Earthgrid aims to rewire the USA using super-cheap tunnel tech | Hacker News Reader

Earthgrid aims to rewire the USA using super-cheap tunnel tech

newatlas.com

79 pointsbookofjoe109 comments

> 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.

In a one meter diameter tunnel, or in this case, a long and really hot oven. 120MW are enough to turn a metric ton of most rock into magma every ten seconds.

In any case I guess Earthgrid will join the small club of companies and government programs who require extremely high temperature electronics. I'd also bet that these things will have limited sensors and give little feedback about what's actually happening in that tunnel. That or they'll need some fancy cooling idea or a pause until the tunnel cools down. Maybe the hot rock that is removed could be used to carry the heat away?

And that's just worrying about what the heat will do to your device. You'll also have to think about what it will do to the material you're tunneling through. Will the rock around you lose stability at higher temperature? Will water within the rock expand violently and collapse your tunnel? Will your device get stuck when everything around it turns into sticky goo? Will you set fire to whatever is close to your tunnel?

Finally, how do we actually get that much power? Certainly you cannot expect the local grid to supply that much. Maybe they could design and power it with a portable nuclear reactor? That's the same order of magnitude as a small one. Can't wait for the portable river technology that will make cooling all this possible.

I guess they could bring some 2,000KW diesel generators. They'll just need sixty of them. At around twenty four metric tons per unit and a combined consumption of 30,000 liters of diesel per hour that is going to be some interesting logistics.

> the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW

I don't understand why or in what way this is considered "100% renewable energy" "super-cheap tunnel tech".

Renewable here just means electricity powered, rather than oil or gas powered. It is assuming that the electricity is created from renewable sources

Would that not imply that all energy is renewable, given that you can make endless hydrogen by electrolyzing water with endless electricity? Then convert the hydrogen into your hydrocarbon of choice using the Sabatier process, and again endless electricity? Maybe I am projecting my own bias onto this, but there's something about endless electricity that does not imply renewable.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? If not, in common parlance "renewable" implies Solar / Wind / Hydro / Nuclear (this one depending on who you ask), while non-renewable = fossil fuels.

If you have a drilling machine powered by diesel it is impossible for that machine to be "fully renewable" in terms of its power source. If you have a drilling machine that is powered entirely by electricity then it can be 100% powered by renewables, but yes as GP pointed out "can be" doesn't mean "is", but still if you care about such things you should obviously prefer the fully electric solution.

You're right. I was just stunned at the 1.38 gigawatts for a "stage 3" system (including "mother rig" + "father rig") for just a 10-m (33-ft) tunnel.

1.38GW is insane. The APR-1400 pressurized water reactor outputs 1.4GW, but at this point you would have a huge nuclear power plant to just power a single tunneling operation.

You could, but it isn't efficient enough to compete economically with the plain old electricity in more direct forms?

So at 4-5 acres per MW for solar farms, each one of these will need around 500 acres of land covered in solar panels (almost a square mile), or about 10 of the largest wind turbines you can buy (a Haliade-X @ 13MW) - to be actually "renewable" powered. (Or 1/3rd of those numbers if you "only" want to run it at 40MW instead of the full 120)

That's "for a hole you can barely crawl through". The 10-m "stage 3" tunnel would consume 1.38 gigawatts per day per km, or 57,500 kwh per meter. By contrast, the energy consumption of a traditional Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) is about 356 kWh per meter [0], or 0.62% of the plasma boring robot. Let's get this in perspective, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona is the largest in the US with three reactors and a total capacity of just under 4 GW. Certainly not what I would characterize as "super-cheap tunnel tech".

[0] https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82422936.pdf

In the special case of tunneling in order to bury high voltage power cables, the power source for boring could be quite remote.

I know it's not this company's focus, but I wish we had coast-to-coast and Mexico-to-Canada tunnels for travel and defense. Just imagine having no street-level highways, and what that would means for animal migrations in more rural areas. Has me thinking of some iRobot scenes. :)

that’s not practical for cross-country travel, but it’s imminently possible in cities. think how much greener and human scale cities would be if all cars were underground, including parking.

Don't need to imagine. Just go to Oslo.

i was actually reading a bit about oslo the other day. i'd wanted to see maps and pictures of the underground roads/parking but the article i was reading didn't have any.

The US has a construction cost problem. The Big Dig cost $24B. East Side Access cost $12B. Gateway Program will cost $30B, and every time you blink the cost goes up. It’s a miracle we actually build anything.

yes, and it's dismaying to say the least. we also do high-speed rail to nowhere for political not civic aims. ~85% of californians live near the coast, and/or wants to visit the coast, and we put rail through the central valley. even worse, the service is not going to be cost/time competitive with flying, not only because of the route but also inflated real estate and construction costs lining the pockets of all the favored rentiers with hats in hand.

