Home → CO2 rock breaking
No vibration. No shock wave. No noise. No fly rock. No blasting licence. For every excavation where conventional blasting is restricted, delayed or banned outright.
Across India, infrastructure, mining and urban projects stall the moment they hit hard rock and discover that blasting is not permitted — too close to a structure, too close to a road, vibration limits in force, or the licensing simply will not come through in time.
The Cardox System breaks rock and concrete using nothing but liquid CO2. It is classified as non-explosive, which changes the entire regulatory picture: no special permits for storage, use or transportation, and no magazine to build or guard.
How it differs from an explosive. An explosive shatters through a detonation shock wave. Cardox produces a controlled heave — pressure begins at the back of the hole and pushes forward, fracturing the rock along its natural planes without shattering it. That is why the material comes out in large clean lumps rather than fines.
Excavation adjacent to live roads, buildings and services where vibration limits rule out blasting.
Breaking out tunnel sections in hard and medium rock, including metro and highway works.
Rock trenches for services and pipelines in built-up areas.
Shafts excavated next to main roads and beneath live gas, electricity and water mains.
Hard rock removed from foundation footprints without shaking the neighbouring structure.
Controlled demolition of mass, lightly reinforced and heavily reinforced concrete in sensitive locations.
General quarrying and dimensional stone extraction — two tubes will split and heave a block of over 50 tonnes. Opencast and underground coal and ore — safe in gaseous mines, producing large clean lump product.
Harbour deepening and widening, seabed excavation for cable and pipeline routes, riverbed deepening, breaking concrete overspills.
Planning figures for estimating tube counts. Actual yield depends on strata, burden, hole pattern and free-face conditions — we confirm against your geology before quoting.
| Application | Strata type | Average yield per tube (m³) |
|---|---|---|
| Quarrying | General | 3 – 6 |
| Dimensional stone | 5 – 20 | |
| General open-cut excavation | Hard / medium rock | 3 – 5 |
| Foundation excavation | Hard rock | 0.75 – 1 |
| Medium rock | 1 – 1.5 | |
| Trench excavation | Hard rock | 0.6 – 1 |
| Medium rock | 0.75 – 1.5 | |
| Tunnel excavation | Hard rock | 0.5 – 0.75 |
| Medium rock | 0.75 – 1.5 | |
| Concrete demolition | Mass concrete | 2 – 4 |
| Lightly reinforced | 1 – 2 | |
| Heavily reinforced | 0.75 – 1 |
Anyone costing a job where blasting is not an option ends up comparing the same short list. Here is an honest read of each, including where ours is the wrong choice.
| Technique | How it works | Where it wins | Where it does not |
|---|---|---|---|
| Explosive blasting | Chemical detonation in a drilled hole | Lowest cost per m3 on open ground at volume | Licence, magazine and police notification; ground vibration; fly rock; exclusion zone; shatters saleable stone into fines |
| CO2 rock breaking (what we do) | Liquid carbon dioxide flashes to gas and expands roughly 600 times, producing a directional heave | Work next to occupied buildings, live roads and underwater; no licence; large clean lumps; reusable tubes | Every hole must be drilled; force does not carry across a construction joint |
| Hydraulic splitter | A wedge is forced mechanically into a drilled hole | Very precise and near-silent on small volumes | Slow; needs a free face to break towards; struggles in heavily reinforced concrete |
| Expansive demolition agent | A powder mixed with water swells inside the hole over several hours | No machinery on site at all; genuinely quiet | Waits 8–24 hours to work; performance swings with ambient temperature; consumed on every shot |
| Hydraulic breaker | Percussive hammer on an excavator | Available everywhere; no drilling | Heavy vibration and noise — the two things most restricted sites are trying to avoid; slow in hard rock |
| Diamond wire saw | Abrasive wire cuts a defined line | The cleanest cut available in concrete | Slow and costly; usually needs access to both faces |
On the name. This method is widely called CO2 rock blasting, and buyers search for it that way, so it is worth being plain: nothing is detonated. The tube is classified non-explosive, which is exactly why no blasting licence is required. We call it rock breaking for that reason.
Underwater work. Because there is no shock wave, the Cardox System can be activated while divers remain in the water and in close proximity to ships and structures — a job specification that conventional explosives simply cannot meet.
Marina and harbour deepening, cable and pipeline trenching, breaking cap rock off a seabed — the sequence is the same as on land, with two differences that matter.
On reinforced structures the discharge lifts and splits the concrete and leaves the steel standing, which is then cut conventionally with an oxy-acetylene torch. Slabs with 50 mm re-bar at 200 mm centres break cleanly this way — and a wall separated from the break by only a construction joint can come through undamaged, which is the whole reason it is specified next to structures that have to survive.
Where it stops, and we will tell you before you order. That same construction joint works both ways: the breaking force does not carry across it. A tube will lift the bay it is in and leave the next one untouched. On a jointed structure each bay has to be drilled and treated as its own piece of work — worth knowing when you are pricing a programme, not after.
Send us the geology, the volume to be removed, and what is standing next to it. We will come back with a tube count, a method and a programme.