Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Oh, we've had more fuss over those ducks!” she said.
There had indeed been more fuss. The governments of Canada and Alberta had decided
to prosecute Syncrude for failing to repulse the ducks from the tailings pond. There would
be a not-guilty plea, and complaints from Syncrude that it was being unfairly prosecuted
for what amounted to a mistake but not a crime, and counter-complaints from environ-
mentalists that Syncrude was getting off easy. In the end, Syncrude would be found guilty
and fined $3 million—$1,868 Canadian for each duck. And if those sound like expensive
ducks, keep in mind that in 2009 Syncrude made $3 million in profit every single day.
We stepped down from the bus near the Syncrude plant—it hissed in the distance—to
visit a pair of retired mining machines. You needn't take the bus tour to see them, though,
as they are probably visible from space. I had never seen such machines. A dragline excav-
ator stood on the right; on the left, a bucket-wheel reclaimer.
These days, oil sands mining uses shovels and trucks in a setup that has a nice scoop-
and-haul simplicity to it. But this system is relatively recent. Previously, companies used a
system of draglines, bucket wheels, and conveyor belts. With a dragline excavator (a ma-
chine probably bigger than your house), a bucket-like shovel hanging on cables from a
soaring steel boom would gather up a bucketful of sand—and we're talking about a bucket-
ful the size of…the size of…hell, I don't know. What's bigger than an Escalade but smaller
than a bungalow?
Big,
okay? The dragline would swing around, using the huge reach of
the boom, and drop the sand behind it. It would then inch along the face of the mine, walk-
ing—actually
walking
—on gigantic, skid-like feet, repeating the process over and over,
leaving behind it a line of excavated sand called a
windrow.
Then the reclaimer would come in, turning its bucket wheel through the sand in the win-
drow, lifting it onto a conveyor belt on its back, which fed another conveyor belt, and an-
other, transporting the sand great distances out of the pit. There were once thirty kilomet-
ers' worth of conveyor belts operating in Syncrude's mine, and if you've ever tried to keep
a conveyor belt running during a harsh northern winter—who hasn't?—you've got an idea
of why they finally opted for the shovel-and-truck method.
To approach the bucket-wheel reclaimer was to slide into a gravity well of disbelief. It
was difficult even to understand its shape. It was longer than a football field, battleship
gray, its conveyor belt spine running aft on a bridge large enough to carry traffic. The
machine's shoulders were an irregular metal building several stories tall, overgrown with
struts and gangways and ductwork, hunched over a colossal set of tank treads. A vast, coun-
terweighted trunk soared over it all, thrusting forward a fat tunnel of trusses that finally
blossomed into the great steel sun of the bucket wheel.
The wheel itself was more than forty feet tall, with two dozen steel mouths gaping from
its rim, each worthy of a tyrannosaur, with teeth as large as human forearms. I stared up at
