The next revolution in tunnel construction!
The claim by the company that it only uses "clean" (whatever that is) renewable energy is probably the Achilles heel and it may well also question the low operating costs.
"Most tunnels dug today are made by massive, mechanical rotary boring machines, which scratch cutting wheels against rock and evacuate the debris behind them, lining the tunnel walls as they go. It's painstakingly slow, hugely expensive, and the cutting heads and drill bits often need changing or maintenance. ...
But its intellectual property takes a spallation boring robot like Petra's to the next level, placing multiple 27,000 °C (48,600 °F) plasma torches onto large discs held out in front of a "Rapid Burrowing Robot (RBR)." The torches are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, starting from the center and widening out until they cover the full diameter of the bore.
Where Petra's thermal drilling robot moves its head around to widen its hole, the RBR will fire on all torches at once, and rotate the torch-bearing discs to ensure full coverage, blasting the rock backward and collecting it into small pushcarts, each connected along the cable supplying electricity to the drill rig."
From the company's website:
"Using plasma created from electricity & airflow, plumes of up to 27,000 degrees Celsius bores at speeds of 1 km per day by vaporizing & spallation (breaking the rock into little bits). We bore deep enough (~3 to 30m below the surface) to avoid the 'spaghetti' of other utilities already in the ground.
We are so much less expensive due to far lower operating costs (no need to change out drill bits & cutter heads multiple times daily, much lower energy consumption, robotics = far fewer workers, no drilling mud and/or drilling chemicals to dispose of, easier spoils removal, sale of our spoils for road & concrete manufacturing, etc.)
The process uses no fossil fuels or combustion, and the electricity is sourced from 100% clean renewable energy. Our 2 business models are:
BADASS - Boring And Drilling As a Simple Service for customers who want to own their tunnels and/or
BOOM - Build Own Operate & Maintain for customers who prefer to simply sign a long-term lease or tolling agreement covering the commodities flowing thru our tunnels (EarthGrid PBC covers 100% of all costs of development, construction, operation, etc.) ..."
Earthgrid says it's developing a plasma boring robot that can dig underground tunnels 100x faster and up to 98% cheaper than existing tech, and it plans to use it to start re-wiring America's energy, internet and utilities grids.
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