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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.
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."
US oil production has consistently increased throughout Obama's presidency, after decreasing throughout Bush's presidency.
There's nothing "desperate" about our energy situation. Gasoline is $3.20/gallon- a lot cheaper than in Canada.
It's convenient for us to buy Canadian oil because of the easy transport. If you don't want our money, many other countries will be happy to take it.
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.
I've never heard them referred to as such. Also, the United States is a legal entity, an abstraction. It cannot speak, much less "refer" to anything using one particular phrase. That's a rather absurd anthropomorphization. The United States never says anything, and its people say a lot of different things, often contradictory.
In any case, aside from a few confused individuals, most people I know of understand that oil is a global market, so the question of where the oil is located has little to do with anyone's energy situation. Domestic oil is only more valuable in that extracting it and transporting it creates and supports local jobs. It has no impact on the price you pay for the finished product, that goes to whoever will pay the most for it, anywhere on Earth that can be reached by a tanker.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This is a common discussion, but fortunately in the oil industry it won't happen for a long time.
The oil industry is notoriously slow-moving. The executives do not like new tech. New tech is untested, unproven. That means risky, and risky means both lawsuits and lost production time. Then, once the executives finally sign off on it and it gets built, the roughnecks simply don't use it, especially with automatic systems. Why automate something they've been doing well enough for decades, they say. I've watched a worker switch off a million-dollar heave compensator (adjusts crane speed based on ocean wave motion, so a bobbing ship can smoothly lay a load onto the still seafloor) because "the computer don't know what it's doin'."
Other professions might lose out to automation. But the oil industry roughnecks will be working for a long time yet.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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
This has more to do with truck drivers of all stripes than it does with the oil industry.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Large belted conveyor?
> Also, the United States is a legal entity, an abstraction. It cannot speak, much less "refer" to anything using one particular phrase. That's a rather absurd anthropomorphization.
But its corporations are people.
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.
For about the last two or three decades, as more and more jobs and manufacturing have moved offshore, I've asked people: what will you do for that large swath of the population who used to work for Ford, or Whirlpool, or General Electric, and who now are literally unemployable?
Forty or fifty years ago "ordinary" people could take a job at the local factory, make enough to support a family and buy a house, and know that after 35 years they would have a good pension to retire on.
When I say "ordinary" I mean the people who won't ever go to university, who will never become computer programmers or doctors, and who surely aren't about to be "entrepreneurs." The people who used to be called "working stiffs" or "blue collar workers."
Once the blue collar jobs are gone, what do you do with these people - say a quarter of your population? Wal-mart jobs? Call centers? Waving pizza signs on street corners?
Three Squirrels
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.
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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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?
Fortunately, humans always want more goods and services. If 100% of existing goods and services were provided by robot, we could still have full employment providing more.
I believe eventually we'll all have jobs providing consulting services to one another on which of all this free stuff made by robots would please us most. And the sexbots aren't going to program themselves, you know.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
However, socially this means reduction in employment, and reduction in wages paid for others.
People have been believed this nonsense for so long that there is a term for it: The Lump of Labor Fallacy. If automation actually caused impoverishment (as you claim) then Europe, America and Japan would be starving, and Ethiopia and Afghanistan would be the envy of the world.
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."
Soylent Green?
These are the people that the elites, like Bush the Elected, have been observed to call "useless eaters". Many of the decent service jobs, such as truck driver, newspaper reporter, radio disk jockey, cashier, and the like, are also going away. I don't know what my nephews and nieces kids are going to do for a living.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Durkk a durrrr!
some karma... and kinda lukewarm about it.
Forty or fifty years ago "ordinary" people could take a job at the local factory, make enough to support a family and buy a house, ...
Forty of fifty years ago, median wages (adjusted for inflation) were lower, labor force participation rates were significantly less, the median house was 30% smaller than today, and that house was much less likely to be owned by the person that lives in it. Your nostalgia for "the good old days" isn't supported by the facts.
Once the blue collar jobs are gone, what do you do with these people
Most manufacturing jobs are already gone, and since total labor force participation has gone UP, it is clear that these people have already found other jobs.
Careful now... last time you declared war on Canada, your White House was burned to the ground.
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in dealing with that male inferiority complex that leads
to an irresistable urge to drive around in a hummer.
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.
If you don't want our money, many other countries will be happy to take it.
No longer true, to be honest. People (read countries) still take it, but they're no longer happy about it. In fact a lot of them are planning to move away from it. The biggest customer for US Treasuries is the US Federal Reserve nowadays . Go figure.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In Quebec we prefer salt and vinegar on fries.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You're spot on there.
I'm sure there's the correlation between elimination of (relatively) decent-waged manufacturing jobs and the increasing number of people who work two jobs, two income households, etc is an anomaly.
What happens to our consumer driven economy when a large swatch of consumers can't afford to consume?
It will me MUCH longer for these autonomous trucks to show up on public highways than private quarries and oil fields with no humans within a mile.
This is a common discussion, but fortunately in the oil industry it won't happen for a long time. The oil industry is notoriously slow-moving. The executives do not like new tech. New tech is untested, unproven.
When I was a kid in the 80s I remember reading about how many of the advancements in deepwater production or seismic imaging then common in the fossil fuel industry would have been considered science fiction in the 50s. It's always been my (admittedly casual) observation that the FF business is more cutting edge in testing out new techniques than many other sectors of industry - perhaps not as much as the computer sector, much more so than the automotive.
This doesn't really apply to on the ground occupations like roughnecks as it'll be ages before we can deploy bots that can climb gantries etc.
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.
Care to name a US military initiative which didn't take significantly longer then planned, and cost a lot more then what congress was told?
That is assuming congress was told in advance as US laws requires approval form congress before declaring war.
