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I'm a geologist. I work on well sites for a living. My biggest concerns about what have been talked about in the video are with regards to rock removal, and hol

I'm a geologist. I work on well sites for a living. My biggest concerns about what have been talked about in the video are with regards to rock removal, and hole stability. But those are always my concerns. 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.

svantana 2y ago
I think the idea is that the heat from the radiation turns the walls of the hole into a very hard glass structure, which should be hard enough to withstand the pressure.
- aurizon 2y ago
  at 10,000 feet in a thermal area the rock is very hot. Hot rock is ductile and holes will gradually close. Some deep hard rock mines in Northern Ontario encounter this problem where mine working gradually close under extreme pressure over time. The closure can be instant = rock-burst = a local micro-quake. Often there is lateral shear as well. The deepest gold mines in Witwatersrand in South Africa are over 160 degrees in places and workers wear vented/cooled suits. They also have refrigerated cold rooms they can jump into to get cool and get back to another work session.
- mcswell 2y ago
  There's an old SciFi story here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30797/pg30797-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30797/pg30797-images.ht... that uses that idea as part of the plot. The hole is not very deep, maybe 150 feet, so the "glass" walls would presumably be strong enough. Much deeper, though, and the walls would almost certainly not be able to withstand the pressure. 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.
- ufmace 2y ago
  That's their idea yes, but it's only an idea, and I am extremely dubious. It's much more like handwaving speculation by people who have no experience in drilling deep wells than a practical proven solution. 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.
  - svantana 2y ago
    Yes that does seem worrying, and might explain why they've only (publicly) drilled a few inches here & there. Maybe they could give the waveguides some outer grid or fins or whatnot to give extra support?
    - ufmace 2y ago
      Physical support isn't actually that important - conventional wellbores are not physically supported either until they are cased and cemented, and mostly don't have too much trouble with collapsing. What they need is a seal tight against liquid and gas to prevent it from leaking into the wellbore. 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.
MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
A massive hole!
doodlebugging 2y ago
Geophysicist and former MWD engineer here. I agree. Even if you fuse everything that you penetrate to the annulus of the borehole, the material properties of the fused annular ring will vary as you cross formation boundaries based on the mineral composition of the formations being drilled. You may have some nice silicon glasses through a clean sandstone that transition quickly to inhomogeneous glass from a silicon-poor limestone. That has to create zones of weakness along the annulus and as you drill (zap) deeper it becomes even more critical to stabilize the borehole. 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.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  Are there places on Earth where it's mostly-homogenous "good stuff" all the way down? Could they avoid some of these problems - salt pockets, limestone - by being very picky about where they drill, avoiding (e.g.) places where there used to be ocean?
  - jofer 2y ago
    Even if it's homogenous, you have steadily increasing stresses with depth. This occurs for perfectly uniform materials as well. If you can't offset these to keep the hole open, it collapses. 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.
bilsbie 2y ago
If you’re vaporizing you’d simply use fans to pull the vaporized material out?
- amluto 2y ago
  I don’t know anything about geology in particular, but: vaporized rock is vaporized rock, not air. It’s going to cool off as it travels up a relatively cool shaft, and some or all of it will condense and/or solidify into something that will be, in the best case, fine dust. The gasses in the shaft will need to be moving upward faster than the terminal velocity of the removed material for the material to continue moving upward. 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.
  - lazide 2y ago
    Additionally, keeping the vapor from cooling/depositing will also require keeping it above the vapor point of rock - which is well above any metals they might make anything from.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  In the "Real Engineering" youtube channel video of this company, they VERY BRIEFLY show that the test area gets covered in a material that is essentially rock-wool. Any attempt to "blow" the vaporized material out will get clogged constantly and at the worst possible times, and they didn't even approach that as a concern or concept in their video. They genuinely seem to be treating "Get the material out" as a "We will figure that out later" problem instead of one of the MAIN PROBLEMS OF THE INDUSTRY. This project is DOA unless they come out with solutions to that and other serious issues.
ufmace 2y ago
Another thing that occurred to me after watching some of their videos - how do they plan to control rate of penetration? 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.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Probably some radar or ultrasound distance sensor would suffice. Maybe even ToF of the laser. I don't think that's anywhere near to the top of the issues they are going to run into.
  - ufmace 2y ago
    I do agree that it's probably nowhere near the top of the list of issues preventing this thing from working at least as well as conventional drilling technology. 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.
a12k 2y ago
I feel like you’re underestimating the power of SV moving fast and breaking things to learn quickly. Your attitude is why we’ve stopped hiring SMEs and PhDs in my underwater space launch / space elevator bio startup.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Damn you I was hovering over downvote until the last clause of your sentence.
- SequoiaHope 2y ago
  Perfect Silicon Valley comment.
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  Will there be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) s?
- cnote337 2y ago
  You had me in the first half! Thanks a12k
marcosdumay 2y ago
Well, they do talk about it, just not on those terms. 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.
K0balt 2y ago
So, you’re saying they -do- have a massive hole in their geo-logic formation?
duffpkg 2y ago
Not speaking to the veracity of the statement but quaise answers this in a different article: "A lot of the challenges are the same as for oil and gas. The subsurface is an uncertain environment. The deeper you go, the more extremes you have, but we've come a long way with the oil and gas industry to develop a whole suite of technologies, techniques and measurement systems to minimise that risk. The main challenge is maintaining wellbores from closing in on themselves as you go deeper. There's a lot of pressure in the rock and these holes eventually will collapse. The way we answer that is by creating a glass wall in the rock as we burn it. When our technology vaporises the rock, it creates a glass wall and that remains on the walls and prevents the hole from collapsing." https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-half-the-worlds-energy-quaise-energy-ceo/ https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-hal...
giggyhack 2y ago
This video walks through the tech in a very explainable way, and the interviewer asks a lot of pointed questions. https://youtu.be/b_EoZzE7KJ0 https://youtu.be/b_EoZzE7KJ0 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.
- Valgrim 2y ago
  I think the parent comment exposes the obvious flaw of using plasma to drill: Drilling with diamond bits uses fluid, which is uncompressible. Drilling with plasma uses gas, which is compressible. No matter how thick the obsidian layer get, there is a critical pressure differential between outside and inside and it will crack and collapse.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

