Suncor’s fleet-wide collision avoidance & fatigue management program making progress

In the conference call for its Q3 2022 results, Kris Smith, Interim President & Chief Executive Officer of oil sands giant Suncor Energy Inc, said that work continues across the company to improve safety and operational excellence, with a particular focus on its mining and tailings operations. “My priority has been to remove distractions from the organisation and to focus our employees on safe, reliable operations and our biggest opportunities.”

A big part of that is mining equipment fleet safety, following a fatality at its Base plant mining operations on January 6, 2022 when one heavy haul truck rear-ended a second heavy haul truck while they were both driving up a mine haul ramp. This has resulted in an accelerated collision avoidance and fatigue management deployment across all of its mine mobile equipment.

Smith said that industry leading technologies for collision awareness are being deployed on over 1,000 pieces of mobile mine equipment across its operating assets to mitigate a key risk in its mining operations. It is one of the most extensive rollouts of CAS ever in mining and the company confirmed to IM that its technology partner is Hexagon, which supplies the HxGN MineProtect Collision Avoidance System, now on Version 10.

Smith adds: “I’m pleased to say this initiative is progressing well, and two-thirds of Syncrude’s Aurora mine equipment will be outfitted by year end, and installations on the remaining equipment at Aurora are expected to be completed by January 2023, nearly two months ahead of schedule.”

Deployment schedules for the remaining mines are on plan, with Syncrude’s Mildred Lake Mine and Fort Hills going live in mid-2023 and Suncor’s Base Mine being complete by the end of next year. “As well, our fatigue management system installation, as discussed in previous calls, will be completed across all mines by early 2023 and is already fully installed and functioning at Syncrude’s Mildred Lake and Aurora mines. This technology has so far demonstrated the potential to reduce fatigue related events by up to 80%.”

The company is also progressing with its autonomous haulage system (AHS) rollout, working closely with SMS Equipment, the Komatsu dealer for the region, and using Komatsu’s FrontRunner technology. The accompanying investor presentation detailed the deployment schedule which shows North Steepbank mine’s AHS as being fully deployed on 30 trucks [930E]; Fort Hills [980E] mine deployment having begun Q4 2020 and having reached 50 trucks [plus Millennium deployment set to proceed between 2023 and 2025 on about 100 trucks [930E and 980E].