In its Investor Day 2020 presentation delivered on November 19, Simon Younger, Imperial Oil Upstream SVP had some interesting updates on its strategy of innovation and modernisation acceleration across its operations. Notably the company has given its first update in a while on its autonomous mining truck project at its Kearl oil sands mine in the Athabasca oil sands region of northern Alberta.
It was the first operation globally to automate Caterpillar 797F 363 t ultraclass trucks, beginning with one truck in June 2018, then reached seven by the end of that year, and now says it has reached 22 and is aiming to have retrofitted 25 797F units by end-2020. This year it has also transitioned from using the autonomous trucks for waste haulage to actual oil sands haulage including dumping into the crusher.
By 2023 it is committed to automating the whole Kearl fleet which could be as many as 75 to 80 trucks, Rich Kruger, Imperial Oil’s then CEO said in an analyst call in 2019 (Brad Corson is the current CEO). The autonomous rollout at Kearl has been conducted in conjunction with Finning, the Caterpillar dealer for western Canada.
The company also said that the northern advance of the Kearl pit in the northwest part of the mine is being carried out “fully automated” though this refers to the trucks only as the loading tools are manned Cat 7495 rope shovels. It also said that unit expense savings with autonomous haulage at Kearl equate to around US$1/bbl (barrel) of oil, not insignificant when you consider Kearl’s daily capacity of 220,000 bbl. Younger said the trucks have been “setting multiple material movement records for us – this technology works at Kearl and is a big part of the operation’s future.”
Kearl is also set to be one of the first operations outside the Pilbara iron ore mining region in Australia to invest in robotic mine truck fuelling technology – a pilot is set for 2021 – and the presentation showed an image of the Robofuel system from SCOTT, who already have extensive experience in Australia of using this system to fuel AHS trucks at two Pilbara mines. This would also be the first mine worldwide to use Robofuel on 797 trucks. Imperial Oil says it will reduce 797 refuelling time from 18 minutes to 7 minutes.
