Behind the innovation: Ariel Torre
How Torre adapted technology used by NASA to improve oil sands monitoring
February 6, 2026
Growing up in a small town in Argentina’s rugged Patagonia region in the 1970s, Ariel Torre’s life changed when his family got a desktop computer.
“I was really young and this was the first or second computer in our town,” says Torre. “I was fascinated by it. It was like magic to me. It inspired me to learn programming when I was 13 or so, and I eventually left to study electronics and then engineering.”
The drive to peek behind the curtain of that seemingly magical box shaped Torre’s career over the next three decades.
“Being curious about how things work is important, but that needs to be combined with grit to see things through,” says Torre, the co-founder and CEO of Impossible Sensing Energy.
The company originally made headlines by winning a contract for NASA to try to detect trace amounts of potential carbon-based past life on Mars. Pablo Sobron, Impossible Sensing’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, developed a sensor that uses light to measure physical changes in harsh environments. It detects composition and quantity by analyzing how the light’s properties, such as intensity and wavelength, are altered as it interacts with different matter. This allows for safe, remote, and continuous monitoring in environments too harsh for traditional sensors.
When Torre, who had spent more than 20 years working for drilling companies around the globe met up with Sobron, they saw a potential to adapt optical sensing for the oil industry.
“The industry was lagging behind because they lacked real-time information. Putting instruments on every well is incredibly expensive,” says Torre, who spent more than two decades working for Schlumberger and Precision Drilling in South America, the Middle East and the United States. “AI software can produce amazing results for companies, but you need to have data to take advantage of that. And you cannot feed an AI model if you have someone only logging data once a month. So, the challenge was to find a solution that industry could afford and that could provide reliable data.”
Getting the funding to build a commercial prototype came in 2022/2023, when the company won $45,000 in a global challenge held by COSIA, the innovation arm of Pathways Alliance, to accelerate the use of steam-reducing technologies in oil sands operations.
“We also received help from a customer in conventional oil and a couple of granting agencies and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Applied Research and Innovation Services, which gave us space in their lab to build a prototype,” says Torre.
The prototype was built to detect butane, propane and other solvents used for in-situ oil sands operations. Using solvents allows operators to reduce or eliminate the need for steam to extract bitumen, which has the potential to lower water use, reduce energy intensity and decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions intensity, meaning reducing the amount of CO2 emissions for each barrel of oil produced, compared to traditional operations.
“Bitumen is very thick, so you heat it or combine with solvents to make it flow. Solvents like butane and propane are more expensive than gasoline, so recycling is crucial, and our tool needed to precisely measure the amount of solvents recovered in an operation,” Torre says. “By efficiently recycling solvents, you reduce the cost of heating water with natural gas as well as the amount of water needed to create steam. You have a more efficient operation and lower costs.”
The funding provided a prototype that withstood the rigours of harsh winters in Alberta’s boreal region.
“The technology needs to be reliable enough to withstand Canadian winters and the tools were working at -40 C,” he says. “It had worked on Mars so we were confident it would be robust enough.”
That has led three Pathways Alliance member companies to have the optical sensors tested at their operations.
“Curiosity and determination are important, but so is being surrounded by great people and we have that here in Calgary. When you demonstrate a clear vision, people rally around and help you,” he says. “Canada has a lot to offer the rest of the world. What we create here is top of the line.”
