Less than a week after reserve evaluators dealt a severe blow to a new oil sands technology, one of the chief champions of that technology has been named head of Connacher Oil and Gas Ltd., a company with its own struggles in the oil sands.

For more than a decade, Chris Bloomer served as an executive at Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd., the company pursuing the THAI process that proposed underground combustion as a way to melt bitumen out of the oil sands.