svantana 2y ago

I think the idea is that the heat from the radiation turns the walls of the hole into a very hard glass structure, which should be hard enough to withstand the pressure.

aurizon 2y ago
at 10,000 feet in a thermal area the rock is very hot. Hot rock is ductile and holes will gradually close. Some deep hard rock mines in Northern Ontario encounter this problem where mine working gradually close under extreme pressure over time. The closure can be instant = rock-burst = a local micro-quake. Often there is lateral shear as well. The deepest gold mines in Witwatersrand in South Africa are over 160 degrees in places and workers wear vented/cooled suits. They also have refrigerated cold rooms they can jump into to get cool and get back to another work session.
mcswell 2y ago
There's an old SciFi story here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30797/pg30797-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/30797/pg30797-images.ht... that uses that idea as part of the plot. The hole is not very deep, maybe 150 feet, so the "glass" walls would presumably be strong enough. Much deeper, though, and the walls would almost certainly not be able to withstand the pressure. 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.
ufmace 2y ago
That's their idea yes, but it's only an idea, and I am extremely dubious. It's much more like handwaving speculation by people who have no experience in drilling deep wells than a practical proven solution. 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.
- svantana 2y ago
  Yes that does seem worrying, and might explain why they've only (publicly) drilled a few inches here & there. Maybe they could give the waveguides some outer grid or fins or whatnot to give extra support?
  - ufmace 2y ago
    Physical support isn't actually that important - conventional wellbores are not physically supported either until they are cased and cemented, and mostly don't have too much trouble with collapsing. What they need is a seal tight against liquid and gas to prevent it from leaking into the wellbore. 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.

