Petra, a three-year-old startup, says it’s developing tech to cut through rock without grinding into it. Using this tech, Petra wants to make tunneling through bedrock cheap enough to encourage utilities to bury electricity and other lines underground.
US government researchers imagined digging through rock with a nuclear-powered tunneling machine. They thought this machinery could change the world by traveling through the Earth’s upper mantle like a submarine moves through water, influencing national security and potentially allowing people to control earthquakes and volcanoes. More than a decade earlier, experiments by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory had led to the creation of a rock-melting drill.
that run-ins with underground utility lines cost $61 billion annually in the US alone and present increasing risks to public safety. Petra CEO Kim Abrams says the company hopes to reduce the cost of burying utility lines by 50 to 80 percent, making it a viable option. She declines to share details about the mixture of gas and heat, calling it proprietary.
“It's like nothing I've ever seen before,” Goodfellow says. “There's been talk about things like nuclear-powered tunnel-boring machines and contactless tunneling and stuff like that, but it's just been talking prototypes. As far as I know, these are the first people that are trying to really, genuinely commercialize it.”
Utilities employ a variety of methods to put power or cable lines underground. On city streets, it’s typically done using a saw with a giant blade to cut through asphalt or concrete. In less crowded places, dynamite or other explosives blast away rock, or excavators break rock into smaller pieces.
“It’s only a growing industry for us,” says Matthew Izzard, executive director of the North American Society for Trenchless Technology, a group focused on underground infrastructure projects in Canada, Mexico, and the US. “I’m pretty optimistic about the infrastructure industry and for trenchless technology, in particular.”
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