Clement Bowman

Clement Willis Bowman (January 7, 1930 – October 7, 2021) was a Canadian chemical engineer, the founding chairperson of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority. He was a Member of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Global Energy Prize.

Career After graduating from the University of Toronto as a chemical engineer in 1952, Bowman worked for several years with DuPont Canada on the production of nylon in Kingston, Ontario.

In the late 1960s the government of Alberta decreased the rate of oil sands development, and Bowman returned to Imperial's research department in Sarnia, AOSTRA is a crown corporation with a fund of US$100 million (worth US$ million today). He was responsible for starting a project to obtain access to the deep oil sands deposits by sinking a shaft and drilling horizontal wells by directional drilling, now the basis of the widely adopted method of steam assisted gravity drainage (SAGD).

In 1984, Bowman returned to Imperial Oil as Vice President—Research of its division Esso Petroleum Canada, with responsibility for the Sarnia Research Centre. In 1986, he returned to Alberta as President of the Alberta Research Council, an Alberta crown corporation. At the Council, he led the organization into joint research ventures with the private sector, with the oil sands and their environmental issues remaining a priority. He left the Alberta Research Council in 1991 to open his own consulting practice. In 1989, five years after leaving AOSTRA, he received the Karl Clark Distinguished Service Award for his contributions to AOSTRA, and the funds led to a $10,000 endowment to the University of Alberta for a scholarship in his name.

Bowman was a key adviser to Premier Lougheed on energy issues throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1991, Bowman developed a decision-making methodology, called ProGrid, based on the work of Alex Lowey and Phil Hood in their book The Power of the 2×2 Matrix. AOSTRA used it for practical decisions such as selecting research projects, choosing corporate strategies, and making decisions on proposals, grant applications and awards in a number of Canadian research institutions and Centres of Excellence, such as Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Ontario Centres of Excellence.

From 2005 to 2015, Bowman chaired the Energy Pathways Task Force for the Canadian Academy of Engineering, which published four reports and two books and held many workshops presenting energy options for Canada. He received the CAE Distinguished Service award in 2007 for his work on the task force. He received University of Toronto's 25-year Meritorious Service Medal in 1977. In 2014, he was selected as an Honorary Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

Bowman was awarded the 2008 Global Energy International Prize by Russian president Dmitri Medvedev.

In 2010, the University of Western Ontario named a 50 million national centre for technology commercialization, the Bowman Centre for Sustainable Energy, after him. The Bowman Centre is housed at the university's Western-Sarnia-Lambton Research Park campus. In 2015, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce presented the Canada’s Resources Champion Award to the Bowman Centre.

Bowman was inducted to the Canadian Petroleum Hall of Fame in 2013.

Publications Intangibles: Exploring the Full Depth of Issues, FCIC, Grafiks Marketing & Communications,