UK company hopes oilsands interest will help heavy-lifting blimp take off

Tuesday, 21 October 2008 18:06

Bill Graveland THE CANADIAN PRESS CALGARY - A giant airship the length of two football fields will be darkening the skies over northern Alberta’s oilsands if a British company can raise enough interest, but industry insiders are skeptical. The SkyCat 200 by Hybrid Air Vehicles in the United Kingdom is capable of carrying a payload of 200 tonnes. Its owners are hoping the $100-million aircraft can find buyers needing to transport construction supplies, large parts and pipe to the booming oilsands and other mining projects in the Canadian North.  “The idea with the oilsands is to provide them with a vehicle that is flexible and allows point-to-point delivery of very heavy modules, taking those off the road,” Gordon Taylor, the company’s director of sales and marketing said Wednesday. “You can fly over choke points. If you were to leave a factory in Montreal and fly directly to the oilsands, that means you don’t have to drive on the roads. You can do it faster, with a lot less fuel, and you don’t need transfer points.” Taylor suggested the airship could fly material produced in Quebec or Saskatchewan directly to a site and put it on the ground for installation. Costs of developing oil and gas projects and diamond and base metal mines in the Arctic have soared, while in the oilsands area around Fort McMurray huge pieces of heavy equipment often need to be transported through places where road access can be an issue throughout much of the year. The SkyCat resembles a blimp and combines aerodynamic and helium lift. The landing system is similar to a hovercraft. It is capable of travelling at a speed of 190 km/h and has a range of 5,100 kilometres. Taylor presented his idea to a number of oilsands companies in Calgary to see if he could drum up any interest. There has yet to be a SkyCat 200 actually produced, so a feasibility study would have to determine if the project could get off the ground. There were a number of skeptics in the crowd. “I think it’s the risk and nobody wants to be the first one out of the gate,” said Doug Giese, logistics manager for the OPTI Upgrader in the oilsands. “Why would I take the risk of shipping an integral piece of my $6-billion upgrader when the impact of something happening to it could result in a one- or two-year delay in the startup of our project?” John Vivian from Total E & P Canada said such technology has been talked about for years and he is still waiting to see it in operation. “Right now I don’t need this technology. I can see the potential of it but I don’t really need it right now,” said Vivian, supply chain manager for the Joslyn North mine project. “We’re looking five or six years ahead - not 20 years ahead - right now. It’s the people that need it that need to put the money forward,” said Vivian. There is already a competitor of sorts in the field of hybrid aircraft. In July, Calgary’s SkyHook International Inc. announced it is teaming up with Chicago-based Boeing Co. (NYSE:BA) to build the Jess Heavy Lifter to haul steel, huge trucks and other equipment in remote areas where ground transportation may not be an option. SkyHook’s rotorcraft looks like a blimp with four helicopter-like rotors underneath and will be able to lift a 40-tonne load slung from its belly, as well as carry it 300 kilometres without refuelling. Taylor doesn’t see SkyHook as a competitor. “Our vehicle is designed to be different. It’s more like a C-130 Hercules aircraft in concept. Theirs is more like a helicopter,” he said. “Different aircraft do different things and the SkyHook is more for heavy lifting.” Michelle Stirling, president of World SkyCat Western Canada, located in Ponoka, Alta., hopes her firm could act as a freight company using the SkyCat. She understands why the oilsands companies are a bit leery of doing things differently. “There are certain risks involved for them certainly in terms of transporting some of these big modules, which are years in design and production, so you would want to go by a more conventional method.” Taylor said it would take about three years to build the SkyCat 200.