The Avatar Movie and the Mining of Oil Sands

The Oil Drum | The Avatar Movie and the Mining of Oil Sands: "The movie Avatar gets the mining bit wrong. And not by just a little – but then us villains are rarely understood, so what should we expect? OK so what is a popular, nay perhaps even genre changing movie got to do with technical talks about fossil fuel production? Well, fairly early in the movie it is made clear that the sole purpose for the plot is to mine “unobtainium” which is a mineral with all sorts of value. Now I’m not going to give away much of what goes on in this movie (and I agree with most of that review by the way) but the fallacy over how they mine the deposits on the planet is one of the lessons learned from the mining of the oil sands in Alberta, which is actually what I want to discuss a little today. In the movie they use a variation on a bucket wheel excavator – which in today’s world looks like this:"