning to help mitigate the risk associated with fatigue. This comprehensive fatigue risk mitigation educational technology will equip marine organizations and their workers with a new tool that can stand alone or run alongside existing organizational fatigue management systems, to support human performance and help to create healthier, safer, and more productive work environments.
This project builds on the successful pilot to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in the ocean ecosystem. Ocean Allies 2.0 expands the pilot program’s scope beyond the Atlantic provinces to become a national program, with partners and key organizations from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Through targeted measures and events to support mentorship, training, awareness building the Ocean Allies team works to reduce systemic barriers, attract talent and build a more inclusive ocean economy. This phase of the projects will focus on increasing Indigenous partnerships with a particular focus on Inuit Nunangat.
The Crowdsourced Wind Maps project provides wind zone contour lines showing how the wind funnels into channels and around headlands, to improve marine navigation for all types of vessels. Data from internet-connected wind sensors is merged with the worldwide meteorological data forecast. There are never enough weather stations, but this project uses data from users who move around. This innovative solution archives incoming data, allowing the generation of wind maps showing how the wind is flowing even when there is no live data in a particular location.
Led by ECO Canada from Alberta with their Atlantic-based project partners, the Centre for Ocean Ventures & Entrepreneurship (COVE), the College of North Atlantic (CNA), Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) and the Joint Economic Development Initiative (JEDI), the Blue Mentorship and Leadership Pathways Program will specifically focus on the needs of ocean companies and will combine a peer mentorship program with traditional mentor-mentee relationships. The total value of the project is $920k with close to $460k coming from the Ocean Supercluster.
The BlueVita Technology Project aims to address significant challenges facing the seafood sector in Canada and worldwide, including undervalued seafood that has been frozen due to seasonal harvests. This project will allow access to high-end markets currently constrained by air transport costs, complicated shipping logistics, and other factors. The new transport technology will position Atlantic Canada as a leader in mobile storage and multi-modal live haul of aquatic animals.
A major ocean industry challenge is the need for a range of environmentally sustainable, low greenhouse gas (GHG) emission, and low-sulphur marine fuels available to end-users at a competitive cost that are compliant with current and future fuel regulations. The Clean Ocean Advanced Biofuels project will address these challenges by introducing a low carbon biofuel across the marine ecosystem.
The AROWIND Project will provide a prevailing ocean sector concept that is autonomous and remotely operates subsea surveys. This ocean solution presents an opportunity for Canadian companies to commercialize a remote and autonomous inspection solution for offshore wind inspection that reduces vessel costs and number of personnel on-board.
Canada’s Ocean Supercluster announced two new projects led from Newfoundland and Labrador including the $471 thousand Crisis Intervention & Operability Analysis for Digital Ocean Operations (CRIOP-DO) Project. This project will support the digital transition to remote operations in our ocean environment.
This Nova Scotia-led project will develop and commercialize ropeless or rope-on-command (ROC) fishing solutions to help address global problems including vertical line entanglements, plastic pollution, and ‘ghost fishing’ caused by abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear. The innovative solution to vertical line entanglements, plastic pollution, and ghost fishing caused by abandoned, lost, and discarded fishing gear that pose threats to ocean species including the Right Whale.
This game-changing innovation will provide a 3D volumetric interpretation of the sub-seabed geology with enhanced resolution and increased competitiveness for the global offshore renewable energy sector. GeoScan will allow wider 3D acoustic scans of depths greater than 30m sub-seabed to support the growing offshore wind sector.
This Newfoundland and Labrador-led project will accelerate mixed-reality safety training development to offer faster and more accessible digital training options across marine industries. This project will enable workers to develop critical worksite specific competencies through engaging and challenging simulation training programs. Simulation training is a safer, more effective option to training than existing forms.
BridgeVUE is a made-in-Canada solution that leverages emerging technology to enhance marine navigation by contextualizing radar data over an individual’s field of vision, in real time, regardless of visibility. By using an augmented reality (AR) headset and combining it with navigational data, vessel crew will have the capability to overlay mission critical information over their field of vision even when visibility is near zero, increasing their situational awareness and improving safety.
This BC-led project will develop a real-time entrainment monitoring system for aquaculture fish farms in complex coastal ocean environments. The products and related services will allow customers to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the fish mortality from high surface temperature and harmful algal blooms.
This New Brunswick-led project will focus on emerging mixed reality technologies to develop a secure ocean data visualization and collaboration application using the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Microsoft Azure Mixed Reality Services. This application will visualize underwater environments in 3D mixed reality to support training, mission planning and rehearsal, and support defence and other marine sector underwater operations.
This Atlantic Canada-led project will develop an innovative product for digital twinning of underwater infrastructures, without the need for external specialists working in remote offshore locations. Upon successful introduction of the project, conventional offshore ROV/vessel crew will be able to confidently collect high quality image data for post-processing digital twins, guided by way of real-time 3D reconstruction giving feedback on image quality and coverage.
This Newfoundland and Labrador and PEI-led project will develop a hybrid diesel-electric system to make the hybridization of existing vessels worldwide a financially viable option. This project utilizes advanced permanent magnet motor technology to provide both Canadian and global vessel clients with a propulsion system that reduces not only maintenance and fuel costs, but also GHG emissions and carbon footprint.
