Can a Geothermal Startup Vaporize Rock to Drill the Deepest Holes?
msn.com
msn.com
The oil and gas industry currently uses "mud" either oil based or water based, in order to keep their holes from collapsing on themselves. Holes collapse. It's what they want to do, this is a factor of overburden - the collective weight of the rock above the hole 'pushing' down. It is also the primary means of communication with downhole tools through mud pulse telemetry, and the primary means of removing rocks - currently in the form of cuttings.
There is no mention of this mud system or other alternative (an innovation that would also need to be ground breaking for the industry) that will 1) keep the hole from collapsing 2) remove the volume of rock required to continue going down and 3) allow communication with your downhole tools.
It feels like this is a massive hole in the logic.
What I was wondering when reading the story, though, was what happened to all the rock that was vaporized. It has to leave the hole, else it will prevent the energy beam (in the case of the story, a laser beam) from getting to the bottom of the hole. If you've ever seen smoke (or even steam) coming out of a smoke stack, you have to wonder how the efficiency of the beam would not be cut to zero after the first few feet.
They're expecting the hole to be open air, with nothing at all to push back against formation pressure. It has to be, for the radiation system to work. But that means that this supposedly fused glass wall has to withstand all of the formation pressure all the way through the borehole perfectly. And they seem to be expecting this to happen from the vaporized material just condensing on the borehole walls. One little crack anywhere, and the whole borehole could flood with water or oil, possibly even blowing out at the surface. How do they recover from that? They'd have to figure out where the failure was, seal it, then get all the water out, each of which seems practically impossible.
Conventional wellbores accomplish this with the hydraulic pressure of the drilling fluid. These guys can't have any fluid though, so they would have to rely entirely on this condensed rock stuff to both support against the pressure and seal against any leaks. Seems very unlikely, considering that it isn't deliberately created by any kind of process, just randomly condensed from rock vapors.
Note also that they won't really start to run into trouble with this until they get at least a few hundred feet down.
Also, you definitely aren't going to drill more than 6 inches while attempting to physically support the wellbore with any part of the drillstring or waveguide or whatever they're calling this thing.
People should also understand that oil drilling is a highly competitive multi-trillion dollar industry employing tens of thousands of smart people all around the world. Absolutely everything that anyone could think of has already been tried, and adopted if it worked and abandoned if it didn't.
It could be flammable natural gas. It may or may not burn or explode in the wellbore, since there's not going to be much oxygen down there. How about at the surface though? Flammable gas erupting out your wellbore with this system sounds very not fun. They have megawatts of electricity flowing around, do you think all of that meets industry standards for avoiding explosions in an environment of flammable gasses? I think there's high potential for a very big boom, and maybe the whole well turning into a giant blowtorch you have no way to control.
Or it could be a poisonous gas like H2S. Poisonous gasses billowing out of your wellbore with this system also sounds like a major pain.
So, who wants to come up with a practical way for this thing to deal with that too? The oilfield has proven methods for preventing it in the first place and dealing with it if it happens anyways. Trip your annular blowout preventer, evacuate the rig, and circulate heavy kill mud until the gas stops flowing.
Maybe these guys could flood the well to stop it. Which means they also need to keep many tankers full of fluid on-hand, and after it works, they're back in the initial situation of needing to figure out how to seal the leak and evacuate the fluid again. I seriously can't think of a good way to do any of that.
I can see this being a lot like conventional drilling to a point with several bit trips or casing runs necessary until you reach a point where the borehole tends to collapse due to overburden pressure, especially in overpressured environments where well control is critical, and it is no longer possible to trip out and run casing before the borehole collapses in the newly drilled interval.
What happens if your proposed well encounters salt or other evaporites? A lot of questions could use answers and those answers only come from poking holes in the ground so maybe if they throw enough money at it they can determine where this method can be useful. That would be the most valuable result of all this.
This looks useful for near surface stuff but for ultradeep wells looks like it needs some experimentation.
Rocks are very weak in tension, despite being very strong in contraction. It's the reason you can break rock with a hammer or the reason ancient quarries were able to work by pouring water on wood pegs in rocks. It's also the reason concrete needs rebar to reinforce it (steel is very strong in tension, so the two combined are exceptionally strong). Keeping a hole open requires strength in tension as well as strength in compression.
