No, you cannot meaningfully delete your posts or comments, but that’s not because of any issue with lemmy, but because you posted them publically. They will be archived and indexed in other services.

It is always best to remember that all your activity here is public, and will be linked to your username. Given that, you may wish to minimise any personally identifying information you post, and use several accounts to split up your activities by topic.

No, I don’t have anything of that sort. Feel free to ask here if you’d like, but I’m just using the information I can find on the web.

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.

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.