I thought that this week we would expand the horizon of these talks a little, and talk about the general philosophy of breaking rock, since the extraction of fossil fuel requires more than just the drilling of holes. I’m going to give a couple of further examples of the benefits of breaking rock out into big bits, and then I’ll describe some of the more exotic methods that have been tried.

For those who are just passing through, on Sundays I post on some technical aspect of the extraction of fossil fuels, so that those of us that are concerned about their future declining production can understand some of the issues that are involved in extraction. One can find a list of recent posts by clicking on "Tech Talk" at the top of the Oil Drum entry screen, or by clicking on this link tech talk. The last post was on Energy Costs in Drilling, which was meant to leave you with the conclusion that the bigger (in general) you can break the rock out in pieces, then the more efficient it will be. So let me give a couple of examples of this. The first is in mining blocks of limestone in Indiana, and the second quarrying granite (perhaps for Paradise) in Sardinia.

In both cases there is a market for the large pieces that are produced, and thus the alternate advantages of just drilling lots of holes, partially filling them with explosive, and then breaking the rock out into a lot of small pieces is offset by the sales price of the end product. So say you wanted to mine these large pieces, you could take an extra-large chain saw, and cut a set of horizontal slices into the face of the rock at the end of the tunnel.