Intrac Product Training and Visit to a DX800LC-7 in an Estonian Oil Shale Mine

From 9-11th August 2022, Intrac, the Doosan dealer for the Baltics, organized product training in Estonia, for the full sales team at the company, from Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The training was hosted by Intrac Estonia and organized by Edmund Tanavots, Sales Manager for Intrac Estonia. The training was focused on giving attendees a full understanding of the features and benefits of Doosan’s latest Dash 7 product range.

Robin Den Reijer gave a presentation on both the compact and heavy wheel loader ranges with Stephane Dieu covering the excavator range including all the new compact, heavy and wheeled excavator models. (Stephane is also responsible for writing this excellent story about the trip.) The training was designed to be very interactive, as the Intrac sales team have an excellent knowledge of construction equipment, with many years of experience.

The last day was dedicated to a visit to a well known oil shale mine in the east of Estonia, where Intrac has sold two Doosan heavy excavators, a DX800LC-7 (4200 hours) and a DX490LC-7 (5300 hours). This customer is operating three 80 tonne class excavators, and the Doosan DX800LC-7 is burning 10 litres per hour less fuel than the competitor machines, for the same production output.

These savings really add up - after over 4000 operating hours, the DX800LC-7 has already saved the equivalent of 40,000 litres of fuel, a massive figure when you consider the actual price of the fuel. Compared to the two  excavators from another brand (PC700/800) being used, the DX800LC-7 uses 15€ less fuel per hour - the overall saving is already 60,000€ after only 4000 hours. After 10,000 hours, the saving will be equivalent to 150,000€.

Did you know that you can extract oil from stone?

Estonia discovered more than 100 years ago that the stone at the mine contained oil inside and from that time onwards started to extract it. The process to obtain the oil remains unchanged. First the stone is taken out, after around 8 m³ of overburden is removed, providing around 1 m³ of the precious oil shale.

To remove the overburden, different techniques are used. The first involves blasting and loading trucks with an 80 tonne excavator equipped with a 4 m³ bucket. Another uses a 50 tonne excavator equipped with a breaker and an 80 tonne excavator for loading trucks. The third method employs an 80 tonne excavator, equipped with a vibrating hydraulic ripper (Xcentric) and another 80 tonne excavator equipped with a bucket to load trucks.

After removing the overburden, the extraction of the oil shale starts, again using different techniques. These include direct use of an excavator to load a truck or using a surface miner to extract the precious material, crush it and load it into a truck at the same time.

The transformation process to produce oil from the stone begins with the stone being crushed and then loaded into a reactor unit, where it is heated to between 400 to 800 ^oC depending on the size. As well as oil, phenol is also removed from the stone. Overall, the process takes around 2 hours. Generally, a kg of stone can be 20 to 30% comprised of oil and the mine operator is moving around 10 million tonnes per year (combining the overburden and oil shale).

Doosan would like to thank all of the Intrac Estonia team for their warm hospitality and great organization of the training and the interesting visit to the oil shale mine.