In other countries animal bridges connect habitats split by highways.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=animal+bridge&t=h_&iax=images&ia=i...

There are over 1,000 wildlife overpasses and underpasses in America as well: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/31/climate/wildl...

So that's enough for one national highway.

What about the others?

At this point we probably need coast-to-coast tunnels / pipelines for moving water around

Why? There is plenty of water in the west. It's just mismanaged by entrenched agrarian business interests.

20+ year drought, all reservoirs at record low levels does not indicate "plenty of water"

Sure the mismanaged water is a problem but I am not sure baring the use for "agrarian business interests" aka Food production, is the solution either.

What is your solution or idea of proper management? Only Potable uses?

Switching from flood based irrigation to spot watering. Selecting different crops than cotton for mattresses and pistachios or alfalfa and hay used for export. Farmers in the West use a lot of water because they can due to their water rights agreement, then they say "given this water allocation, what crop will maximize my return on my dollar" and they end up doing stuff like growing pistachios as a result because that's where the incentives have pushed them. Adjust the incentives and the crop choices and practices in the west will change. We don't need the cotton fit for mattresses or $10 bags of pistacios to feed us. The midwest alone produces plenty enough biomass for this country. Much of it there as well is exported elsewhere for individualized profit.

It puts the whole country at risk. Because the desert has almost a perpetual growing season, everywhere else is out of business or at least sustainable business.

Growing perpetually in a greenhouse setting is probably vastly more efficient than out in the desert where you are subject to constant losses to evaporation

> "given this water allocation, what crop will maximize my return on my dollar"

It has traditionally been "given this water allocation, if I don’t use it I will lose it so what thirsty crop can I grow to keep it" so they grow alfalfa and cotton in the desert.

Though, apparently, this has been changed recently to conserve water for the golf courses in the desert.

We probably have to rethink growing the thirstiest crops in a semi-arid environment.

It is indeed asinine IMO that we irrigate the southwest to grow alfalfa, almonds etc when those crops grow perfectly in the grade A farmland of Iowa, while Iowa is subsidized to grow mainly number 2 yellow corn for animal fodder. "Corn Subsidies in Iowa totaled $19.7 billion from 1995-2020" [0]. What is wrong with this picture?

[0] https://farm.ewg.org/progdetail.php?fips=19000&progcode=corn

> What is wrong with this picture?

The federal primary election system…

That would be too funny if it wasn't so true.

>What is wrong with this picture?

America's desire for cheap beef. It is what is for dinner after all.

Corn subsidies are specifically used to keep feed prices down, and thus beef prices down.

Food prices due to inflation are going to play a HUGE role in the midterms, agree or disagree you are not going to get any elected official to vote to increase the price of the hamburger.

Iowa finishing pigs were the largest class of livestock consuming corn, approximately 340 million bushels, which is about 16.6% of the Iowa corn crop, or 55% of all the corn fed to livestock in Iowa [0]. Iowa is the number one pork producing state in the U.S. raising nearly one-third of the nation's hogs, and the top state for pork exports [1]. In 2021, exports accounted for 29.4 percent of total U.S. pork and pork variety meat production [2].

[0] https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/air/article/id/6168/down...

[1] https://www.iowapork.org/news-from-the-iowa-pork-producers-a...

[2] https://www.porkcheckoff.org/markets/us-pork-exports/

I think the key word there is "in Iowa" these reports are about Corn use in the state, not about Corn Subsidies nationwide or even the over all use of Corn from Iowa in other states.

as you said Iowa has high pork production so it is obvious that would be the main use of Corn Feed IN Iowa, but that would not track to other states like say Texas where there is less pig and more Cow

I don’t think almond trees will grow in Iowa. I’m not an arborist though.

Pistachios certainly don't. They are desert trees native to Iran.

Nuts that can be grown in Iowa include black walnuts, Persian (so-called “English”) walnuts, heartnuts, pecans and other hickory nuts, hazels, almonds, chestnuts, and perhaps a few other minor species. [0]

[0] https://practicalfarmers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Tom-...

Almonds can be grown in Iowa, according to the document you cited, but in the next section (Which ones should I grow, or should I grow them all?) after your quote one finds:

"Almonds—Unreliable in bearing due to susceptibility to late frosts and numerous diseases"

So I would say no to commercial production of almonds on Iowa. The California central valley is probably the best place on Earth to grow almonds, so it's a good place to do that. The US needs to trade something for those Chinese goods. Deserts are good places to grow things, if you have the water, because the mentioned diseases are much less prone to develop and spread.

