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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
This nearly 100% depends on how far the gravel/stones will have to move. You always will need several trucks per digger.
Best solution usually is to find a median level, tear down the mountain part above this level, and then use the material to fill up the surroundings to that median. Result: flat land, but maybe not at the level you initially thought.
How far away do you want to build your new mountain?
You could flatten it, take the top of and put on the sides, but if it's bad quality stone that may just not be possible.
If the mountain contains valuable minerals then the cost will be negative; you can make money by removing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountaintop_removal_mining
Though, depending on the geology, you might not want to build a town on the resulting site. Sometimes heavy metals leach out of the disturbed rock, resulting in polluted surface water.
No minerals
You’re comparing moving 100 cubic meters of soil, so 200tons+ 10-15km away versus paying $20.
One of these is vastly more expensive than the other.
Governments would rather use eminent domain than literally move mountains.
It depends on what you can do with the fill coming off the mountain.
Good point. They can dump that stuff on mountains 10-15km away
I think he means, is there any value to it? Bc otherwise the cost is colossal and nobody's gonna level a mountain just to develop on the land
Alternative to removing a mountain is to pay $70M to land owners
**So you're saying cost of removing a mountain in given size would be higher than $70M? **
Yes, way, way more. Go look at how big a quarry is, compared to a mountain, and realize that took years and years of work from equipment that probably costs more than that by itself
way, way more ? Can you share your napkin math?
If I read your measurements correctly, you're talking about digging up over 350 million cubic metres of soil and rock, transporting them 15km and dumping them safely. Comparing that to the cost of paying the land owners gives you a budget of approximately $0.20 per cubic metre. Ignoring the digging costs, you'd have to check what your local rates for trucking bulk soil would be over that distance, but I suspect they're more than that on their own.
Then you have the rather signicicant issue of what to do with the literal mountain of soil and rock you need to dispose of. Just dumping it is going to cause pretty serious changes to the local environment, not least of which would be a new mountain.
Thanks! Please do share any napkin math you can think of. This is really important to me. I could share the location with you in dm if that helps
Cost of oil, machinery should be similar to US. Labor should be 50% cheaper roughly
I'm only going to do this very roughly, only for the transport and using US prices (as they're easier to find), because the total cost of mining, transporting and dumping that much material is astronomical compared to the $70m budget. Even the transport cost alone are an order of magnitude higher.
Soil has a density of between 1,200 and 1,700 kilograms or 2,645 and 3,747 pounds per cubic metre.
I couldn't easily find bulk rates for trunking soil, but bulk trucking rates for grain seem to be in the right area from what I can see. A truckload of up to 80,000lb costs somewhat over $6 per mile.
Given the weight limit per truck, and taking a middling estimate of soil density of 3000lb/m^3 (rock would be heavier and so increase the cost), we can transport around 80000/3000=26m^3 per truck, at a cost of at least 615=$90, or $3.46 per m^3. Our budget for the whole operation was 75,000,000/(3,500,000100)=$0.20 per m^3.
From those figures we can see that simply trucking the spoil fron the operation would be more than 15 times the cost of paying the landowners. That ignores all of the other costs. Local rates may be sonewhat cheaper, but probably not enough to make a serious difference, and you'd need to ship over 10 million truckloads of dirt, which would put massive strain on local infrastructure too.
It's highly dependent on local need, but sometimes projects need fill material, so at least some of it could be sold off to offset the cost.
You lose a mountain to get some shitty parking lots or whatever.
What?
Monetary costs are not the only costs in this scenario. One of the costs of destroying the mountain is that the area no longer has that mountain. In exchange for warehouses and parking lots or whatever an "industrial area" means.
