"Fort McMurray, Alberta" a Edmonton Travel Page by Darby2

Fort McMurray lies in the northeast region of Alberta on the mighty Athabasca River. It's major industry is oil, extracted from the vast Athabasca tar sands which contain more oil than all of the oil fields of the Middle East. Current population is more than 40,000 and growing very fast.

To extract the oil from the tar sands, some of the largest machines built by man are used to move the bitumen from the mine sites to the huge extraction plants operated by Suncor and Syncrude.
Huge draglines with buckets of 150 cubic meters and booms of 400' work round the clock to remove the overburden. Enormous 3200 horsepower trucks capable of hauling 350 tons move the material to the plants. The current production is more than 400,000 barrels /day which represents about 12% of Alberta's total crude oil production.

The picture shows one of the huge trucks and also one of the 4 giant 300' long coke ovens being transported to the Suncor plant in the winter of 2000.
Photo courtesy of Komatsu, other photos by the author.

Syncrude, in conjunction with Caterpillar has developed the 797 which is capable of hauling up to 380 tons and more. When fully loaded, this truck weighs 40% more than a 747 Jumbo jet!

Typical of the huge draglines operating in Fort McMurray's Oilsands operations.

Photo courtesy of B-E

Photo courtesy B_E
Notice the size of the pickup truck and the bulldozer in the bottom of the picture to give a sense of scale.

More pics of the coke drums in transport.

This is a photo of one of the gigantic coke ovens being transported to Fort McMurray from Edmonton in the winter of 2000. Some of the bridges over which the loads passed had to be reinforced to carry the huge loads, of which there were 4 like this.

Each vessel is 110 meters long, 10 meters in diameter, and weighs 416 Tonnes. The trailer units have a total of 320 wheels! Special hydraulic levelers were designed to keep the load stable as it went around banked corners and curves in the highway. Average speed was about 10 km/hr

With 2 tractors pushing and 2 more pulling it took more than 10 days for the 500 km trip.
These photos were taken near Two Hills.