> Sure the mismanaged water is a problem but I am not sure baring the use for "agrarian business interests" aka Food production, is the solution either.

It really is though. They're using over 90% of the water in the state, so where else do you suggest cutting it from? Further, if you look into the state of California's water rights, you will come to understand that the problem is, in fact, a group of reactionary agri-barons who jealously protect their ability to freeload off the State's natural resources.

The U.S. is too bought into security theaterism for this to happen. The border especially the southern border should feel like a state border. Border towns already have probably half their commuters playing this stupid "heres my papers sir" fascist border crossing game to go work their retail job in El Paso or wherever. It's a performance for politics at the end of the day which means its not going away any time soon as long as it continues to have political utility. San diego transit would run into TJ if this world had any logic, but instead you exit the train from san diego a few feet from the border and have to cross by foot into tj, because security theater.

Meanwhile the cartel just reacts by opening more labs and grow operations stateside or digging tunnels themselves instead of having their business be at all affected by this security theater.

While I do understand 'security theater' and think we could do better, I have to wonder what it's like crossing from an EU country to a non-EU country. People abroad look at our border crossings and react strongly, but I think most of the time they're going from France to Germany (example).

I'd love to see tunnels like this for easy transit that doesn't waste surface area/acreage.

This would be great for vampires. Also incredibly expensive.

> but I wish we had coast-to-coast and Mexico-to-Canada tunnels

Like the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel?

https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

It would be great to have a global version of this for some extremely quick delivery of goods from the other side of the world. Obviously with a price to match.

I believed this thing existed for a non-trivial amount of time

Cold shower time: America does not have a problem building infrastructure. It has a problem maintaining it.

america also has a problem building

It can’t build it with any finite budget.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-cant-america-build-tra...

Though it can’t maintain a lot of it either, but it’s the unsexy suburbs it can’t maintain.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

More specifically, funding that maintenance.

Federal government is a complete political mess of warring factions, many of which see any public spending as heretical. Local governments can't deficit spend and constituents similarly allergic to tax increases.

Also, any interstate project is subject to a he-said she-said of who should pay for it.

See: DC Metro, the Gateway Tunnel

Tell that to the California high speed rail project. Or pretty much every other city's municipal heavy rail. Or municipal broadband.

Municipal broadband thrives where it's allowed to be built.

That's what happens with suburban sprawl that runs rampant in America. Property taxes in the majority of the country do not cover maintenance+replacement costs of infrastructure, relying on perpetual growth and debt to keep older roads and utilities from crumbling.

If cheap tunnels were possible, the cost of maintenance would also be hugely lower. "Maintaining" electrical lines at a given location looks a lot like tearing them down and replacing them.

Finally, the technology we need to build the long-overdue Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.

https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

What? I’m pretty sure the reason we don't have a nationwide power grid has nothing to do with "we don't have anywhere to put the wires!"

Meh. There are better technologies for cheap tunnel boring: https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4687637

> In its low-power state, with each torch consuming 500 kW, Helming estimates a total power draw of 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW.

40MW at low power. How in the world do they think they’re going to get that much power at a drill site and stay low cost?

For me, the keyword from the article was

> developing

meaning they haven't completed the tech yet. This is likely a marketing puff piece designed to drum up investment interest. I'll believe wild claims like

> 98% cheaper

once they actually happen.

I'm not even sure they could get that kind of power into the small tunnels they'd be making.

Seems to me, if they really can plasma cut rock it would be way easier to slice out sections and remove large chunks of solid rock. Or chop it into many smaller "bricks" and move those out.

Monster Cables

Receiving power from where? 40MW is the capacity of a medium sized wind farm. The larger tunnel configuration uses 1.38GW. That’s more than most large scale coal or nuclear plants.

Even if they could obtain the supply from a plant operator the cabling to get to the site of the tunnel cost a fortune

If you had pure copper conductors could you even get enough into a 1 meter space to conduct that much power?

If we're going to need high temperature superconductors and fusion power, this isn't the first thing I'd use it for.

(I can't deny the fun factor of this, though.)

An 1cm-ish thick copper cable can handle about a kiloAmp without melting. At 10kV you'd need 12 of them, so call it a 5cm thick bundle with some kind of cooling for the 1m tunnel that needs 120MW.

