#918: Mal Carroll: Syncrude Celebrates 20 Years for Hydro Transport

It’s 20 years since Syncrude introduced hydro transport to its oil sands operation.

This replaced an arduous system of tumblers and conveyor belts to move ore from the mine pit to the processing plant.

With hydro transport, the ore is mixed with hot water and pumped down a pipeline for several kilometers.

Mal Carrol is Syncrude’s General Manager of Research and Development.

MAL CARROLL: Hydro transport was originally conceived here at Research in the back of our facility using some very small buckets and water.   And it was then scaled up to, I’ll call it about a garage scale pilot test.  From there we built a pilot on our site.  And this pilot was where we were able to hone the technology and continually sort of develop the pots and pans needed to do this efficiently and reliably

Mal Carroll says the adoption of hydro transport significantly reduced operational and energy costs.