Tag Archives: industrial

Elephant in the room alert!…

Did you notice how at the Nazarovsky open-pit mine we saw zero… coal? Like, we visited this massive coal-mining operation, but didn’t see a single chunk of the black stuff?! What?!

Here’s the deal. The insanely massive mechanism that moves sandy rock from one spot to another was the main attraction – by far. So much so that that’s where all our tour time went – gawping at it, mouths agape! But not to worry, for next up was another open-pit mine – Beryozovsky – where we finally got up close and personal with actual coal ->

The mining here works a bit differently because the layer of non-coal-containing rock (called “overburden”) is thinner – plus there’s way more coal: the coal seam here is up to 60 meters thick:

Read on…

Still back in July, still back in Krasnoyarsk Krai, next up on our tour of our dear heavy-industrial customers’ operations (after the Vostochny Gold Mine, the Boguchany Aluminum Smelting Plant, and the Boguchany Dam) – another two industrial giants – the Nazárovsky and Beryózovsky coal mines, which both belong to Siberian Coal Energy Company (SUEK). And just like at the other industrial facilities in Krasnoyarsk Krai, the way we were welcomed was as if we were royalty!

// I say royalty – but only… tee-totaling royalty! At every industrial site in Russia that I’ve visited over the past 10–15 years, a no-alcohol rule is strictly enforced – even for visitors. At every entrance (and exit (!)), employees/ workers/ miners all take a breathalyzer test; if the result‘s positive – immediate dismissal. Apparently, way back when this rule first came in (some time in last century), there was initial resistance: “Come on, how can we work without Alexey? He’s a drunkard, sure – but he’s still a master of his trade”. But no: other – sober – Alexeys were found to replace drunk Alexeys. So yes, back to our welcome: it was grand, but there was nothing stronger than fruit juice on the tables!

But enough of the industrial-site sobriety – let me show you the photos. They’re mixed in from both mines. Just to whet your appetite…

Photo 1, Nazarovsky:

Photo 2, Beryozovsky:

Here we go!…

Read on…

In yesterday’s post, I told you all about the operations at the Boguchany Aluminum Plant and its herculean appetite for electricity. I mentioned hydroelectric power in passing yesterday too – and not without good reason: for it’s this that satisfies this appetite at the aluminum plant. So off we popped, next door, to the Boguchany (hydroelectric) Dam…

And here she is – the beaut:

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Ok – you’ve had the gold post. Now for a post about another metal. But first – let me back up on the gold topic before segueing to today’s metal…

Two questions…

1. How much gold has humanity extracted in all of history?

2. How much gold‘s left in the Earth’s crust?

I’ll answer :)…

1. If we trust this source, the total amount of gold ever mined in the world is about 216,000 tons (with two-thirds of it mined after 1950!). All of it would fit into a cube measuring 22x22x22 meters. Basically, that’s about the size of a skinny six or seven-story cube-shaped building. Not that much really. And if you rolled all that precious metal into a ball, you’d get a sphere with a diameter of over 26 meters.

2. As for what remains, the numbers vary wildly. From 40,000 to 80,000 tons could still be dug up. But what happens after that? Well, obviously, we’d have to start bringing gold from the Moon, Mars, and Venus – if that’s even possible. But can you imagine how much that would cost?

So that’s the deal with gold. There’s not much left, and the price just keeps going up. Time to move on to another metal – and the industrial systems used to make it…

Here’s a 90%-automated industrial system, where, under the constant watch of digital telemetry and automatic “iron hands”, rectangular containers filled with gray liquid metal move along a conveyor belt. The liquid solidifies, the solidified bars are shaken out, stacked, and packaged by those same iron hands. And you could watch this process forever. So – what’s the metal?…

…Aluminum!

// Thus – we’ve jumped from box 79 (gold: Au) to 13 (aluminum: Al). in the periodic table.

Read on…

Hi folks!

Been a while, yes, but – you know: August! :). Meanwhile – rewind: back to July…

I’ve said this many times, but I’ll say it again: practically all industrial facilities – quarries and mines, power plants and factories, trucks and ships – are permeated through and through with all kinds of cyber-technologies. Indeed, the only non-digitized operation I’ve seen in the last 10 years or so is… the production of coconut oil in Fiji! :).

And since the prefix “cyber-” is, alas, increasingly more often followed by “-incident”, the combination of “cyber + security” is also becoming increasingly popular and in-demand – including at industrial facilities. It’s for this very reason we work closely with a wide variety of manufacturing companies. Over the years, such partnerships have become more and more based on trust – and with that comes our being invited to visit production sites to see how things actually work. And that’s what happened on our July trip to Krasnoyarsk (which I gave a brief summary of in my last post a month ago): We express our appreciation of and respect for our clients, and at the same time satisfy our own curiosity. After all, it truly is very, very interesting to see up close different lesser-known aspects of just how this world really ticks! Not on a TV screen sat in the office or on the couch at home – but in person and live: from a front-row seat and with full immersion, so to speak.

In just three days we managed to visit a whole five sites – the first of which was the Vostochny (“Eastern”) open-pit mine, where the company Polyus (pronounced pOl-yoos) mines gold. And since this quarry is one of the deepest in the world (more precisely, the second deepest – after the US’s Bingham Canyon Mine), it was doubly interesting to see this man-made wonder with our own eyes:

This is what the mine looks like from up above:

An impressive structure!