How will they cool the tunnel? That's for a 1 meter tunnel. If they're cooling it with air heated by 100 C, the airflow will have to be supersonic.

Hmm, liquid sodium, lead or molten salt cooling?

Edit: 40 MW is just 150 liters per second of water with a 80 °C temperature rise.

> 40 MW is just 150 liters per second of water with a 80 °C temperature rise.

That's already out of spec for even the highest rated fire hydrants, so you better hope you have a river handy.

It will also require big pipes to go into your tunnel since you will have to make do with low pressure pump(s) due to your pipes needing to be elastic.

"just"--that's the municipal water supply of a small town.

40MW isnt that much, water can do it (granted at a serious cost)

A truck full of batteries to act as a capacitor? Run it for x minutes, wait a while to recharge, go again. Alternately, being a truck mounted gas turbine generator and plenty of fuel.

Still probably not a great plan.

If built using a 'plasma cutters oriented in a fibonacci spiral' this thing will only be able to cut through conductive materials.

Additionally it will only be able to cut tunnels through material that don't require supporting walls.

Not to be cynical, but this is 100% never going to see the light of day.

Tunnels typically don't see the light of day...

lol

Based on a few minutes of Googling, I think you're thinking of a plasma cutter which creates a closed circuit through plasma, through a cut line in the conductive material, and back to the machine. This seems to be just torches which shoot out plasma at high temperature with no closed circuit required.

Awwww, don't spoil my idle apocalyptic speculation here.

I've been wondering about what will happen when one of these carves itself a several kilometre long tunnel with molten rock/glass walls, then burns through into a very large aquifer which fills up the last kilometre or so of well above boiling point temp tunnel and surrounding rock. The superheated steam carrying out the pulverised rock tailings and condensing into at least some water, would make _the best_ high pressure water/abrasive cutter ever! If you reckon jet fuel can't melt steel beams, wait until you see a plume of steam/water/tailings cutting 1m circular boreholes straight through reinforced concrete buildings and freeway overpasses!

Fun!

But presumably you'd be pumping out the heat somehow so the entirety of your power cabling and waste cart system doesn't need to be made of inconel or tungsten.

If half went into the ground somehow you'd need to boil about a tonne of water a second.

The entrance to the tunnel sounds like it'd be fun with high pressure steam coming out at 100s of km/h. At least until the tunnel got long enough to dissipate the heat and it becomes a river of boiling mud.

I wonder why they'd even need the carts.

Edit: Whoops, I accidentally some orders of magnitude. It's 'only' 50kg/s of steam.

Hm. I'm not sure if you'd end up with a geyser.

Assume a chimney fire first. It's like a square pipe with 20cm - 30cm side length and - depending on how active it is - 200 - 400 degrees in there. That's already a condition you cannot introduce water into, because if water flash-boils into steam, it can expand it's volume by a factor of up to 1700. This can cause the chimney to turn into pretty much a pipe bomb, with the additional bonus that it's going to distribute the fire previously contained inside the chimney all over the house.

And now we're talking about some much, much hotter situation (melting rock), pretty much contained (because that 1m hole isn't going to vent much) hitting ideally a large amount of water? That's not a geyser, that'll be a bomb. For example, one of the largest steam explosion in the US was caused by a pipe 0.61 meters in diameter with steam at 400 degrees C. It left some 4.5 meter crater.

My startup operates in the high temperature drilling electronics space.

It is hard to take this concept seriously.

Could you tell us more about why? I’m not in this field.

Well, the power requirements are just insane for one.

I don’t understand how you generate that kind of power without just straight up being more expensive than an HDD drilling rig, which is the type of rig that’s used to drill these sorts of notes today.

Drilling 1’ to 8’ “tunnels” underground is done every day for utilities. Check out the Horizontal Directional Drilling market. (We make tools for this industry as well)

Another thing that just sort of seems silly about their concept is the treads. You’d think it would look a lot more like other boring machines and have treads that contacted the cylindrical wall of the bore at 3 or 4 points to maximize traction.

I just googled "HDD drilling" and I have to say - if I did not know that this exists, I would not have believed that this can work. Impressive.

Ha! That's cool. Why would you have not believed that it could work?

I would have thought that the hole will just collapse onto the drill?!

No way you’ll just wash out the rubble!

And that there would be WAY too much friction to insert a long metal tube in the end. Also, that metal tube would need to bend while being pushed through?! That’s massive friction, impossible to overcome, I would have thought.

Honestly I still think that I have not yet fully understood how this works and I am missing parts of the picture. Because it still seems impossible.

