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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."
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.
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
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 dug up from a giant strip mine produces extremely low grade crude hard to process into gasoline. This is one reason that the main affect the keystone pipeline will have is to increase the cost of heating oil in the Midwest as the source of their heating oil is shipped out for export.. The second would be to increase the profits of the various energy companies, it is unlikely to provide any help to the average consumer and may, indeed, cost them money.
You're under the mistaken impression that a "ton" is a large unit. When it comes to oil, 2 tons is nothing. 2 tons, as stated above, is about a cubic meter of sand. 2 tons is about a quarter of a cubic meter of steel. 2 tons is...jeez, I can't even think of an example. 2 tons is just insignificant.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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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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.
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
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.
That is all the encouragement I need. Let's do this.