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Autonomous Dump Trucks Are Coming To Canada's Oil Sands
Daniel_Stuckey writes "According to a Bloomberg report, Canadian oil sands giant Suncor, which is "Canada's largest energy company by market value," is currently testing haul trucks that are run by computers. Extracting bitumen from sands requires first digging up an enormous amount of the sand itself, with about two tons of sands required to produce one barrel of oil. Digging up all of that sand is the job of huge excavators, which then offload into gigantic haul trucks that transport sands to extraction plants. Time is money, and in this case being faster means carrying as much sand as possible. Haul trucks can carry hundreds of tons at a time, and are in constant motion, moving back and forth between excavator and extraction plant."
I'm looking forward to the remake of "Christine" with a truck the size of a house in the title role.
Are these the Canadian oil sands that the United States keeps referring to as "North American Oil" so that Americans don't feel so desperate about their energy situation?
... what defence strategies exists against it?
Gradually, bit by bit, each human worker in the economy is becoming obsoleted. This is pretty cool technology, and if the way our economy and politics worked was similarly cool this would be an undeniably great thing.
However, socially this means reduction in employment, and reduction in wages paid for others. Steadily, over time, we have broken down professions and it will be increasingly hard to find things humans are actually useful for as employees or business operators in 'the economy.' What then?
So God put the sand in the Vaseline?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
They are called railroads.
Autonomous vehicles.... the very first use will be "destroying the Earth" on behalf of "capitalist" pig-dogs.
Bet you didn't see that one coming.
LOL.
Canadians... We're really concerned about the Environment and all, but we've decided not to mimic your decline.
If you drive a vehicle for a living, start training for another job ASAP. This is the tip of the iceberg. I honestly think that in 25 years zero humans will be paid to drive a vehicle.
Rio Tinto has used autonomous trucks on some of its Iron Ore mines in the Pilbara region (north west Australia) for a number of years now (trials began in 2008). They also use it in conjunction with driver-less trains to haul the ore to the ports. In about April this year they announced that the driveless trucks had shifted 100 million tonnes of ore#1.
For those who think it will obsolete humans, I believe they are dead wrong. It will obsolete some skill sets, but not people. It creates other jobs and frees up labour resources for other uses. It is no different to the Scythe. Prior to its invention there was a much higher demand for labour to harvest fields, the scythe allowed the finite resource that is labour to be used somewhere else. If you believe self driving trucks will make people obsolete, what you are actually saying is that driving trucks is all that person is capable of. If that is the case I obviously have a much higher opinion of people than you do.
1 - http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/news/rio-s-driverless-trucks-move-100-million-tonnes
The thought of sending my money to Canada is a Hell of a lot more comforting than sending it to some backward Middle Eastern shithole that treats their women worse than their cattle. Now putting mayonaise on French fries, well....
If anybody still needs evidence that we're past peak oil, this is it.
Re-read that summary: two tons of sand have to be hauled away to the processing center just to get a single barrel of oil.
And remember Deepwater Horizon? The rig that went kablooie in the Gulf? The wellhead was a mile below the surface of the ocean, and the top of the deposits were seven miles below bedrock.
Long gone are the days when you had to be careful with your pickaxe in Texas lest you set off a gusher. We're now washing two tons of sand per barrel of oil just to feed the habit.
Oh, sure. There's still lots of oil left in the ground. About half as much as there was at the start of the industrial revolution, in fact. But it's all the nasty low-quality expensive shit that we would have laughed and turned up our noses at in the '70s. But not today.
Worst of all, we're now consuming oil at a faster rate than ever before in history. The only way we could keep the remaining half of reserves to last another century is if we decreased production by 2% - 3% annually, same as it used to grow. Can you imagine a century's worth of that kind of contraction?
No?
Then get ready for price shocks and the crash to end all crashes as we run out of what little is left in mere decades, and not that many.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
two tons is not that much. Assuming metric, sand/gravel is around 2000 kg / cubic meter, or you know, 2 tonnes. So really the above is saying that you require a cubic meter of sand to create a barrel of oil.
Maybe I would understand this better if it was given to me in library of congresses.
qd.
I guess with the rise of autonomous vehicles we'll see a lot more of this sort of thing. The reason these drivers get paid so much is their willingness to tolerate fairly bad conditions, living in remote mining camps working 3 weeks solid at a time. It's pretty rough, but for many people it's an opportunity to work around their less than fortunate start in life.
As the technology improves we'll see more and more of these jobs automated into redundancy.It's typically argued that new jobs will appear to absorb the labour capacity, but you do wonder when the speed of automation will completely outstrip the ability of most humans to learn new tasks, or even when all the jobs below a certain capability level will be automated. The office where I work has recently had to make redundancies of several intellectually disabled people because there was simply nothing they could do that couldn't be done better by machines.
I'd hope that the Australian government is carefully monitoring this sort of thing; although I don't believe they should block the use of these tools, some thought should definitely be given to the economic impact of removing these jobs from society.
"Theyyy took our jobbbsss!"
Iron Ore Company do Canada (partially owned by Rio Tinto) has run driverless trains since the 1960's in Labrador.
2 tons of sand for one barrel of oil? With all the processes needed to get the sand and process it that sure doesn't sound like it makes monetary sense to even extract the oil in the first place... can someone help me understand what I'm missing?
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Indian programmers are well respected for their technical skills, but I'm concerned about their domain knowledge here.
I've never been to India but I've seen several TV programs and youtube videos and I still can't work out whether they're supposed to drive on the left or the right.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you'd read TFA you'd know they're running a modified version of LynuxWorks RTOS in the trucks, but all of the scheduling is done remotely using servers running Windows Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012.
in dealing with that male inferiority complex that leads
to an irresistable urge to drive around in a hummer.
