Superheated tip perhaps?

Then of course a PRTI/PRTO or PPIP

The thing about drills is in order to be realistic, they need to be able to take the item they are drilling, turn it into powder form and have it piped up to the surface. so if you used pstn and a device that creates powered pipe while it is going down, you could use pump to break the material. (bmtl, qrtz, coal, etc) then when the material is broken, it would be sucked up via powered pipe. portals are in my opinion not very realistic. It might be a bit more technological than you planned, but it would definately be realistic and probably be a front page save.

You could use conv to powder a solid the drill hits. You would need dmnd between the frme and it though to stop it converting the pstn too.