At Face Slurrying: Advancing Tomorrow's Technology for Oil Sands Production

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The oil sands industry is witnessing many multi-billion dollar capital investments to either open up new mines or increase the scale of production existing mines and also introduce new technologies into the sector. The new technology combines large-capacity dump trucks, shovels and the hydrotransport techniques to extract new reserves from open pit operations. The capital and operating costs associated with current technology account for over 30% of the total production cost. As pits become deeper and production faces advance further away from processing plants, many dump trucks will be required to meet production targets as a result of long haulage distances. In the oil sands terrain, these long haulage distances will cause severe tire wear, frequent tire replacements, higher fleet maintenance and management problems resulting in high production cost. In addition to high the production costs, the need to reducethe emissions of carbon dioxide and other exhaust pollutants from diesel dump trucks warrants the use of more efficient, less costly and an environmentally-friendly technologies. A potential replacement technology is the "At Face Slurrying" (AFS) technology. This technology basically involves replacing the haulage trucks with a flexible pipeline system. The technology will be used to mine and transport oil sands slurry from production faces through a flexible pipeline system to link the existing hydrotransport system.