Extreme Excavators

The bucket-wheel excavator is a continuous excavation machine capable of removing up to 12,000 cubic metres of material per hour.
BWEs are used most often in coal mining in Europe, Australia, and India. There is also one in use at the Athabasca Coal Sands project in Alberta.



These huge machines, possibly the largest moving machines on earth, can weigh 11,000 tonnes and stand more than 100 meters tall, with a length of about 200 meters.
They move on huge sets of crawlers, and can mine more than 240,000 m3 of material per day. These machines take 5 years to build.