Back to Work!!!
Back to Work!!!
I hope you’ve had (or are still having) a great break over the
festive season. It’s a wonderful time to be together with family and friends and for that well-earned rest and reflection.
However, as they say, no rest for the wicked, so at QER we’re back at work and straight into it.
This week we’ve been running our final trials with our ‘retort feed test unit’ (RFTU). We built the RFTU to help us test and modify the equipment we use to evenly feed the kerogen rich rock into the retort – our central production process.
It’s a good example of the level of meticulous effort required to develop new technology. The trials involve feeding the rock into the unit, then carefully sampling from across the bed. We also take photographs of the rock bed which are analyzed to help us understand how the different sized rock is distributed.
Once we’ve done that analysis, we carefully change one parameter – say the feed rate, or the shape of the feed bin, and do the sampling, measurements and analyses all over again.
I’m grateful to our engineers who carefully design and oversee the work, and to our staff who operate the unit patiently, systematically and safely.
The trials have gone very well to date and have helped us come up with some useful refinements. Analysis of the results will proceed over the next couple of months and will give us yet more data to help make our process as energy efficient and reliable as it possibly can be.
So…a busy, though rewarding start to the year for us at QER. To everyone in the local community, we hope your year gets off to a good start and that 2018 is a successful and enjoyable one for you.