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Comment by sfink | Hacker News Reader

Dumb question: is there any use for this for horizontal drilling? I'm imagining scaling up the size of the drill head to the size of a car-carrying bore hole, vaporizing the rock (or whatever gets in your way) and using some of it to recondense into tunnel liner, and blowing out the rest of the ash either back out the whole tunnel or via vertical(ish) vent tubes drilled periodically from the tunnel roof up.

Though maybe the tunnel liner part is too much of a stretch. It sounds like the vaporized rock wants to turn to ash. I don't know if there's a way of concentrating the once-solid parts and keeping it hot enough while routing it to the tunnel wall. It just seems like a cool set of problems to solve, resulting in a self-contained (minus the energy source) burrowing drill that can create arbitrarily long stone tunnels underneath (non-volcanic) land.

DIY lava tubes!

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The oil&gas industry makes heavy use of horizontal drilling already. Say you own land with a nice pocket of $$$ buried beneath, but you refuse them to put a well on your property. That's when they turn to horizontal drilling.

Infamously stated as "if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, but I have a straw that reaches your milkshake, then I have all the milkshake".

Modern laws are generally onto this, and if caught (a big if) bad things happen. This is also why oil and gas companies buy mineral rights anywhere they might be interested in - it lets them take your oil without worrying about it.

Of course not everyone lives where law is caught up to this, but it is a big deal and so most places where it matters the courts know what is up.

More like if they buy your mineral rights they now own your oil and have the right to extract it.

But it does allow you to consolidate the equipment and access roads on a large piece of land because you could, for instance, run a road across the narrow dimension of the property and run the wells horizontally along the wider dimension.

I originally started to include about mineral rights, but took it out. If you own the mineral rights and this happens to you, then yes it becomes a case of stealing/theft (whichever is more accurate in legalese). If you don't own the rights and the rights owner allows for that $$$ to be extracted, horizontal drilling is exactly how they'll get to it.

Yes, the quote chosen did lead the meaning to stealing as that's how it was used in the movie. I have just always liked that quote. It didn't occur to me until your post how it changes the intent of the entire comment.

They can drill horizontally subsea too!

I think OP was asking whether this specific technology could be used for horizontal drilling.

I don't think TBMs (tunnel boring machines) have the same problems as mechanical deep-well drills. For instance, you can replace worn components of a TBM without extracting the entire mechanism from 100s of meters of earth. Whereas vaporizing a 10-meter wide tunnel would require an insane amount of energy. Plus you'd have to deal with the slag trying to flow back toward your equipment.

It sounds like by default the slag is in the form of ash. That's actually the main advantage I was thinking of; current long tunnels require mixing it with water to make muck and transporting it all the way back out. I don't know if they ever lift it out via vertical or angled dumping tubes? Seems like a pain. And then getting the muck out interferes with getting the tunnel lining in. The muck is far from homogeneous, so it's difficult to deal with.

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