I really don't think it makes much sense. The entire idea of an autonomous haul truck is that it can change immediately to a different location, different material, loaded a different way. And if you've ever worked on a large mining site or construction that can happen multiple times in a single shift. Now I would think some sort of rail or ore car system would work in certain situations, but I can't imagine even with a team of genius computer programmers, the they could program these trucks as if they had a driver. Point a to point B okay, but there is no way they could program fast enough to the ever changing situations that a haul truck encounters every day.
Replaced by jobs in the low paying service sector. So while labour force participation has increased somewhat, real US household incomes have remained almost stationary for the bottom 80% of US workers.
Nope. Along with the grade and other factors, rail or conveyor are not as flexible as trucks. The locations from which they dig change too rapidly as they move through the mine site to set up a fixed conveyance.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah, keep reiterating that tired lie until you actually start to believe it. Please post a link to any Supreme Court case which makes this statement true and quote the relevant sections.
real US household incomes have remained almost stationary for the bottom 80% of US workers.
Baloney. Over the last fifty years, real (adjusted for inflation) median (50% level) incomes have gone up by 60%. Much of that gain was in the 1960s and 1970s, but even if you look at the last thirty years, people at the bottom have done better than inflation figures suggest. This is because inflation has been more severe for services than for goods. Rich people spend mostly on services, and poor people spend mostly on goods. So inflation has less effect on the purchasing power of the poor.
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.
I dont know how many times that has been repeated but i'm not sure its true.
How come "median wages adjusted for inflation" in 2011 are at the same level as 1995?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/17/the-typical-american-family-makes-less-than-it-did-in-1989/
While you are correct, unemployment/labour force numbers look good its the quality of the work/pay that is not (mostly low paying service industry jobs).
Citation?
Most charts do not show this, for example: http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median%20Household%20Income.pdf
The reason for the price difference between the US and Canada is due to taxes.
/gallon and FULL SERVICE only a few years ago
This sums things up nicely: http://retail.petro-canada.ca/en/fuelsavings/2139.aspx
Take your $3.20 a gallon price and tax it to the level Canada does and see what you would pay.
PS.
I remember filling my car in NJ in the low $2's
Perhaps they are referring to Poutine?
Good stuff, but something best eaten occasionally.
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.
I don't think Grenada took too long to finish up. Don't know what the cost was, either projected or actual.
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.
So you managed to link to a piece that states what you said, and the Supreme Court case that is based on.
Please finish the other part of the request, and actually quote the line "corporations are people" from that court decision.
Having just downloaded it, and searched for all instances of the word "people", I see nothing that says "corporations are people".
Please point it out, quoting the paragraph, and noting the page number for us.
Thanks.
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.
Might have been cheaper to try to buy it, and no one would have died/been injured.
But then we wouldn't have gotten a great movie out of it.
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.
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.
You can thank the environmentalists for driving the factories out with laws intentionally designed to give the middle finger to business. With laughs and high-fives all around every time a factory closed and Americans were put out of work.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
...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.
Citation?
Most charts do not show this, for example: http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median%20Household%20Income.pdf
You need to get your eyes checked. Your own link shows real (inflation adjusted) income increasing from $24k to $40k over fifty years, which is a 66% gain.
Careful now... last time you declared war on Canada, your White House was burned to the ground.
Actually, the last time we tried to declare war on "Canada", they got scared and split the Oregon Territory rather than fight... Also, technically, both times were with the UK, not Canada, but if float the Canadian ego ;^)
Perhaps they are referring to Poutine? Good stuff, but something best eaten occasionally.
Poutine is fries with cheese curds and gravy. Most restaurants will have salt, pepper, and ketchup at the table. A significant portion of those will also have vinegar. You almost always have to ask for mayo.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Wages as a proportion of GDP are much lower than they used to be. House sizes are irrelevant, and only really in America, yet the trend for mass unemployement and low wages is common across the developed world.
So set up mobile conveyance. Put your conveyors on wheels, and reposition them as needed.
So the tar sands are not the job makers they were saying they'd be?
Poutine is overrated marketed crap and is not standard fare - except for tourists.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So the pink line which moved from 24 to 35 from 1960 to 1965 then remains flat, and actually dropped in the 1980's?
So you know, I am with you on this, but our OP may have his head befuddled but certain news centers and are talented in twists separate bits into a new meme. Perhaps he/she was refering to this source. However you slice it, it is old, it is not true, and it is a reflection of how far down the road to fascism the US has gone.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
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.
Yee Haw! If we jest had more uh that good old poloooshun we'd all be stinkin' rich!!
Three Squirrels
That is all the encouragement I need. Let's do this.
The citizens united decision explains in totally unambiguous terms that corporations have the same right as people with regards to speech. Read it.
Remember I was responding to:
> Also, the United States is a legal entity, an abstraction. It cannot speak, much less "refer" to anything using one particular phrase. That's a rather absurd anthropomorphization.
and my response was that anthropomorphizing is ok when it concerns corporations, at least when they are granted the speech rights that the constitution safeguards for humans to oppose tyranny. I took a shortcut. Here:
"In the context of this same ability to speak, its corporations are people."
No, but thanks for trying and failing,
Citizens United said that a group of Citizens who form a corporation for the purpose of pooling their money (as required by federal law) in order to make political speech cannot be prevented from using that money to make political speech.
It also pointed out the hypocrisy of someone like Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow complaining about corporations like Citizens United or Rolls Royce being allowed to make political speech when they are (were at the time) being paid by a corporation that directly competes with Rolls Royce in one business area to make political speech.
You could have just said you didn't read it. There's a link right up there, and it's not very long...
"Austin had held that political speech may be banned based on the speaker’s corporate identity."
"Austin is overruled"
Read the whole thing. Corporations are equal to people when it comes to freedom of political speech.