This game-changing project represents significant developments in science and technology and has never been done before. The Sustainable Protein for Aquaculture project will take greenhouse gas emissions from upstream oil and gas and convert them into a high-value protein product to be used to feed farmed fish.
This project will develop an integrated service-hub, referred to as “Tech Companion,” that centralizes data in a remotely accessible, intelligent, and automated digital ecosystem for use in ocean industries. As a unified digital platform, Tech Companion will connect technicians across the globe and facilitate the collection of core data, including condition-based monitoring of equipment, task level instructions, structured reporting, and augmented reality training to support tasks on demand.
This project is the first of its kind in Canada and will allow for faster, more reliable and affordable data acquisition. Led by Sensor Technology, with its partners Kraken Robotics and 3D Wave Design, the Autonomous COMPASS Project team will work together to develop a compact, multi-element passive acoustic monitoring system to conduct passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), which is used in defence applications, oceanographic research, marine mammal protection activities, and energy exploration.
Led from Newfoundland and Labrador and Nova Scotia, the almost $27 million project will bridge gaps between land, sea-based, and processing operations that exist in the aquaculture industry today by providing real-time information, analytics and environmental connectivity to improve overall operations. Through its development, the project will create 138 new jobs, including 20 at project implementation.
The Field Validation of Energy Storage System Project, led by Corvus Energy with its partners Seaspan Ferries, VARD Marine, BC Hydro, and UBC will conduct a commercial study and field trial of the new Corvus ESS that will support the development of the system and bring it to market. Canada’s Ocean Supercluster will provide $2 million in funding for the project, with $2.15 million coming from industry partners.
This Ontario-led project brings together SMEs, academia, government, and other partners in ocean innovation to bring state-of-the-art ocean environmental monitoring sensors into the ocean’s autonomous platforms, creating four highly skilled jobs, with the potential for 20 indirect positions, and part-time positions.
OSC’s first Alberta-led project, and brings together SMEs, academia, and other partners in ocean innovation to advance the development of Katal Green Fuel ahead of commercialization to reduce dependency on diesel and transition to low-carbon fuels. The project will benefit Canadians by creating seven jobs immediately, an additional 42 jobs within three years, and the potential for 210 indirect jobs.
The project will create a platform for the development, validation and commercialization of digital twins for a range of applications in Canada’s offshore as well as for other ocean industries, while also building capabilities to support the increasingly digital ocean economy and the future opportunities it presents.
Through the development of automation and predictive machine learning algorithms, branded Tallybots, this project represents the next generation of seafood processing powered by traceability and production software focused on improved efficiency and quality, and environmental benefits as a result of reduced waste.
The Digital Ship In-Service Support Project is Canada’s Ocean Supercluster’s 16th project with a total project value of more than $3 million. It brings together two Canadian marine industry leaders from Canada’s west & east coasts to develop and commercialize 3D digital twin capabilities that will help make Canada more globally competitive, drive export opportunities, & create jobs in the marine sector.
Led from St. John’s, NL, the $3.1 million project called the Rutter Internet of Things (IoT) Project will transform and migrate Rutter systems into an IoT enabled solution, offering remote monitoring as a managed service with specialty radar system data acquisition, and cloud-based storage and analytics, while also creating 12 new jobs.
With an increasing number of private industry companies and government agencies seeking accelerated solutions to remote operations and training, this project will develop and utilize highly specialized software in the Cloud that will reduce the need for software operators in the field and enable increased processing and quality control from an office or home setting.
The Smart Protective Coatings Project will introduce a new graphene-based nanotechnology to the global ocean economy through the development of revolutionary graphene-based protective coating products for vessels. With a total project value of more than $4.6 million, the OSC will provide $2.2 million in funding with the balance coming from industry partners.
The XOCEAN XO-G2 project will develop the next generation of Uncrewed Surface Vessel (USV), that addresses these requirements operating over the horizon with a range of over 3,000 nautical miles without a support vessel. The total project value is $3.4 million with the Ocean Supercluster providing $2 million in funding and the balance coming from project partners.
The Ocean Allies project has a total value of more than $420,000 where the Ocean Supercluster will provide $250,000 with the balance of funding coming from project partners. This project is designed to access, engage, and support a diverse ocean economy through targeted strategic activities across five work packages.
The Vitality Project is a transformative approach to address the shared data challenges of the ocean economy. This project will capitalize on Canada’s ocean data to deliver definitive commercial outcomes to the businesses involved by advancing ocean data analysis, management and visualization capabilities, and products.
This Project will deliver a new device a capability to train search and rescue (SAR) operators under realistic mission scenarios including turbulent flow zones, sea state, complex ship and offshore installation geometries and rescue rafts while simulating the full array of east coast Canada and arctic harsh environmental conditions.
The OceanDNA System has applications across ocean sectors and could be used to help inform sustainable ocean management and activity. By reading DNA from environmental samples, such as sediment or sea water, a comprehensive range of organisms can be identified – from bacteria to marine mammals – which yields a complete picture of the ecosystem. eDNAtec’s technology achieves proven cost reductions, strengthens environmental stewardship, enhances safety and supports regulatory compliance.