Materials and Reliability in Oil Sands Program

Mining Equipment

Oilsands surface mining equipment operates in extremely harsh conditions where rapid wear and high equipment failure rates result in high maintenance costs, unexpected failures, and expensive process bottlenecks.

Operators have identified several focus areas where the impacts are most significant. These areas include electric rope shovel ground engaging tools (GETs), dozer and grader GETs, dozer undercarriages, rope shovel cables, and haul truck tires. To prioritize efforts, this portfolio will focus on electric rope shovel ground engaging tools (GETs) and haul truck tires. These components are singled out due to their high impact on the value chain, the high rate of wear and high cost of replacements. Improvements to the wear and reliability will reduce maintenance costs and, in some cases, prevent the need for an increase in equipment fleet size to cover downtime.

Processing Equipment

Maintenance and repair within the Canadian mining sector is a $15 billion annual issue.  A major contributing factor is pervasive material wear throughout the surface mining industry from extraction to sizing and blending.  All such equipment is subject to abrasive, impact and erosive wear.  Wear has a detrimental effect on component durability and reliability due to material loss and equipment failure.

Equipment reliability issues associated with wear are particularly prevalent in the oil sands industry.  Surface mining can be used to recover approximately one fifth of the oil sands deposits in northern Alberta.  Approximately two tonnes of sand must be processed to produce one barrel of oil, with current production rates averaging at 1.4 million barrels per day.  This scale of production results in significant wear related issues, affecting equipment lifetime and reliability. The issues can be weather dependent with wear rates increasing in the winter due to the frozen ore. 

This portfolio focuses on the development and selection of manufacturing processes and materials to enable improved equipment reliability in aggressive wear conditions.  Technology areas include:

1. protective overlays and sintered materials, and
2. repair technologies and advanced manufacturing processes, e.g. WA-AM of large scale components.

Corrosion

An exceptionally aggressive type of corrosion has been the subject of investigation due to the extensive damage it is causing to water piping systems throughout oilsands operations. This phenomenon has demonstrated the ability to cause extensive damage through extreme pitting, and at the same time, create massive formations of corrosion products which can obstruct flow in pipes, or lead to damage downstream. Recently it has led to rapid failures on carbon steel piping as well as in welded stainless-steel fittings, even under mild operating conditions with near-neutral pH water. The causes of this type of corrosion have been so poorly understood that it has been attributed to anything from specific microbial colonies to flow regimes, water chemistry, temperature, and ground water fluctuations. This is extreme type of corrosion is known as tuberculation.

Common issues facing producers that are being addressed by this portfolio include:

1. understanding the corrosion mechanisms and the estimation of piping lifespan where tuberculation is occurring, and
2. flow effects and pressure drops due to tubercule build up and effective material selection and NDE technologies.

Robotics and Monitoring  

Oil sands mining and in-situ production assets are designed, operated, and maintained to achieve specified mission run times in order to achieve bitumen production targets and to allow for reliable operations. Both planned and unplanned asset outages due to excessive wear or failure can have serious consequences for the asset owner/operator. Asset outages can disrupt bitumen production, increase maintenance costs, and negatively impact the environment (e.g. process leaks).  Significant changes to operations (e.g. increased production) can affect asset reliability, maintenance, and total cost of ownership. Each producer addresses these challenges with risk management systems.

Asset inspection data, forecasting, and modelling are critical inputs into a producer’s risk management system. Each producer uses a risk management system to make decisions on how to control for asset damage, failure, and downtime. Manual inspections, sensors, other non-destructive testing (NDT) methods, and modelling are used on production-critical assets and components.

This portfolio will produce a roadmap of current technology-needs for NDT methods and process modeling in the oil sands mining industry. Project plans will then be initiated to address these high priority issues. The portfolio also includes hosting an annual workshop on slurry pump operations.

Advanced Materials

Mining equipment is subject to operation in aggressive conditions. The main wear mechanisms encountered when extracting oil sands are abrasion, impact and erosive wear. Abrasion is the most common form of wear, with rates being determined by factors such as sand angularity and applied load.. Impact-related damage to equipment can be caused by rocks and boulders in the deposits. During the winter months, the ore can freeze and consolidate, increasing the level of impact damage. The addition of hot water in hydrotransport operations creates wear-corrosion issues, with corrosive species acting to accelerate erosive wear rates.

These issues have led to the wide adoption of protective materials to increase component longevity and reliability. This portfolio evaluates new materials that can potentially offer step changes in performance for mining equipment. Technologies of interest include metallic alloys, composites, sintered carbides, ceramics, rubbers and polymers

MARIOS members receive many benefits, including: 

• Access to technical research in the four portfolios
• License-fee free use of technology developed in MARIOS to support members’ research and development
• Attendance at workshops
• Opportunity to present at semi-annual technical workshops
• Networking with oil sands mining companies and suppliers/manufacturing supply chain
• Access to training seminars and courses.

Producers

• Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
• Imperial Oil Resources Limited
• Suncor Energy Inc.

Government

• InnoTech Alberta Inc.  

Suppliers

• Apollo Clad
• Arctec Alloys
• BIT Service Company Ltd.
• Black Cat Blades Ltd.
• Bradken Canada Ltd.
• Canadian Innovative Materials Ltd.
• Canadian Wear Technologies
• Castolin Eutectic
• Corrosion & Abrasion (CASL)
• Demir Engineering
• ESAB
• ESCO Canada (WEIR Minerals)
• Exergy Solutions
• Filotech Electrodes
• Flint Corp.
• Fuller Industrial
• Good Earth Tools
• Haver & Boecker
• Heavy Equipment Repair