Drilling mud accomplishes this by being roughly the same density as the rock, so it offsets the stresses that are trying to close the borehole that steadily increase with depth due to the increasing amount of rock above. Drilling mud keeps the borehole open until you can put in casing to support it.
This is exactly the same reason why it's difficult to build a submarine that can go to very large depths in the ocean. To put up steel walls (casing) to keep it open, you have to stop drilling and cement in casing - you can't do that as you drill. So drilling mud is a key part of being able to drill efficiently. Otherwise, you'd need to stop every few tens of meters and spend _days_ setting casing before being able to drill again.
Regardless, there is nowhere on earth where things are homogenous over very long distances. Simply put, even relatively uniform rocks can have very significant variations in physical properties. Many relevant properties (e.g. permeability - how well fluids can move through) vary over _tens of orders of magnitude_ naturally. So "uniform" can still mean "only varies by a few orders of magnitude". There are places where you can reasonably avoid non-silicates, but you're going to hit tons of other issues due to fundamental heterogeneity.
Sorry, I think not. Neat idea, but there's big holes in that in practice.
Can types of drill bits (heads?) be swapped out? So use the super diamond bit to get started, then switch to Quaise's maser once you reach granite.
Just guessing. Am noob. Am just trying to follow along.
eg Most recent Volts podcast episode: An update on advanced geothermal w/ Tim Latimer of Fervo Energy.
So yes, you could swap the two out. But we already have bits that are good at drilling hard rock (granites, etc) they're called tricone bits. They more so crush the rock than cut it. And they look badass.
In the worst case, I can imagine the vaporized rock depositing (directly in the strict chemistry sense or indirectly via a liquid intermediate) into the walls of the shaft higher up.
This project is DOA unless they come out with solutions to that and other serious issues.
Their radiation head thing has to be a certain distance from the rock face it's cutting / vaporizing, but it isn't actually touching anything. So how do they know how fast they're actually vaporizing more hole and how fast to advance?
I'm sure you know this, but for the rest of the audience, conventional drilling rigs use the measured weight of the drillstring to determine how much weight is on the bit and how fast to advance. I don't see any good way for these guys to do anything like that.
I don't think that's anywhere near to the top of the issues they are going to run into.
However, anything about radar, ultrasound, or laser ToF would require electronics at the head of this waveguide and a way to communicate data to the surface. From what they're saying, the downhole environment of this thing is going to be very high temperature. Physically vaporizing 100% of the rock to make hole tends to do that. Conventional oilfield electronic tools already have trouble getting the MTBF above a few hundred hours at current downhole temperatures, which are much cooler. It seems likely that no electronics would survive at all at the temperatures they're planning on running.
Their "drill" is unable to distinguish mud from rock, so inserting mud is a complete no-starter.
They expect to stabilize the hole by hardening the rocks on the walls. If you just ignored this because it obviously can't work, well, I agree, but that's still their claim. The only conclusion I can take from it is that they either know a solution and won't tell us, or haven't thought of anything and hope to solve it in production.
They also talk about residue removal. They say it will just gas away from the hole. Again, if you decided to ignore it because it obviously can't work...
That said, I'm with doodlebugging here. As long as it's not my money that they are betting, I just want to see what interesting problems and solutions will come out from this.
https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-hal...
To your questions
> 1) keep the hole from collapsing
They are vaporizing the rock which turns everythingeft into an obsidian like substance.
> 2) remove the volume of rock required to continue going down
As the rock is vaporized, they push nitrogen gas down the hole to cycle the vapor back to the surface
The video goes through the main challenges they have, like rate of penetration, power output and other small issues.
Will they be successful? Who knows, but the concept seems sound and the tech is proven. Can they do it at scale and consistently enough to change drilling worldwide? Who knows.
The competing technology is diamond drill bits.[1][2]. As synthetic diamonds have become cheaper, drill bits have improved. The old Hughes-style bits with what looked like big bevel gears now have a competitor. The key question is how much drilling you can do before you have to back out the whole drill string. That's a slow process, which gets slower as the drill string gets longer. Polycrystalline diamond bits now sometimes last for 3000+ meters. Maybe longer.
Comments from anyone in the drilling industry?
[1] https://okbit.com/choose-a-geothermal-drill-bit/
[2] https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/scaling-new-energy...
