Automation can make remote mining sites viable

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 7:38

   backstage but there's some folks i talked to in the mining industry who mentioned you know like the the big issue with mining number one is just surveying like finding the the locations right is there an advantage to be created there because i know there's a couple startups that are trying to be really smart about selecting locations to get the targets out of the ground yeah and then the other one is like, well, can you go deep? Because pretty much anywhere on earth, You can get whatever you want if you're willing to go deep enough, but the cost is distance squared, right?

2. 8:06

   So the energy cost is like, how deep are you going to the second power? So it becomes, you know, geometrically more expensive to go deeper. But the deeper you go, the more you're able to kind of not worry about getting the right location. So does automation unlock that capacity? I mean, automation definitely does. I mean, also, it's like, man, does boring company have some good stuff going? Like, I hope we were like, we're doing the mining thing, like, and boring goes, makes, you know, some good tunnels for, for cars to do the thing.

3. 8:38

   But like, there's some kind of boring mechanism, automated tunneling to do some of this. But to be honest, there's, there's, you know, they have this, this thing is like rare earths. I don't know why they put plural rare earths, isn't it? Rares earth. I don't know. But the, but sorry, rare, rare, rare earth. Yeah. Yeah, but it's not rare. It's not uncommon minerals. Guys, it's not rare. It's what you have to do to the land is aggressive.

4. 9:06

   And what's rare is where are the places they'll let you do it that you can also sort of get people to. When you automate, you can go to a lot of places. Well, first is all the mines that exist are way more productive. And the second is you can then sort of justify going to places you wouldn't have been able to go before, because you don't have as much of a labor footprint or a safety issue or a whole bunch of other things that then become better.

5. 9:35

   So if it's inhospitable, if it's regulated, if it's like, I don't want to live there, it's the end of the earth. Yeah. You can send robots and have people monitoring them remotely. Yeah. And this is like a future that feels like a little bit like science fiction. Look, we're here in Austin.