Snowy 2.0 boring machine Florence now stuck for a month in hard rock

The Florence tunnel boring machine brought in by the federal government owned Snowy Hydro to create the head race tunnel for the troubled Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project, remains stuck in hard rock nearly a month after coming to a halt.

The company revealed on Wednesday that the high pressure jets brought in to try and blast the rock away are “working well”, but gave no indication of when the machine would be able to resume operations.

The controversial and incident riddled project has been hit by lengthy delays and massive cost overruns, and according to some analysts each additional day of delay costs an additional $3 million a day in interest.

Snowy Hydro CEO Dennis Barnes appeared before a Senate Committee last month shortly after the latest mishap, but indicated at the time that there had been no additional blow out in costs, already at $12 billion without counting the cost of new transmission lines.

It is estimated that the problems with Florence, which reportedly cost more than $150 million, have contributed around $2 billion to those added costs.

Florence encountered its first problems soon after starting in early 2022, and suffered delays totalling more than a year after being bogged in soft ground. It came to its latest halt on May 16 this year when it encountered extremely hard and abrasive rock conditions.

Specialist contractors with high pressure water jets commenced work on May 21.

In its latest statement, Snowy Hydro says: “The high pressure water jetting technique to remove the rock is ongoing and working well.”

The company has flagged the possibility of bringing in an additional tunnel boring machine, at a potential cost of more than $100 million, to start at the other end of the near 17 kms tunnel that Florence is supposed to be working on.

TBM Florence has so far tunneled just 850 metres, and is not likely to find its task any easier if and when it resumes. “We expect highly variable ground conditions to continue ahead of TBM Florence in the head race tunnel,” the Wednesday statement said.

The Snowy 2.0 project, which had at one stage been tipped to be up and running in the early 2020s, is now not expected to be operating until 2029, a delay that has had an impact on the market operator’s reliability outlook, and which will have an impact on multiple other projects.