[cnote337]

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.

[doodlebugging]

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]

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?

[specialist]

My impression is Quaise's maser (?) drill thingie would be used for granite. Which is increasingly a challenge for geothermal (going deeper, longer).

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.

[gosub100]

Could you avoid the problem by drilling down a fixed length, carving out a room or supply area, drilling laterally, and then drill vertically again?

[BigParm]

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.

[a12k]

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.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Will there be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket) s?

[SequoiaHope]

Perfect Silicon Valley comment.

[cnote337]

You had me in the first half! Thanks a12k

[cmrdporcupine]

Damn you I was hovering over downvote until the last clause of your sentence.

[marcosdumay]

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.

[giggyhack]

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

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]

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.

[ufmace]

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]

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.

[duffpkg]

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-hal...

[K0balt]

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

[svantana]

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.

[ufmace]

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.

[mcswell]

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.

[aurizon]

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.

[bilsbie]

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

[amluto]

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.

[mrguyorama]

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.

[MathMonkeyMan]

A massive hole!