I would argue the industrialized world does not 'need' as much oil as it currently uses.
Thanks to the consumer electronics industry, battery electric cars are now viable, but merely somewhat expensive, transportation. Overhead wires could be installed for large trucks, and trains, to electrify them instead. Ships could go back to running on coal, or wind. Electricity can be provided by giant nuclear breeder reactors. Plastics could be made from sugar. Now, if the world were running low on natural gas, and coal, then humanity would be in trouble.
So what, we have had automatic ports for years - a crane driver points a laser at box on a ship confirms the number on it is then the rest is automatic; the lifting; the stacking on the quayside; the putting it on a lorry or another ship.
We will have automatic cars soon - they don't crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car
Thats 21 gallons of crude oil per tonne - to too bad at all.
I don't think that people realize the tsunami of change that is coming through automation. Basically if you do something repetitive and with a basic set of rules then your job is probably going bye bye. A list of jobs that comes to mind, almost all assembly line manufacturing, warehouse work, much in the way of machining, much in the way of welding, some construction such as many parts of the road construction business, cleaning, waiters, cooks, security, almost all of agriculture, things like baggage handling, most retail work such as stocking shelves, checkouts, and of course many driving jobs such as trucking, taxi, pizza delivery.
This all comes down to three simple questions, can it be done better, more reliably, and cheaper?
Each of these questions will have interesting twists. I suspect that in the above case of the robot trucks that they will occasionally screw up and not want to cross a puddle or some stupidity but that over all costs will drop and consistent productivity will be, on average, much higher. The same with say replacing a cook with a robot; it might not be better than the best cooks but as long as it is better than average, costs less, and the owner doesn't have to worry about it showing up on time then bye bye cooks.
But again the key is that robots will be so much better at certain things as to make them far more valuable then a simple spreadsheet analysis might indicate. In the case of a robot cook, if it is always preparing food in an extremely consistent way and always there then you might think that it isn't much better than a chef who only misses 2 days a year and only has 2 off days per year. But the reality is that an off day or a long wait due to a missing cook could kill off a few regular customers resulting in a much larger loss than the few nights directly impacted.
The next impact will be that robots have the ultimate case of OCD. So if you want you could have the robots go out into the field and pick the bugs, one at a time, off your plants. This is simply something that humans won't do as they would lose their minds. The same with things like cooking. A robot could place exactly 23 onions onto a certain dish placed in (artistically designed) exacting locations. A table in the restaurant could be told that their meals will be ready in 6 minutes 3 seconds as the chef has plotted the temperatures of the meat and knows exactly how long each step is going to take.
A simple example of this sort of variation having an impact can be observed with the medical helicopters that fly over my house. One of the pilots sets the collective wrong and the helicopter is noisy. He also is ponderous about leaving the helipad and flies fairly slowly. The other pilot lifts off and in one nice smooth movement turns, speeds up, retracts the gear, and is off like a flash. The landings are basically the same thing in reverse. I suspect the patient survival rates between the two pilots is very different.
This is an illusion and not actually happening. You see, they haven't built the Keystone XL pipeline (north segment), yet. As long as they don't build that, the dirty Alberta oil sands will stay in the ground. Daryl Hannah told me so. Madison wouldn't lie, would she? (Elle Driver now, that's another story!)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Check this out if you're curious about the oil sands - sparkwatch.ca
welcome our new, autonomously sand hauling overlords [which are driven by a computer]
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
we need health care not tied to jobs and maybe even cut full time down to 20-35 hours with the OT pay kicking in after say 30-32 hours a week with the NO OT on salary pay having a min level of like 90-100K + COL.
To get an idea of the size of these trucks:
1) Overview of the Caterpillar 797B mining dump trucks, at the Albion Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada.
2) The mining shovel which loads (and dwarfs) the 797B.
Well, obviously it depends on which side the steering wheel is on.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
...in the Athabasca region where the Canadian oil sands are...literally the only people not employed there are not employable due to disability or other personal issues...indeed many workers live all over Canada and fly in for their shifts and stay in company work camps
Automating these trucks would free up workers for other much needed labour elsewhere plus make operations safer and more efficient.
So the tar sands are not the job makers they were saying they'd be?
Can't wait to see all those crushed puny "built-for-soft" pick-ups by autonomously rolling behemoths.
This is not a reflection of scraping the bottom of the barrel but rather a perfect example of how good we've gotten in the process industry.
Yes 100 years ago oil was gushing from fountains, but even back then peak oil was just around the corner. Only the lighter sweeter crudes were useful. Oil was distilled in batch stills which took incredible amounts of realestate and energy for very little output. Every year a few more comments of peak oil popped up. Oh my god we need to catalytically crack heavy hydrocarbon chains into lighter ones!!!! A sign of peak oil. Oh my god we need to coke solid bitumen into light hydrocarbon chains!!!! A sign of peak oil. Now we're simply extracting oil from sand, yet another sign of peak oil.
Just wait until they star putting biological agents into wells to break down all the oil we can't get at. That'll be a sign of peak oil too. The reality is since the first oil was scooped from the surface of this rock every subsequent well has been deeper or more remote. BP ... I mean the Anglo Persian Oil Company actually sent out expeditions to map the geology of an uncharted and uninhabited desert looking for oil and it took them absolute years to find it. They used slaves to carry drilling equipment hundreds of km in search of oil. All of this over 110 years ago.
In contrast today's oil finding efforts are quite simple. Most of the oil was always known to be deep underground. We just lacked the technology to get to it.
Indian cars must have them in the middle then.
Yee Haw! If we jest had more uh that good old poloooshun we'd all be stinkin' rich!!
Three Squirrels