Boring Company has started work on an 29km tunnel in Chicago from downtown to the airport. Successfully completing the airport tunnel will make the tunneling company worth as much as $16B. This valuation will be before any full speed hyperloop implementation. If Boring Company succeeds in lowering the cost of tunneling by 10-100x then they will enable high-speed transportation to be used inside and between cities. This would not only mean capturing most of the existing tunnel and infrastructure projects but increasing the tunneling projects by 100x.

2021-12-17: New tunneling methods are being tried. They’re currently about as fast as Prufrock, the Boring machine (which does 10 m / hour)

Petra, a 3-year-old startup is developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. A mix of gas and heat above 1000 degrees Celsius breaks rock into small pieces. Sensors attached to small rods touch the rock, but the excavation is carried out by the heat and gas. Petra is testing its tunnel-drilling method in a Minnesota quarry on Sioux Quartzite, 8x tougher than most forms of concrete. In the test, Petra says its method is moving through rock at 12 m / hour. Once the rock is broken into tiny pieces, a vacuum is used to suck rock fragments out of the hole.

• Uncategorized