Nei­ther Gold nor diamond..

Then what it is ? Before get­ting the answer.. one more ques­tion to you. Where does oil come from ? If the answer is “from the under­ground and no where else”  you are wrong ! It’s time to know about oil sands. [ Ellaam Crankx-aala varra venai :) ]

Megas­truc­tures is one of my favorite pro­grams in TV. I watched rang­ing from build­ing Hoover dam to devel­op­ing Palm island in Dubai. Pow­er­ful and live exam­ples for project man­age­ment [ Oho adhaan vishayamaa :) ].

yes.. Oil is extracted from sand in the form of a petro­leum type called Bitu­men. Sim­i­lar to oil wells, we do have oil mines majorly in Canada and Venezuela. The oil resources are mas­sive com­pared to other for­mats.. capa­ble of 3 times more than what Saudi Ara­bia has.

Canada sup­plies more oil and refined prod­ucts than Saudi Ara­bia. Way north in Canada, lies the Alberta forests across 100s of hectares, untouched.. till the time Syn­crude , an oil com­pany landed there. The mean­ing of Syn­crude is syn­thetic crude. Let me come out quickly by giv­ing a gist of the oil project.

- 10 Bil­lion Dol­lar oil project
– There are only 2 play­ers in the field Syn­crude and Shell
– 26000 hectares of mines used in the process
– 2 Tonnes of sand to get a sin­gle bar­rel of oil.

Why do they get into such a mas­sive n risky busi­ness invest­ing dol­lars and lives ? Energy cri­sis is the answer. Sooner or later, we’ll have this prob­lem. 20 years back, if any­one is asked to buy a water bot­tle for 15 or 20 Rs, would he bought ? Once we used to carry the “paalar” water from home­town and it hap­pens in the reverse now. We take water to my home­town — not because of the hygiene but because of the water scarcity. That’s a big­ger topic any­way like NPR os Alaska — another mys­te­ri­ous sub­ject to explore.

Any big­ger project fas­ci­nates us eas­ily. The thing that attracted me was the engi­neer­ing mar­vels in Mechanical/Civil. I was aston­ished by the size of the 250 Tonne truck. Weigh­ing equal to 747 jumbo truck, the big trucks are the back­bones of these sand mines. They engage a lady employee too for dri­ving this mas­sive truck. Dri­ving this truck would be the great­est chal­lenge for any great truck dri­vers. The way the real time project car­ried on is noth­ing com­pared to what we do.

Apart from the mas­sive engi­neer­ing won­ders and the breath tak­ing num­bers it plays in busi­ness, the indus­try has its down­side — pol­lu­tion. The forests are destruc­ted, recy­cles out the used toxic water back in the form of a river, cre­at­ing sul­phur pyra­mids and not least emit­ting enor­mous amount of pol­luted air releases. “No Pol­lu­tion.. No pro­duc­tion” is the slo­gan that comes out of any company.

The above thoughts are the out­come of watch­ing “BLACK GOLD” — an episode in “National Geographic“channel.

Happy watch­ing

:)

Toto.

Related Posts B

1. Few grams from the gold mine — part II.
2. Few grams from the gold mine III
3. Few grams from the gold mine
4. Few grams from the gold mine IV