Pressurized fluid is used to keep the hole or well from collapsing. The fluid equalizes the formation pressure and keeps the hole from collapsing. This is called "mud engineering," Yes, it's a real thing, look it up! :)

Steel is really surprisingly flexible. You can press on a 30 foot length of 6" steel in the middle and it will deflect a lot. Modern drill strings can make 90' turn in as little as 100' to 200' feet and still rotate.

Friction is an issue. Friction is combatted with lubricants in the fluid (mud) and devices that are called agitators. Basically big vibrating tools that break the friction with small physical movement.

The drilling industry may not be the hot thing but there is literally 175 years of continuous innovation, A/B testing, and incremental improvement at work here.

Check out this U-Zontal, this is an example of the shape of a well that a modern Oil and Gas well can drill.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/davidgibsonreports_gibsonrepo...

The ONLY things stopping the US from building are paranoid environmentalist concerns and NIMBYs (even in the middle of nowhere, a NIMBY will surely appear to complain at the planning meeting, possibly because they want more cash for their land).

I don't think putting infrastructure under the ground is going to magically make these factors go away.

There was just an article about this in the WSJ today [0]. Indeed “citizen voice” is an important role in excessive costs as well as other factors including environmental regulation, and short sighted politics that do not align well with mega-project planning.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/infrastructure-us-costly-explai...

In cases like this, I’d also include “the laws of physics” as naysayers with the NIMBYs and environmentalist paranoids.

Are there any videos of this in action? I would like to see how it deals with methane and water pockets. Is the device strong enough to deal with the compression and blow-back?

https://youtu.be/VRGufaph27E

Not exactly a video of a drill rig.

Well it says right there in the video : "100% Renewable Energy" => How?

I find it hilarious that in the stock footage of two "workers" in the tunnel the woman is wearing high heels LMAO

Also, if it passes through a seam of coal, it could set off another Centralia-like fire I'd think.

“ The total power draw in a "stage 3" system like this could get as high as 1.38 gigawatts”

New York City uses ~11MWh per day (i.e. a capacity of 458 MW). This means the above would amount to ~3x that usage. I don’t know much about this and may misunderstand something here, but this seems infeasibly high for a mobile system, no?

If your plan is to dig tunnels for energy grids, then it's sensible because you're going to start at the energy producers. We build power plants in the gigawatt range [1] regularly - they're only suborning 12% of that output.

The biggest challenge is going to be extending cabling, though presumably the "tunneling cable" just becomes the transmission line.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_power_statio...

The triad will soon be a quad, if it isn't already. Who's going to stop a self tunneling nuclear tipped train that diggs X km below the surface? It will soon be a time critical arms race. Detonationing several megaton warheads deep enough may only leak a tiny amount of fallout, but with catastrophic earthquakes that could tumble even skyscrapers. This technology could alter the equation significantly as there would be no risk of nuclear winter, even if an entire continent gets carpeted.

Slashdot tore this one apart a couple of days ago: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/07/21/2231228/earthgrid-a...

Vaporizing all the material to make a tunnel may be useful tech.

But calling that "entirely emissions-free drilling" is absurd.

Regarding the realism of this, I feel eerily reminded of projects for civil use of fission bombs in the 1950s.

Project Plowshare!

Atoms for Peace!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atoms_for_Peace

Wow is this a joke . Just because you use plasma the mass transport problem does not disappear if is gaseous you have potentially toxic fumes spewing everywhere. Also tunnels need to be reinforced to prevent collapse from pockets ... Also lose soil is a problem so is ground water

Maybe all that hot rock could be used to produce steam which would run turbines which would produce electricity, which would be again used to power these machines, or perhaps more simply just fed into the grid?

If this is real it should be able to revolutionize well drilling and maybe enable deep geothermal power just about anywhere.

Deep geothermal has very little to do with punching a hole in the ground and a lot more to do with the physics and chemistry problem of finding long life materials to use in the production equipment to make power extraction economical.

I was under the impression that drilling multi-km deep wells was still a very expensive proposition. Why would materials be a problem ? I wouldn't think the physical conditions would be more extreme than in, for example, a nuclear reactor.

Disclaimer: I’m not a materials scientist researching this problem.

My understanding is that the production casing doesn’t last quite as long as you’d want it to for long term electricity or heat generation and is a bigger cost consideration than the drilling.

Yes, drilling is still ridiculously expensive. The drilling rigs and equipment for geothermal likely run $300,000 per day of drilling, with it taking months to get anything done.

Someone should let Elon musks boring company know about this tech. It sounds really promising.

Also with the power and heat requirements this sounds like a good candidate for nuclear.

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