Posted on 08/25/2019 10:32:54 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
Over two decades, they managed to dig more than 7.5 miles down into the Earth.
However, in 1992 they had to stop drilling because the temperature was around 180 degrees Celsius, which was far hotter than the scientists predicted it would be.
If you fell down the hole, it would take around 3.5 to 4 minutes to reach the bottom.
(Excerpt) Read more at thesun.co.uk ...
It does say 180 C, I was wrong on that. But I definitely think that the ground temp added to the steel operating temp would anneal it. Great pic! that shows it got too soft.
That is a myth.
On 28 January 2011, Exxon Neftegas Ltd., operator of the Sakhalin-I project, drilled the world's longest extended-reach well offshore on the Russian island of Sakhalin. It has surpassed the length of both the Al Shaheen well and the Kola borehole. The Odoptu OP-11 well reached a measured total length of 12,345 m (40,502 ft) and a horizontal displacement of 11,475 m (37,648 ft). Exxon Neftegas completed the well in 60 days.[3]
On 27 August 2012, Exxon Neftegas Ltd beat its own record by completing the Z-44 Chayvo well. This ERD well reached a measured total length of 12,376 metres (40,604 ft).[15]
In terms of depth below the surface, the Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3 retains the world record at 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989 and is still the deepest artificial point on Earth.[16] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
when the Chinese dig a hole what is the comparative destination?
The Pentagon.
To Hell and Back with Dr. Maurice S. Rawlings - http://www.divinerevelations.info/documents/rawlings/dr_rawlings_near_death_experiences2.htm
And that is hard for a rock collector to do, they don’t want to even leave a perfect example of pretty Leaverite. Many many divorces over the years were caused by rock collections... :)
musta been another reason, i wouldn’t think 365deg is hot enough to affect drilling
See photo linked in #79
Plus comment about heat gain from drilling.
wonder what the cutters are made of, tungsten carbide has a melting point way above that but maybe be too brittle?
I don’t think it is so much a melting point issue but a lower temp “annealing” point that makes it soft. Even Tungsten Carbide can start annealing at a much lower temp than the melting point. Some cutters are diamond impregnated, but if the metal gets soft it can’t hold the diamonds and it wears much faster.
They stopped drilling in 1992, better equipment today:
Schlumberger
Our drilling services have successful track records for high-temperature applications
https://www.slb.com/~/media/Files/drilling/brochures/drilling_applications/ht_tools_br.pdf
thx
Max. operating temperature:
260 degC [500 degF]
there it is
Just a thought about Radon gas. Were a well dug deep through granite would it act as a flue to channel Radon out of the hole?
See Doodlebob’s tagline.
9.81 meters(32 feet)/second/second.
32, then 64, then 128, etc. until terminal velocity.
This explains the rats and the muzzies. They drilled down so far they opened a path from hell to earth and Satan is personally leading them. Weird, the Bible says he’s supposed to fall from the sky.
Turns out that Wheel of Time is history rather than fiction....
Maybe if the "pet rock" fad was ongoing.
I guess they gave up trying to reach China.
Thought of that one too
LOL Works for Me !!!
That plus the friction probably causes the Bit to bind up?
Or-Ivan runned out of Stoli...
You could eliminate heating bills but probably not get much in the way of steam. Unless you circulate slowly it might take a lot of pump power to move even friction reduced water through the size of pipe you would have but you would have VERY hot water. You might get steam if you picked up heat at the bottom of the hole and prevented heat exchange with cooler rocks on the way up and kept the system pressurized as super heated water until you were ready to liberate the steam. You would also have a bomb on your hands with a pressure cooker like that.
I saw a lot of awfully hot mud come out of wells that hot but never steam. Of course when a well got that deep and that hot we resorted to Oil Base Mud since water base stuff was just too expensive and hard to maintain. The pits on an OBM job are a miserable place to work with all the diesel vapor and heat coming off them.
That is a thermal gradient of less than 1 degree F per 100’ in the Russian Kola well. A low thermal gradient. 1.2 or more is generally expected in continental well rocks and 1.5 to 1.6 in Gulf of Mexico. Other places in the world that are not located near volcanic activity or other hot spot intrusions would mostly be similar.
It is not a high thermal gradient but it is a deep well.
The Bertha Rogers held the record until the Kola well and ended in a kick that thankfully flowed molten sulfur into the well and drill string and that was that. Those were great days when the hunt for deep high pressure gas in Oklahoma’s Anadarko Basin was all the go. We were running out of natural gas and Lone Star Gas Company was one of the pack leaders to find more. Every day we went where no man had gone before and it was a hoot!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Rogers
The hottest mud I ever saw, other than geothermal wells, was from high angle / horizontal wells and most of the heat there was generated from friction pressure owing to high pump rates needed to clean the bore hole. We used mud chillers in those operations.
We drilled many dry holes approaching 30,000 that had bottom hole temperatures near 300 to 350 F, the limit for most of our logging tools 30 or more years ago. At one point I mused about the possibility of installing circulating strings to provide super heated water to the surface and kick start a thermal generation plant. America was running out of energy and the muzzies had us by the throat and all we could do to break that cycle was fair game. The heat exchange rate is not fast enough and the circulating friction pressures are very high, the tubes are small as are the boreholes and can’t be made bigger. Drilling mud circulated at high rates gets very hot but not hot enough for practical use. However, you can also not cool the earth very well at all. We tried to circulate to reduce temperatures to get logs in some instances. It hardly worked very long if at all. You really needed drill string conveyed logging tools to make it a simultaneous operation. Nobody liked doing that sort of stuff. I also mused about diverting deep high pressure but low delivery volume non-commercial gas wells into shallower depleted reservoirs to repressure them. Cross flow comingling is frowned upon by state regulatory bodies even if it was practical. I thought it had merit if you had enough time and might be worth a look but was busy with other things. The wells were permanently abandoned long ago but there were a lot of them drilled in the do-dah days.
The days of deep high pressure gas well drilling will probably not be seen again but there are massive quantities of methane at depth in low perm and low porosity reservoirs. It is just not needed these days and it is not economic.
I always told people who worried about running out of oil and gas that we would run out of rate long before we rant out of oil and gas in the ground. The way things are going now we may not even run out of rate before the hydocarbon era winds down. There has to be something to provide the energy a modern world needs though and it isn’t going to be from solar panels, wind turbines and batteries anywhere near the current state of play. It isn’t going to come out of unicorns either. Our best prospect for clean, long lasting, plentiful energy that we need is probably Thorium until warp drive, dilithum crystals and the Starship Eneterprise come along. The chicoms and the indians are working on LiFTR reactors using our technology we developed at Oak Ridge. We aren’t doing anything on it. Meanwhile hydrocarbons will continue to be our bridge to the future. For now shale and horizontal drilling in conventional reservoirs and big fracs is the name of the game along with big company making more conventional reserves like Exxon and others have discovered along the northern coast of South America.
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