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.
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.
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?
You don't have to trip if your cutting tool never wears out. You fix it to the end of a casing string and just keep adding lengths. The hole is cased as soon as it's drilled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
There's an old SciFi story here: 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.
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.
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.
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.
Wasn't Quaise on HN before, years ago? They've been talking this up since 2018.
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.
Drilling is essentially an O(N^2) method. You need to replace your drill bit every X meters, and the time it takes to replace it about linear in the current depth.
Note that diamond (usually called PDC) drill bits have been in common use in the oilfield industry for decades now. Search PDC on your favorite search engine, and you'll find dozens of manufacturers actively selling them, each with a big selection.
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.
Quaise is also aiming for faster drilling not just longer lasting drills.
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.
Main reason it wouldn't work is that once a bit is lost in the bottom of the hole, that portion of hole is done, el fin. These bits are diamond impregnated PDC bits and you cannot drill or mill through them. Once you've dropped one, it would be a required side track.
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.
One thing that video left me wondering is what happens to the vaporized rock; how are we collecting or transporting it so it doesen't immediately re-solidify, stringify and block the hole?
That's a valid question. As the vaporized rock cools it needs to be directed to the annular walls of the borehole being drilled. If it flutters chaotically up the along the drillstring and sticks itself to the drillstring then you are effectively blocking the borehole as you drill. Even if you rotate the drillstring the cumulative effect is that the drillstring becomes a long length of sandpaper or a vertical grinder, grinding the fused rock from the annulus above where you are currently drilling.
You can see in that very video that it's not even an unsolved problem, it's an unaddressed problem. They currently handwave it away as "vent the molten rock" as if that is a solved problem.
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.
It's true that it's not entirely clear but it seems there's a nitrogen gas that pushes the gasses back up ?
It's also not clear how much of the rock mass actually resolididy instead going away as gas but for the part that does, it seems to be do so in a fashion that resembles mineral wool.
It is only shortly mentionned in the video but it seems like one of the main issues is what happens when water starts infiltrating your hole (it's unclear how much the glassified walls of the holes are a protection against that) and then you waste a lot of energy vaporizing liters and liters of water.
Unless... you close the hole at the top to collect the steam and have it turn a turbine to recoup electricity expenditures ?
If the hole is 2 miles long, I assume the steam would condense before reaching the top. And I guess lowering the pressure again, so I don’t know if that’s possible. But I’m not a physics expert.
I have always thought that very deep geothermal is a massive potential source of renewable energy that gets far too little attention.
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:
This article from 2 days ago says they have a test rig that is drilling outside. They don't say exactly how deep they have drilled but mentions they have another site where they will attempt to drill up to 100 feet.
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.
Eavor is a Canadian geothermal company that does closed loop systems with diamond drills and insulated drill pipe. https://www.eavor.com/technology/
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.
Why not just use a laser? I vaporize rock instantly with an 80w CO2. vacuum the dust up and blow it out the other end, done. Throw it on a galvo, you can control where it aims and fires.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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://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.
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.
https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/geothermal-can-provide-hal...
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.nature.com/articles/srep37740
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.