Whenever I walk past a road repair crew laying down asphalt, I am taken back to my days working at Syncrude in the oilsands. The smell of the road tar is the same as the smell in the open pit mine. For three years that was my everyday experience. It’s the same as when I get a whiff of diesel fumes, it often reminds me of my days working underground. It seems that smell really can bring back memories, for me at least.
In Part 1 of this two part blog post I would like to share some stories from the early days of my career working in Fort McMurray.
Hopefully they will be interesting and help shed some light on what it can be like working in the mining industry. Syncrude provided my first job out of engineering university and hence will always be special to me.
In the early 1980’s Syncrude was producing about 90,000 barrels of oil a day by processing oilsand at a rate of 180,000 t/day, so it was a big mining operation.
The Engineer in Training Program
I started at Syncrude in the winter of 1980. At that time, the two main places hiring mining engineers were the oilsands in northern Alberta and the iron ore mines in northern Quebec / Labrador. A few mining graduates also went to work in Calgary in the conventional oil & gas industry, since they were looking for engineers and petroleum engineers were in scarcity.
At the time Syncrude had an excellent engineer-in-training program for new graduates. Every six months they would rotate engineers into different technical areas.
These areas could consist of: overburden stripping planning; overburden geotechnical; short range mine planning, mine geotechnical, industrial engineering, tailings planning, and tailings geotechnical. Long range planning tended to be left to the more senior people.
Probably about 15 mining / geological engineers were hired at the same time as me. We came from McGill, Queens, UBC, Laurentian, Univ of Alberta, and Nova Scotia. All of us were in the same boat, rotating through various departments for the first few years.
I ended up in four of the areas listed above; I don’t think anyone actually went through all of them. My first role was in Overburden Geotechnical department, where we had responsibility for waste dump stability, haulroad construction QA/QC, and dragline pad preparation. Each of these tasks required a lot of on the job learning for me.
A Fish Out of Water
At McGill, in the mining engineering program, we took some courses on rock mechanics, focusing on “rock”. The mines in eastern Canada were mainly hardrock mines so that was the learning priority. We leaned about joint mapping, stereonets, compressive and tensile strength testing and kinematic analysis.
Well, at Syncrude there was no rock. All geotechnical work here was based on soil mechanics, something we learned little of at university. Perhaps the civil engineers did more of this. Working in the oilsands, one had to learn about sands, silts, and clays, Atterberg limits, grain size curves, compaction methods, and limit equilibrium stability analysis.
I quickly realized that even after finishing university, the learning does not end. In fact, the real learning starts. Everything you do is now applied on the job site, not just submitted in a term paper for marks, so you better learn fast.
The following is one such learning experience.
A Powerline in Trouble
As mentioned above, my first role was in Overburden Geotechnical, where waste dump design, stability, and monitoring were part of my job responsibility. We already had about three out of pit dumps underway and a few inpit backfill dumps. The waste dumps were comprised of inter-mixed clay & sand built upon mainly clay foundations. That’s not the same as building rock dumps on rock foundations.
A few months on the job while on my daily site inspection route I noticed that, next to one of our waste dumps, the main 240 kV powerline coming to site was starting to lean over (see sketch). My first thought was “Fiddle sticks this isn’t good”. Gradual creep of the waste dump slope was starting to push on the power line. The guy wire anchors were holding tight but the base of the power poles were being moved.
I hurried back to the office to explain the situation to my supervisor and the issue quickly went up the chain of command. We jumped into action, first by relocating waste dumping activity to another area. Next, we started to investigate the cause to see if we could stop the creep. The dump did not actually fail catastrophically; it was just moving slowly. Generally, when slope creep starts, it is difficult to stop.
We drilled several hollow stem auger holes from the dump surface down into the foundation to see what was there. We installed a few slope indicators to see at what depth the sliding was occurring. These pinched off within a day or two, but at least we knew at what depth (about 20m down the hole).
Next we sampled that depth carefully, revealing that frozen muskeg layers were present. When we installed standpipe piezometers in these holes, we saw water flowing out of the top of the pipes. This means the foundation pore pressure is high, way too high.
We concluded that a few years prior the waste dump was built in winter when the muskeg was frozen. The dump insulated the muskeg from thawing and the frozen layer would not allow upward pore pressure dissipation from the dump surcharge. The clay foundation didn’t allow downward dissipation. The muskeg layer was acting like a water bed, floating the waste dump on top of it.
Every day one could see the power poles leaning a little bit more, so time was of the essence. We tried to implement foundation depressurization measures, but drilling angle holes in soft clay was problematic, and targeting the over-pressured zones was difficult. Management quickly made the decision to relocate a section of the powerline. Helicopters were brought in to help install a new powerline around this area. The entire exercise probably cost several million of dollars, but a major plant outage was avoided.
Welcome to the real world.
Not All Jobs Were Exciting
The one rotation that the engineers generally tried to avoid was Industrial Engineering. This is an area that looks at operational and cost efficiencies in the mine. It tends to focus on smaller details rather than the big picture mining operation. I had a 4 month stint in this department, which taught that me, that in life you don’t always get what you want. The IE projects would vary depending on the mine’s needs.
For example, one project I had was to monitor the performance of different brands and styles of conveyor idlers. We would track about 2,000 individual idlers; when they were installed on the conveyors; when they were removed, why they were removed (bearing failure, cover failure, something else).
The idea was to figure out which idler manufacturers were the best – important but not exciting work. If you liked statistics, this was a good job, although around 1981 we didn’t have Excel (or even Lotus 123) at that time (1982), so it was a manual process.
Another project was to try to improve the time efficiency of mine conveyor belt splicing operations. With steel cord belts, there are numerous steel cords in the interior of the belt that carry the tensile load. When it comes time to do a splice (to add in a new section of belt) each splice took about 2-3 days, which meant that mining area would be out of commission.
To splice, one must clean each steel cord individually then overlay the cords from the two belt section side by side, then cover the cords with rubber and vulcanize under heat and pressure. It all took lots of time. Naturally this time study project required spending long days out with the splice crews, watching them do this work while making notes on the actions and activities and durations. Important .. but less than exciting.
One good thing about this job was that the Industrial Engineering supervisor loved to use the expression “That’s politically explosive” for stuff that really wasn’t. That phrase made such an impression on me that I still try to use it today.
End of Part 1
Dragline mining of oilsand was never done before, so engineers were learning on the fly. Given the size of the operation, we could not afford to be wrong on the decisions made. It was an interesting, and also stressful, time for many.