Anyway, seems like the obvious solution is to stack multiple drill bits at the end and detach ones that get used up. Obviously this doesn’t work, but it’s not clear to me why it shouldn’t.
Actual answer seems to be drilling side holes also involves removing the pipe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43371776
Is the failure mode they always or often fall off the shank into the hole and they can’t be extracted?
Which suggests just leaving the old drill bit somewhere in the ground. But currently doing that would also involve removing the pipe, as to why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43371776
The actual way to avoid the problem is by using bits whose design lifetime in the formation you're drilling is at least as long as the hole section you're planning to drill.
Now you might ask, cool so just drill around it.
The problem is that with current technology, you HAVE to pull back to the surface first in order to do this. You need to cement the bottom of the current hole and depending on the circumstances, you also need to set a 'whipstock' in order to assist in drilling out of the original hole. Side tracking is a long and arduous process that involves numerous trips out of the hole.
So regarding your lower comment, that's why we can't just have multiple bits and drill around them, or drop them off in their own sidetrack. It's not a bad idea, it's just that the realities of drilling at these depths are harsh and not completely intuitive.
My Creds - currently in the gulf of mexico drilling a well with a total depth of 30,012 feet.
Drilling 6 miles vertically without using a media to conduct cuttings to the surface would be a major change in how things work. I don't think that glassing the inside of the borehole by fusing cuttings as you drill will create a durable borehole. We used to have problems with electronics desoldering at depth in our MWD tools. It gets hot and the pressures can be enormous.
Former Scumbagger MWD engineer here.
You're completely right doodlebug, our MD is around 30,000 with a TVD of about 26,000' (ballparking here so i'm not violating any contracts).
I also appreciate your other comments here!
So I wrote a longer, more meandering reply to explain the other one. I'm deleting that one too. Too much stuff. Suffice to say that my time with them was interesting, not fun, full of organizational dysfunction on levels I never thought possible. I hope you are having a nice career with them. I cut mine short to save my own sanity and everything else that I loved and cared about.
Life is full of new experiences. Every day finds you at another node on the decision tree that will ultimately define and document your life to others. Pick the wrong path and your options at the next node will be less attractive than those behind you. Pick the right path and you can continue like branches on a hackberry, making the most of every opportunity to continue growing toward the light.
Had I followed the path that vengeful rage had offered me I would never have had the opportunities to polish my skills and grow my career into a successful consultancy. They got off easy because I chose to take the long view for my family's sake and chose to let it slide while taking every opportunity to find another job. If I had let it be personal then a lot of things would be different.
Geothermal power is indeed cool, but to get it usable anywhere on Earth instead of a few places where magma currents happen to be near the surface, we'll probably need several orders of magnitude deeper and wider holes than we're currently capable of drilling just for starters. Can these guys do the job? Maybe, but let's just say I'm not planning to invest in them.
[0] https://www.quaise.energy/news/from-lab-to-field-testing
That's what bothers me about this. If drilling with microwaves works, why aren't there industrial applications? Laser cutters are widely used, from little ones that engrave plastic to big ones that cut steel plate. Yet nobody seems to be selling microwave cutters. In industrial applications, you don't even have to fit the microwave generator into the hole and keep it working in a hostile environment.
The idea was suggested back in 2002, but seems to have gone nowhere.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11075717_The_Microw...
This wants to dump a lot of heat into a large area, and there’s industrial uses for that: https://industrialmicrowave.com/industrial-microwave-heating...
You also have a device at home that uses microwaves for heating larger volumes of material…
We just have to be more selective with the location to ensure that there is heat nearer the surface. They're right, if you drill deep enough, it's hot everywhere. Even in non-geothermal oil and gas wells, we commonly have temperatures that exceed 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Our tools that we send down whole are commonly rated for 300-350 degree temperatures. Plenty of temperature down there!
Although I admit, I'm an oil and gas guy and don't really have any industry knowledge of geothermal.
Exactly how long you can drill with one varies widely based on a bunch of factors. You do have to pull the whole drill string to change one. It's slow, but not that slow. Most actual oil wells drilled have in the neighborhood of 10 or so trips in and out with drilling tools for the whole operation for various reasons. Varies widely of course depending on a bunch of factors, but that's usually the ballpark. Plus a few more for casing and cementing runs.
