Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on February 18, 2017
Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots
The local mining industry often justifies the tax breaks and incentives it receives on the basis it employs people in the mines (they usually claim to be a major employer but there seems to be little truth to that, employing around 1% of the workforce). MIT Technology Review notes that increasing automation of mine sites, which is going to drive the “cashed up bogan” of the mining boom into extinction – Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots.
Each of these trucks is the size of a small two-story house. None has a driver or anyone else on board.Mining company Rio Tinto has 73 of these titans hauling iron ore 24 hours a day at four mines in Australia’s Mars-red northwest corner. At this one, known as West Angelas, the vehicles work alongside robotic rock drilling rigs. The company is also upgrading the locomotives that haul ore hundreds of miles to port—the upgrades will allow the trains to drive themselves, and be loaded and unloaded automatically.
Rio Tinto intends its automated operations in Australia to preview a more efficient future for all of its mines—one that will also reduce the need for human miners. The rising capabilities and falling costs of robotics technology are allowing mining and oil companies to reimagine the dirty, dangerous business of getting resources out of the ground.
BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining company, is also deploying driverless trucks and drills on iron ore mines in Australia. Suncor, Canada’s largest oil company, has begun testing driverless trucks on oil sands fields in Alberta.
14 Comments on "Mining 24 Hours a Day with Robots"
Davy on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 6:35 am
This is a delusion not because it can’t be done but because of the reasons it is being done. Our civilization is on a path to self-destruction. On all levels this is true. This is a multidimensional and in ascending levels of abstraction. What does that mean? It means everywhere you look the corruption of meaning has occurred. Truth is now relative and value is now for value’s sake.
We are closing in on our end. This is global and this is a process with acceleration. It has momentum and is unstoppable. Once corruption has metastasized it is over. This is a process and it is part of a greater process that ensures our end as modern man. This end may not be the skydaddy fantasy of a rapture or a sci-fi thriller of a mad max. It will be an end of modern man as we know it with his journey back into a dark ages of decline. That greater process is the destruction of a planetary system and the limits that represents. This is the cycle of nature and there is no transcendence. This is what life does when it becomes intelligent and then delusional. When fantasy becomes reality we are lost.
Don’t be fooled by this articles techno optimism. Look at the pictures of the rape and pillage of the earth and for what? Steel to build more cars to rape and pillage. If this where a coal mine it would be for energy to waste on being absurd. Playing video games or surfing the net for porn is absurd when one considers how fragile survival is. This is a vicious circle of deceit and the deceit is in our hearts. We are corrupted as a species and now will pay the price. This is our doing. We are to blame. Yet, at another level this is just life and no one is to blame. Only you as an individual can leave this insanity but only partially. There is no escaping a civilization self-destructing in a destroyed planetary system.
bug on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 6:35 am
The new president will not allow this, workers here will use spades and picks and
Wheelbarrows to get it done. And carry their lunches in little lunchboxes exclusively made in the US.
Cloggie on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 6:49 am
The more you mine and the more you apply recycling the less mining you are going to need in the future.
24 hours robots doing the mining?
Here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0vwogI1S0I
At some point world population numbers will stabilize and decline, possible in an apocalyptic manner. But the cumulative mining effort of the past will result in a situation that if you need iron for instance, you can pick it up from the planet’s surface and the need to mine underground will gradually disappear.
sunweb on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 7:14 am
well said, Davy. Hubris, arrogance and myopia because we are special. We are heads above the web of life.
Cloggie on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 7:58 am
Beautiful words of collapse Davy, but placed right under a picture of giant mining robots.
The topic is “24h mining robots”.
They apparently exist, like it or not.
Sissyfuss on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 9:24 am
If a robotic truck is mining mindlessly and there are no humans left to hear it, does it make a sound?
onlooker on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 9:28 am
Well said Davy. This is a profound and utter collapse of civilization and a diminishment of the life sustaining capabilities of Earth. It is hard to grasp what at this time 7.4 billion rapacious human-primates are doing to the planet but suffice to say they are reducing its vitality on all fronts. The sirens call of techno-optimism is seductive even more now, as any sensible person now can perceive that decline and crash is closing in. Some can face the reality, others ignore it. The irony is that dramatic collapse is so close now that even those best prepared are not assured anything
Cloggie on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 9:44 am
If a robotic truck is mining mindlessly and there are no humans left to hear it, does it make a sound?
If you install a webcam on the terrain and per remote button press start the engine of a mining monster, you will guaranteed seeing birds flying away, in a stimulus-response manner.
I leave to you as an exercise to answer your own, somewhat philosophical-epistemological question.
Cloggie on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 9:52 am
The trucks shown aren’t really mining robots, but more like yet another implementation of the driverless car idea, a “pipe dream” according to some here.
Here is a real mining robot, the largest in the world, albeit operated/overseen by one man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE9w-QRx3Fw
(Gatzweiler/Germany, 50 miles East from where I live)
GregT on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 10:36 am
The cancer has metastasized.
Jerry McManus on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 11:35 am
Hey, look at it this way, if all the “jobs” are roboticized out of existence it will finally force the issue of what to do with the surplus population.
Which, in the case of our current winner-take-all regime probably means tossing them out on the street to fend for themselves, or die trying, like packs of feral animals.
It’s either that or take Bill Gates’ advice and engineer a virus to kill them all off in one go.
Which in our current deep-state regime probably means talking some dumb “terrorist” into doing it for us.
Anonymous on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 1:27 pm
What an idea, let’s just fire everyone. Think of all the money we’ll save….
Well, I guess the robot designers will still have jobs. At least until they replace them with robots as well. Then we’ll be all set.
curlyq3 on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 4:01 pm
Hello Davy, the “cycle of nature” indeed. It is in fact the only function that is ever occurring in the physical universe. When resources no longer support a given process it will slow down or stop altogether. The fusion reaction that occurs in our sun will eventually stop due to depletion of the atomic materials that sustain it.
curlyq3
dooma on Sat, 18th Feb 2017 11:52 pm
“Don’t be fooled by this articles techno optimism” I think this article does a fine job of painting a bleak future for a low-skilled workerless future.
You know, all of the workers that are going to make the industrialised world great again.