Next-Gen Drill Rigs for Underground Mining

Humanity needs more metal extracted in the next 25 years than the past 70,000 combined⟴, requiring improving today’s underground mining economics, reducing the cost per discovery, and decreasing the time it takes to go from discovery to production. A core issue across all these is drill speed and its labor costs.


We are building next generation drilling rigs for underground mines with 10-30x drill speeds, spectroscopy for real time orebody mapping so blast engineers can skip low concentration zones, and directional pre-fracturing while drilling so less explosives cleanly break intended rock planes and prevent subterranean structural damage. With this new modality of drilling we want to out-perform $100K-1M product lines like Sandvik’s, whose mining division generates $12B/year revenue. We're starting small with just 6-100m drills to build revenue today, so we can develop the core technology to go kilometers underground for a future in deep hard rock in situ mining.

Example of 'stope' being drilled and blasted, collapsing rock into lower draw tunnels.

While block caving is popular around the world for its cost effectiveness, large sink holes that devistate the landscape are left behind. North America's mining industry, restricted to low-disturbance underground mining, does stope mining, a technique of precisely blasting and filling sections of subterrean rock. But while U.S. mines rely on this laborious method, 50% of U.S. mining engineers are expected to retire in the next 5 years⟴ (the US only graduates ~200 students/year). While industrial policy is turning the tide, from the government financing MP Material's expansion⟴, setting price floors for commodities, and invoking the Defense Production Act⟴ to cut permitting timelines from years to days, automation will need to close the gap. Unlike other automation attempts, we're starting at the drill head not the drivers seat.

Milestones

Chapter 1: Building the Manufacturing Base

Developmental, Long Hole, and Exploratory Drill Rigs

When we set out to solve drilling challenges at 2-5km depths for geothermally enhanced in situ leaching, we found our concept could be complementary to underground drilling rigs that only need to go 6-10 meters. While drill rigs seem like a saturated field, we believe similar ideas are being used secretively used by enhanced geothermal companies⟴ that are approaching 300 ft/hr rate of penetrations. By miniaturizing drilling, reservoir stimulation instruments, and taking advantage of directional drilling, we can gain an unfair advantage at the rock face while providing mining teams real time data about the ore body across the operation, whether that’s constructing tunnels or blasting stopes. Or in other words, while competitors focus on automating driving (table stakes), we’re turning every drill into a diagnostic tool that helps daily/weekly mining planning.

Our beachhead rig will be a $100,000 developmental drill rig that automatically drills smooth blast patterns for underground mine tunnel advancement. Our drill heads will drill faster, with less wear, get consistent depths on each hole despite rock characteristic changes, and even will pre-fracture rock between drill holes so less explosives can be used to more cleanly clear the rock face. All while building a real-time spatial model of rock and ore composition. An integrated approach is how we achieve multiple improvements over than $100-250K Sandvik rigs.

After proving the effectiveness of our new drilling modality, we will be ready to challenge $300K-$1M longhole drill rigs for stope blasting using the same tech. A fast, self-correcting, analytical drill bit can change the planning and economics of the entire mining operation. Compact underground tunnels restrict the mechanism for driving a drill rod, requiring percusive hammering that's drifts off target once it hits 50-100 meters. Our drills will be more compact, can reach 100-200+ meters without drift, and can have smaller sized holes optimal for blasting. Additionally, as drills characterize the ore body, a drill team can choose to skip low concentration zones, saving downstream processing costs. A drill rig with these capability changes underground mining economics and planning. Subsequently, we can use the same technology to build exploration drill rigs that go beyond 1,000 meters, helping mines plan operations and discover neighboring and deeper ore bodies to expand to.

Chapter 2: Joint Ventures as Mining Operator

Underground Precision Mining & In Situ Leaching

With a directionally controllabe drill that has realtime feedback about the ore interactions, we believe we can become the most economical narrow vein extraction operator, especially for contexts of rare metals, platinum group metals, and rare earth elements.

US Critical Minerals recently found extremely high concentrations of rare earth elements (REE) in hydrothermal vein formations that cannot be extracted using conventional open pit mining techniques⟴. Simultaneously, precious metals like gold also have concentrations found in hard rock hydrothermal veins. We’re seeing this business model pioneered by Novamera⟴, but with conventional drilling and fracturing tools. Initial experiments show that our drill and downhole instrumentation will have multiple advantages, such as increasing porosity for leaching, dropping out metal from the ore, and working across a 2D rock plane rather than just the surrounding rock of a drilled hole. We believe this capability could be valuable for many of the same mines that we could already be selling our development and long hole drill rigs to.

Finally, with our experience, fast penetrating 1km+ drill explorations, spectroscopy, rock fracturing instrumentation, and ultimately rock processing, we can push into the frontier of in situ leaching. We want to steer high temperature geothermal fluids in and around ore bodies to change permeability like what occurs around volcanic zones. If we have successfully dropped the cost of drilling and can create precise well networks, drawing parallels from enhanced geothermal techniques, it may be possible to make ultra-deep mining economically viable by utilizing the earth's currents and heat.

Questions You May Have

What makes you think you can compete with existing manufacturers?


Companies like Sandvik are focused on high dollar surface drill rigs⟴, and would have to re-engineer their drill head, drill string, on-board hardware, the rig's power systems, etc. to accomplish the integration required. Preliminary experiments have been done with an industrial partner who we are looking to have as an initial investor and we will be collaborating with Columbia University and national labs on our instrumentation and permeability enhancement.


Aren't you better positioned to be an enhanced geothermal company?


Fervo's success does come down to their ability to directionally drill fast and at a low cost, which is a capability we are also developing. But we want to develop fracturing and reservoir technologies specifically for deep in situ leaching, becoming the only viable developer for deposits like the largest lithium deposit in the world found 5km underground in Western Maine.

Asks & Next Steps

We are looking to speak with:

We're also seeking angel investments from those connected to mining, industrial manufacturing, machine learning, scientific instrumentation, and robotics.

Who We Are

We are a pair of self-taught builders whose work has been funded by Y-Combinator and the Dept. of Energy's ARPA-E. We have worked across electrochemistry, high temperature ceramics, synthetic biology, machine learning, and power electronics. We are building tools to harness the thermochemical potential of the Earth itself.

Reach us at founders@mithras.industries