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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>It feels like this is a massive hole in the logic.
Wasn't Quaise on HN before, years ago? They've been talking this up since 2018.<p>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.<p>Comments from anyone in the drilling industry?<p>[1] <a href="https://okbit.com/choose-a-geothermal-drill-bit/" rel="nofollow">https://okbit.com/choose-a-geothermal-drill-bit/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/scaling-new-energy-systems/geothermal/geothermal-well-construction/geothermal-drill-bits" rel="nofollow">https://www.slb.com/products-and-services/scaling-new-energy...</a>
A relevant video by Real Engineering: "Geothermal Energy is Changing" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0</a> (21m53s) [2025-03-01]<p>The company being discussed is Quaise Energy: <a href="https://www.quaise.energy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quaise.energy/</a> , <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaise" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaise</a>
I have always thought that very deep geothermal is a massive potential source of renewable energy that gets far too little attention.<p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37740" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/srep37740</a>
Eavor is a Canadian geothermal company that does closed loop systems with diamond drills and insulated drill pipe. <a href="https://www.eavor.com/technology/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eavor.com/technology/</a><p>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.<p>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).<p>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.
<armchair geologist hat on><p>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.
Some maths.<p>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.<p>At a density of 5.5 kg/dm^3 it would weight about ... 55 thousands metric tonnes of rock.<p>To vaporize 1 kg of liquid water it takes 2250 kcal of energy.<p>If that mass was water it would require 1.23e11 kcal of energy.<p>I suspect that both the amount of energy needed and the amount of pollution added would be unbearable.<p>And this is for a hole that's "just" 10 km deep.
63 comments and no one brings up Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."<p>(The 63 comments essentially support Betteridge.)
Actually, the <i>real</i> trick is to invent the technology that eliminates the need to drill so <i>deep</i>. But for that invention to be made/found, we need to go a bit more "quantum".