We need this mine for the jobs they said. Someone will need to drive the trucks they said. Everything about modern mining operations is massive, including the cost to keep these mines running. One significant expense comes from the often six-figure salaries that heavy equipment operators require. Not that they dont earn it—you try driving a house-sized truck loaded with tons of rubble up a narrow canyon rim barely wider than the wheelbase—but the cost of employing a large number of skilled operators gets expensive fast, especially when you also factor in the cost of housing them and their families in the remote locations where oil sand fields tend to occur. But for Canadian oil sands giant Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest energy company by market value according a Bloomberg report, the answer might be to get get rid of the drivers altogether. See, getting oil from sand is just slightly more efficient that getting blood from a stone. You have to dredge up two tons of sand to squeeze out a single barrels worth of bitumen. That means lots of excavating and even more hauling to get it to the extraction plant. But the faster these trucks make the loop from mine to extraction plant and back, the more cost effective the process becomes. And the easiest way to do that is to make the trucks run themselves nonstop. According to John Meech, a mining engineering professor at the University of British Columbia that spoke to Bloomberg, doing so could carve as much as 15 percent off of Suncors operating costs.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 04:01:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015