Elon Musk wants to tunnel under Texas

Elon Musk wants to take his Texas adventure three-dimensional – in the air, on land and below the earth.

The California ex-pat appears interested in deploying his Boring Company to build experimental transit tunnels under part of the state, Bloomberg reported. His companies already build rockets and electric cars there.

Working out of Pflugerville, an Austin suburb of about 61,000 people, the Boring Company has filed permits for land it owns in Bastrop County, about 42 miles away. Both locations are about 30 miles from Austin, the site of Tesla’s Giga Texas factory. The permits are for a research and development site where Boring can fine-tune its tunnel-building operations, according to Bloomberg. Plans include housing for workers.

They also include “as many tunnels as necessary,” each 300 feet to 600 feet long. The company will dig tunnels with a boring machine called Prufrock, an improved version of the machine the company used to dig now operational tunnels under the Las Vegas convention center.

Three 40-foot grout silos, a 35-foot vertical storage system for belts that pull muck out of the tunnels, office trailers, a tented working area, portable bathrooms and a chain-link perimeter fence are also planned for the Texas compound. Ten prefabricated, 550-square-foot homes are planned for worker housing. A “future café and retail” structure is shown on the plans but has not been submitted for permitting.

Boring has been pulling back on potential projects in Chicago, New York and California. Boring has also proposed digging a tunnel from the south end of Texas’ popular South Padre Island beach and national park site to a point on the north end of Boca Chica Beach, where SpaceX’s Starbase production complex and launch site is located.

[Bloomberg] – Cindy Widner