The company being discussed is Quaise Energy: https://www.quaise.energy/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaise
At 6:34 in the video, they very briefly show a running test drill, and then cut immediately to the ceiling of the test chamber with a large specimen of rock wool.
That rock wool will completely clog any mechanism they could come up with. How do you reliably transport rock wool from 20 miles underground to the surface?
This project/company is a dead end unless they could magic away that problem.
Unless... you close the hole at the top to collect the steam and have it turn a turbine to recoup electricity expenditures ?
It is important to be able to detect the formation boundaries and to have the mud weight tailored to the expected pressures within the target zones so that blowouts can be avoided. Pre-drill predictions of downhole pressures are made from seismic data and can be extremely accurate, especially when correlated with borehole data from regions with similar geologic history.
I did pre-drill pressure predictions as a geophysicist. Very interesting stuff.
Here is a little info about well control and gas kicks.[0]
[0]https://www.drillingmanual.com/gas-kick-behavior-expansion-m...
If we can make it work, we have a source of "limitless" (at terrestrial human scale) energy that doesn't require expensive battery backup and is dispatchable. It could also be used as a source of industrial process heat, cogeneration (if it's safe to do near or inside city limits), etc. I've even seen proposals to make methane or liquid fuels by injecting CO2 and H2 or H2O down there and using it as a thermally driven in situ synfuel reactor.
Solar is one way of using a ready-made natural nuclear reactor. This is another. Some geologists believe the Earth's core is a natural fission reactor, and a few people have proposed other even more exotic possibilities:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/whats-your-problem/harnessin...
So sounds like they are at the very beginning of piloting. I'm not going to listen to an hour podcast to see if it is claiming anything different, if you have a text source I'd be interested.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/the-smell-of...
Closed loop and insulated pipe allows a geothermal project to be drilled into hot rock, which is pretty much everywhere, even if there is no water.
They have a demonstration project in Alberta, a 'commercial' project in Geretsried, Germany (4500 meters, 64MW thermal, 8.2MW electric) and a deep demonstration project in New Mexico (5500 meters, no news since early 2023).
From the company website, it looks like the projects work though Eavor doesn't give any data on their projects that would help calculate the economics. The heavy presence of government in their media suggests that, at least for now, significant government involvement is required to get projects built.
Wonder if they could drill a stable hole with a honeycomb arrangement of lasers like engines on the Starship, but with smaller radius. It wouldn't strictly be an empty hole but just a bundle of small diameter holes. Whatever the laser hits, vaporizes until it's out or turns into glass on the side. Whatever caves in just keeps getting vaporized.
(And the oil companies will view the competition as from Satan?)
1 squared meter surface times 10 km in depth yields ... 10,000 cubic m of mass to be vaporized and then "dispersed" into the atmosphere.
At a density of 5.5 kg/dm^3 it would weight about ... 55 thousands metric tonnes of rock.
To vaporize 1 kg of liquid water it takes 2250 kcal of energy.
If that mass was water it would require 1.23e11 kcal of energy.
I suspect that both the amount of energy needed and the amount of pollution added would be unbearable.
And this is for a hole that's "just" 10 km deep.
10 km^3 = 10 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 m^3 != 10,000 m^3
20 in down 7.6 mi is 0.2 m^2 down 12321 m. This gives 2500 m^3 or 2.5e-6 km^3 of rock.
Google says "rocks are generally between 1600 kg/m^3 (sediments) and 3500 kg/m^3 (gabbro)" so going with 2500 km/m^3 that would be 6240000 kg, 6.24 Gg, or 6.24 thousand metric tons.
Heat of vaporization of water is roughly 2250 kJ/kg, or 537 kcal/kg, so if the mass was water it would need 14e9 kJ, 14 TJ, or 3.35e9 kcal to vaporize.
For a 5 in borehole divide all the above by 16. This ignores the heat required to actually change the temperature of the water, but I'm betting you can get a lot of that back via condensation, and for this reason I'd also assume that much of the rock will not end up in atmosphere. These assumptions also go entirely out the window of there's an inflow of material, but unfortunately I'm betting that's exactly what will happen.
Edit: Fixed post after I confused radius and diameter. Someone should probably check my math as well.
(The 63 comments essentially support Betteridge.)