Read on…

Saint Petersburg walkabout – done.

Saint Petersburg roof-about – done.

Next up, Port Bronka (here) – the new, modern (i.e., deep enough for modern monster-sized ships) port of the city (not to be confused with the nearby older Great Port of St. Petersburg), which happens to be a customer of ours (for all things cybersecurity, naturally) and with which we have a great relationship…

Read on…

Curiously, in the comments at the bottom of my Instagram post about my visit to Orenburg, a dear reader suggested we visit her nearby hometown of Gui (pronounced Guy; not Gay). Another commenter stated something along the lines of, “What? That hole?!” To which the original commenter retorted, ~”actually, yes – it is a hole, kinda, since it has the deepest hole mine in the whole of Europe!” This interaction was all the more amusing to me since I was reading it… in Gui!…

We flew to Gui (incidentally, a +1 to my list of cities in the world visited) by helicopter. Perfect. In the car we would have missed the fantastic aerial-panoramic views of the vast steppe, and it’d have taken us four hours…

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Norilsk walkabout – done. Norilsk borsch – supped, and already yearning for more.

Next up – an inspection of the industrial-technological processes upon which the city of Norilsk grew, and which still produces a broad spectrum of the elements from the periodic table.

Nornickel was kind enough to show us practically the whole process of the production of copper: extraction > fine crushing > preparation > smelting > electrolysis > dispatching. All that, coming up in this post…

First up for us – safety talk, down there on the ground floor (next to that pond in which carp swim!) ->

Read on…

The other week I found myself at Innoprom-2022 – the industrial exhibition in Yekaterinburg. I’d been twice before – in 2017 and 2021 – and, come this year, I can now say that it’s progressed well.

I was there for just one day, and was as busy as a bee – as per the template. Still – I did manage to find the time to take a few pics of some of the more intriguing stands and exhibits…

But, first – it wasn’t the exhibits or stands that impressed most of all. Can you guess what did? Have a look at the following photo. Got it?…

Masks no longer needed. Hurray! Away with you, maddening muzzles! Yes, the virus has weakened, immunity has risen, and the situation is (seemingly, mostly) under control. Let’s hope it stays that way. And I’m sure it will. After all, mega-awful mutants tend to visit us every ~50 years: there was the Spanish flu in 1918–1920, then the Hong Kong flu in 1968–1970, and then of course corona in 2020–2021 (yes, there’ve been other virus pandemics, but they came and went much less noticeably). Anyway, no matter: the latest semi-centennial pandemic – done and dusted!

Right. Next thing to impress? Actually – it wasn’t impress, it was more depress. Just look at these lines to get into the event! Folks had to wait sometimes over an hour. Nope. Sorry: organizers – get a grip. This won’t do at all. Sort it. // I was lucky: as a speaker I entered through a designated door without having to wait.

Once inside – first thing’s first: head over to our stand, where I had my first meeting scheduled. And here we are! ->

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Ten years is a long time in cybersecurity. If we could have seen a decade into the future in 2011 just how far cybersecurity technologies have come on by 2022 – I’m sure no one would have believed it. Including me! Paradigms, theories, practices, products (anti-virus – what’s that?:) – everything’s been transformed and progressed beyond recognition.

At the same time, no matter how far we’ve progressed – and despite the hollow promises of artificial intelligence miracles and assorted other quasi-cybersecurity hype – today we’re still faced with the same, classic problems we had 10 years ago in industrial cybersecurity:

How to protect data from non-friendly eyes and having unsanctioned changes made to it, all the while preserving the continuity of business processes?

Indeed, protecting confidentiality, integrity and accessibility still make up the daily toil of most all cybersecurity professionals.

No matter where it goes, ‘digital’ always takes with it the same few fundamental problems. ANd ‘go’ digital will – always – because the advantages of digitalization are so obvious. Even such seemingly conservative fields like industrial machine building, oil refining, transportation or energy have been heavily digitalized for years already. All well and good, but is it all secure?

With digital, the effectiveness of business grows in leaps and bounds. On the other hand, all that is digital can be – and is – hacked, and there are a great many examples of this in the industrial field. There’s a great temptation to fully embrace all things digital – to reap all its benefits; however, it needs to be done in a way that isn’t agonizingly painful (read – with business processes getting interrupted). And this is where our new(ish) special painkiller can help – our KISG 100 (Kaspersky IoT Secure Gateway).

This tiny box (RRP – a little over €1000) is installed between industrial equipment (further – ‘machinery’) and the server that receives various signals from this equipment. The data in these signals varies – on productivity, system failures, resource usage, levels of vibration, measurements of CO₂/NO_x emissions, and a whole load of others – and it’s all needed to get the overall picture of the production process and to be able to then take well-informed, reasoned business decisions.

As you can see, the box is small, but it sure is powerful too. One crucial functionality is that it only allows ‘permitted’ data to be transferred. It also allows data transmission strictly in just one direction. Thus, KISG 100 can intercept a whole hodge-podge of attacks: man-in-the-middle, man-in-the-cloud, DDoS attacks, and many more of the internet-based threats that just keep on coming at us in these ‘roaring’ digital times.

Read on…