Elon Musk : The Boring Company — What about it?
Elon Musk took to Twitter today to announce his tunnel-boring company: ”The Boring Company — Boring, it’s what we do”. While we are still trying to figure out if it’s a joke or not, it would actually be fun to consider the actual potential of such a venture. It actually has implications for EVs, Mars and possibly Tesla entering geothermal energy.
Elon has been talking a lot about tunnels in the past. Since California is prone to major traffic congestions in the cities he probably experiences it all the time, and being Elon means that you always find solutions to problems. He has spoken about it in the past on several occasions and have used it as a better solution for transportation in 3D than flying cars. Here is a good article from Electrek mentioning what he has said in the past:
Let’s actually consider what it would be like arrive at a big city like say London, if there were 30 stories of tunnels instead of single streets: You’d arrive just at the outskirts of the city area with your (ride-shared) electric autonomous car, drive down in a tunnel and start the intracity travel for your shopping experience at Harrods. All other cars are electric in the tunnel, so there is no need for huge filters for toxic gases in the tunnel and since cars are autonomous and safe and there are enough levels to never have any congestion, the car would travel at 150 km/h (90 mph). That would take you from Chelsea to Big Ben in about 2 minutes, instead of the 20 that it takes to drive when there is no traffic according to Google Maps. Then you would approach Harrods, the car would take you to the topmost level, serving as a drop-off and pick-up level for all people travelling. The mall would have a fancy underground entrance where people were dropped-off by their cars, which then drove off to serve new passengers. You would visit the mall and then enter the streets. Instead of having vehicles on those streets, you would have smiling people walking because cars would be separated from people. Pedestrians would never be hit by cars, as cars on the first underground level would just roll slowly for entry and exit into vehicles.
Okay, that sounds like a nice scenario! But could it be possible to create a tunnel company and make it successful, in order to fund drilling at such scale? Are there any innovative competitors to worry about that would stop Musk and use drilling technology for something else? Most likely not. In Sweden there is something called the Swedish Mining & Tunneling Group (SMTG), which is a collaboration of 33 companies that together claim to be “a global leader in underground technology”. That sounds like the space industry, organizations with dozens of contractors trying to collaborate. Musk has gone up against that before and seems to be outcompeting them fully. Everyone wants to work at SpaceX, few are probably as passionate about ULA. All those industrial Swedish companies are companies that flourished after WWII, when industrial Sweden was one of few places in Europe to not have been bombed, some are trying to reinvent themselves, but Elon’s old colleague Peter Thiel would not have anything against Elon trying to reach monopoly in the tunnel-business. In Sweden all major tunnel projects for the last decades have been severely delayed and now at a construction project for a train station renovation in Stockholm, a tweet went viral that “Elon Musk wants to send humans to Mars by 2024, that’s one year before, Stockholm municipality expects “Slussen” to be finished”. It would probably be good to avoid bureaucracy in tunnel drilling and doing stuff the Silicon Valley-way.
Musk should also have interest in drilling and creating tunnel boring machines for his plans for Mars. SpaceX and Musk haven’t really discussed what we’ll do when we get there and instead use their transportation technology to signal to entrepreneurs and members of Zubrin’s Mars Society to create the technologies necessary to live at the surface of Mars. Most ideas include boring into the Martian soil to create underground habitats protecting human Martians from radiation. Someone needs to be good at drilling holes by then, so why don’t do it himself. Besides if a Muskian company is created to drill holes, then it will be cool to work with drilling and then talent will be drawn to that area, just like into cars and space as of recently.
We should also consider what else use Elon could have of drilling holes. Tunnels for Hyperloops would be something he would want to improve but also avoid, but what if Tesla went into another form of renewable energy? Tesla’s goal is to “Accelerate the advent of sustainable energy” within both production and consumption. Geothermal energy is an energy source that means that a liquid with a temperature below the freezing point of water is pumped down in a hole up to a few hundred meters down in the rock foundation, then the underground water down there heated indirectly by the sun, heats the liquid a few degrees, then up at the surface a heat pump enhances that effect and 3–4 times as much energy as was used for the pump and heat pump is delivered to the building. That’s a great way to heat buildings, but it requires a quite complex system with a room full of pipes and systems, just like battery rooms used to look until Tesla released their energy storage products. Perhaps one-day Tesla will release a geothermal product that is as simple and elegant as their batteries, and then it would be useful to be good at boring holes as well, even though these small holes are much simpler. If he doesn’t, hopefully someone else does that because we need mass-scale adoption of geothermal energy all across the world.
So Elon Musk that first got all those comparions to Steve Jobs, which he hated, was then more compared to God and now when he builds stuff all the time, maybe it’s time to compare him to Bob the Builder. Can we fix it? Yes we can!