Homo sapiens

Three days later.

Wu Gang saw the mass spectrometry report fed back by the exploration team and finally figured out what was underground in Area 7.

Magnetite components were detected in the cores of three of the drilling sites, and this was not pure magnetite, but magnetite containing titanium and vanadium.

Molybdenum and rhenium were also discovered.

He was not new to geology and mining, so he quickly reported the matter to headquarters.

The discovery of iron ore was secondary, but the titanium, vanadium, molybdenum and rhenium associated with the iron ore was the important discovery in this exploration.

Less than two days later.

Hundreds of professional geological exploration and mining professionals secretly appeared in the seventh area of ​​the Langerang Mountain Space Base.

Mineralogist Weng Xuehai, who led the team, determined 12 drilling points again based on the surrounding terrain and mountain trends after on-site exploration.

Wu Gang was very concerned about this exploration: "Dr. Weng, what do you think the potential of this mining area is, and will it affect the construction of the space base?"

"Preliminarily, in the three drilling sites where minerals were discovered, the reservoirs are between 450 and 570 meters, the thickness of the ore layer is about 60 to 70 meters, and the area is about 500,000 square meters. The iron content in this area alone The ore is about 150 million tons.”

"so much?"

"It's just that the grade is a little low. The grade of the samples at three points is only about 34%, which can barely be regarded as ordinary iron ore! And the burial location is too deep." Weng Xuehai said helplessly.

Ba Kang, another mining engineer, smiled and shook his head: "Dr. Weng, you don't have to worry about this. The company has the technology to solve the mining and mineral processing problems in ultra-deep strata."

Weng Xuehai also seemed to have heard some inside information: "Is this the bioerosion technology and fluid boiling extraction technology you experimented with a while ago?"

"Yes." Bakang nodded.

He is the lead engineer in testing this technology.

Weng Xuehai glanced at the terrain map: "If you want to use our new technology, you must use an inclined shaft. Based on the surrounding terrain, it is estimated that the flat land here is not enough."

Hearing this, Wu Gang already knew the other party's subtext.

That is to let the space base adjust the plan as soon as possible. After all, iron ore may not be mined, but those rare metals must be mined.

He said directly to the two of them: "I will adjust the base layout as soon as possible to make enough space for mining."

Bakang on the side shook his head: "Captain Wu, don't make adjustments for the time being. You can do other work first. We need to explore the general distribution area of ​​the ore layer to avoid you having to make adjustments later."

The reason why he stopped Wu Gang was mainly because the new mining technology had a shortcoming, which was that it was easy to form large areas of cavities underground, which would then lead to ground collapse.

This requires that there should be no buildings above and within one or two kilometers around the mine to avoid being affected.

This is also the reason why new mining technology can only use inclined shafts and not vertical shafts.

This is to prevent the mining farm from being built directly above the mineral seam.

Wu Gang frowned: "Engineer Bakang, will this kind of large-scale mining affect the launch site?"

Ba Kang looked at the map: "Judging from the current trend of mineral veins, only part of the seventh area has mineral veins, and no mineral layers have been found on the side near the launch site. The straight-line distance between the two places is more than 3.6 kilometers. It is not a big problem. By then Just control the scale when mining.”

This is actually one of the advantages of new mining technology.

Traditional underground mining technology requires not only digging mine tunnels, but also paying attention to exhaust, ventilation, and drainage. Especially for ultra-deep veins, these auxiliary facilities must be in place.

Mining drainage will cause a serious problem, that is, the water level of surrounding groundwater will be affected.

In severe cases, it may even cause the surrounding ground to subside.

The new mining technology does not require miners to go down. Instead, it uses biological erosion to turn the stratum into fine particles, then injects water and air to turn the stratum into a mud fluid, and then uses mud pumping equipment to pump out the mud in the stratum. Come up.

During this mud pumping process, water will continue to be injected into the mining formation on the other side to maintain the water level balance of the formation.

Of course, there is another drawback to this kind of mining.

That is, in karst landforms, attention needs to be paid to underground rivers and caves to prevent genetically modified bacteria from accurately corroding mining strata.

However, in ultra-deep veins, the strata are basically relatively dense rock layers due to years of heavy pressure, so the underground leakage problem will not be too serious.

Especially the newly discovered vanadium-titanium magnetite in Langerang Mountain this time, the underground strata are quite dense.

The ultra-deep mining technology developed by the Homo sapiens company was actually caused by the environment.

If Homo sapiens Company had a large open-pit iron mine like Australia's, who would mine ultra-deep veins? It's not that there are no outstanding metal mines in the four control areas.

Therefore, we can only find another way and use bioconcentration technology to extract some of the required resources from the ocean.

On the other hand, we need to deeply explore the local mineral potential.

At present, only open-pit mines and shallow mines are mined for non-precious metals and rare metals around the world.

Especially in areas outside China, mineral veins below 500 meters underground are usually not mined. The main reason is that the mining cost is too high and it is not economical and cost-effective.

Not to mention Southeast Asia, it is very rare to find anything below 100 meters underground, let alone 500 meters.

Hongsawady's mining technology can only exploit the richest minerals on the surface throughout Southeast Asia.

Therefore, mining deep mines has become another means for Homo sapiens companies to achieve resource self-sufficiency.

Although no large minerals have been discovered in the surface and shallow layers, as long as you dig deeper, there must be many deep or ultra-deep mineral veins that have not been discovered by humans.

Even if the technology is powerful enough, there will be a lot of rare metals and gold in the mantle and core of the earth.

The premise is that it can be mined.

The Homo sapiens company dare not think about the resources of the mantle and core for the time being, but the homo sapiens company has great ideas for the strata between the surface and 10,000 meters underground.

At least with the new mining technology, there is no big problem in mining veins two to three kilometers underground, and the mining cost will not be too high.

There are currently two main problems that restrict the promotion of new mining technologies.

One is the issue of confidentiality.

The other is exploration. After all, the cost of drilling a formation composition analysis well will increase as the drilling depth increases.

There is no way to solve the first problem for the time being. After all, if the Homo sapiens company does not reach the top for a day, these technologies must remain secret.

But the second problem has been solved recently.

The key to solving this problem lies in bioerosion technology.

The specific operation is also very simple. Just use a very slender super-hard thimble, launch it through explosives, and insert it directly into the formation to form a slender channel, and then inject a certain amount of corroding bacteria into the microchannel.

This technology can drill very large-diameter wells. Even ultra-deep wells can easily be dug to a depth of two to three thousand meters with this technology, and the cost is very low.

The technology at the space base has not yet had time to be updated, but the geological and mineral exploration teams have now used this new technology.

In addition, this technology can also be combined with the green umbrella system, which allows the drilling of ultra-deep wells and ultra-large wells without the need to import large-scale drilling equipment.

After all, large-scale drilling equipment has a certain technical content, so it is not cost-effective to import it on a large scale, and it can easily be analyzed by the outside world as being used for large-scale mining or oil extraction.

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