MathMonkeyMan 2y ago

A massive hole!

doodlebugging 2y ago

Geophysicist and former MWD engineer here. I agree. Even if you fuse everything that you penetrate to the annulus of the borehole, the material properties of the fused annular ring will vary as you cross formation boundaries based on the mineral composition of the formations being drilled. You may have some nice silicon glasses through a clean sandstone that transition quickly to inhomogeneous glass from a silicon-poor limestone. That has to create zones of weakness along the annulus and as you drill (zap) deeper it becomes even more critical to stabilize the borehole. 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.

pavel_lishin 2y ago
Are there places on Earth where it's mostly-homogenous "good stuff" all the way down? Could they avoid some of these problems - salt pockets, limestone - by being very picky about where they drill, avoiding (e.g.) places where there used to be ocean?
- jofer 2y ago
  Even if it's homogenous, you have steadily increasing stresses with depth. This occurs for perfectly uniform materials as well. If you can't offset these to keep the hole open, it collapses. 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.

bilsbie 2y ago

If you’re vaporizing you’d simply use fans to pull the vaporized material out?

amluto 2y ago
I don’t know anything about geology in particular, but: vaporized rock is vaporized rock, not air. It’s going to cool off as it travels up a relatively cool shaft, and some or all of it will condense and/or solidify into something that will be, in the best case, fine dust. The gasses in the shaft will need to be moving upward faster than the terminal velocity of the removed material for the material to continue moving upward. 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.
- lazide 2y ago
  Additionally, keeping the vapor from cooling/depositing will also require keeping it above the vapor point of rock - which is well above any metals they might make anything from.
mrguyorama 2y ago
In the "Real Engineering" youtube channel video of this company, they VERY BRIEFLY show that the test area gets covered in a material that is essentially rock-wool. Any attempt to "blow" the vaporized material out will get clogged constantly and at the worst possible times, and they didn't even approach that as a concern or concept in their video. They genuinely seem to be treating "Get the material out" as a "We will figure that out later" problem instead of one of the MAIN PROBLEMS OF THE INDUSTRY. This project is DOA unless they come out with solutions to that and other serious issues.

ufmace 2y ago

Another thing that occurred to me after watching some of their videos - how do they plan to control rate of penetration? 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.

IshKebab 2y ago
Probably some radar or ultrasound distance sensor would suffice. Maybe even ToF of the laser. I don't think that's anywhere near to the top of the issues they are going to run into.
- ufmace 2y ago
  I do agree that it's probably nowhere near the top of the list of issues preventing this thing from working at least as well as conventional drilling technology. 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.

a12k 2y ago

I feel like you’re underestimating the power of SV moving fast and breaking things to learn quickly. Your attitude is why we’ve stopped hiring SMEs and PhDs in my underwater space launch / space elevator bio startup.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Damn you I was hovering over downvote until the last clause of your sentence.
SequoiaHope 2y ago
Perfect Silicon Valley comment.
LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Will there be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) s?
cnote337 2y ago
You had me in the first half! Thanks a12k

marcosdumay 2y ago

Well, they do talk about it, just not on those terms. 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.

K0balt 2y ago

So, you’re saying they -do- have a massive hole in their geo-logic formation?

duffpkg 2y ago

Not speaking to the veracity of the statement but quaise answers this in a different article: "A lot of the challenges are the same as for oil and gas. The subsurface is an uncertain environment. The deeper you go, the more extremes you have, but we've come a long way with the oil and gas industry to develop a whole suite of technologies, techniques and measurement systems to minimise that risk. The main challenge is maintaining wellbores from closing in on themselves as you go deeper. There's a lot of pressure in the rock and these holes eventually will collapse. The way we answer that is by creating a glass wall in the rock as we burn it. When our technology vaporises the rock, it creates a glass wall and that remains on the walls and prevents the hole from collapsing." https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-half-the-worlds-energy-quaise-energy-ceo/ https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-hal...

giggyhack 2y ago

This video walks through the tech in a very explainable way, and the interviewer asks a lot of pointed questions. https://youtu.be/b_EoZzE7KJ0 https://youtu.be/b_EoZzE7KJ0 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.

Valgrim 2y ago
I think the parent comment exposes the obvious flaw of using plasma to drill: Drilling with diamond bits uses fluid, which is uncompressible. Drilling with plasma uses gas, which is compressible. No matter how thick the obsidian layer get, there is a critical pressure differential between outside and inside and it will crack and collapse.

aaron695 2y ago

[dead]