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Comment by totalview | Hacker News Reader

I hate to play the Cassandra again, but the deepest hole ever drilled by anyone was 7Km (edit: 12Km), a far cry from drilling 20Km holes everywhere on the earth. I’ve worked in oil and gas for over 10 years, including on the largest rotary drilling rig in North America, and it is insane what kind of machinery it takes to get 6,000 feet down and push a tool 15,000 feet out.

Just as insane is convincing anyone that your drilling activities aren’t causing earthquakes, screwing up water tables, or leaking gas and other chemicals out of the ground.

I still hope it works lol!

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Ah, good. Someone from the drilling industry. Has anyone ever tried microwave drilling?

Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.[1] Ticker symbol changed from GYTI to GYTIE, indicating failure to file financial statements, and the stock price went to zero. They were talking about this as a precision heat source, like a laser cutter. That would be useful. But apparently it didn't work out.

It seems a big stretch to take that technology from nowhere to something you can push down a drill hole. That's close to the toughest application. You'd expect industrial applications first.

Now, if you could make that technology work, there's a cool application. This August, NASA is sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche, which supposedly has large amounts of heavy metals, possibly including gold.[2] If NASA finds valuable metals, there will be serious interest in asteroid mining. If you want to mine an asteroid, you need cutting tools. But you don't have any useful gravity to hold them to the surface. So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble. Might be the killer app for gyrotron drilling.

[1] https://www.gyrotrontech.com/gyrotron/

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/psyche

Wouldn't the energy beam push you away from the surface just as well? I get that you don't need to exert torque, but you'd need to stabilise it somehow.

> Wouldn't the energy beam push you away from the surface just as well?

do you believe lasers have thrust?

you could cut through a planet with a laser and still not lift a one ounce weight off the ground with the "push back"

laser ablation is the result of heat, not force

>do you believe lasers have thrust?

Absolutely. How do you think solar sails work? Light has inertia. If you emit large amounts of energy with any form of light, you'll get a thrust.

"Absolutely. How do you think solar sails work?"

By accumulating tiny pressure over decades in zero gravity where they face no friction.

It is not coincidental that you had to go to this extreme of an example.

"Light has inertia."

I see you missed the part where I gave a factual accounting of how much inertia is dispensed.

"If you emit large amounts of energy with any form of light, you'll get a thrust."

At the entire output of the Sun, you do not produce enough thrust to lift an average adult male human being in the gravity of the Earth.

Go do the math.

Lasers do have thrust, yeah. I guess I haven't done the maths to work out how much would be produced by a mining one :P

They have tried it out before but most, if not all, industrial oil and gas drilling activities are performed with Rotary drilling or a Coiled Tubing rig (which still drills via a rotating cutting bit). I do not work at a drilling technology center, so I cannot speak to what innovations are currently being examined next, but if it was proved cheaper or better petrochemical companies would be using it.

> Has anyone ever tried microwave drilling?

yes, many times. as you would expect, it obviously doesn't work.

> Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.

that's correct. they weren't able to cut two inches of well controlled non-porous dry material.

> You'd expect industrial applications first.

honestly, you wouldn't. it's technical nonsense. lasers are more efficient and easy to build.

the reason we use microwaves to cook is they pass through most material harmlessly, and mostly interact with the water.

which is kind of a dealbreaker here.

> So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble.

no, it's really not. it's just science fiction bs.

if we want to save the planet, just build regular 1970s nuclear power, and quit it with the "i'll invent something new with less than ten years on the clock" stuff.

So what is the secret sauce here? Is it a scam? Are they bringing anything new to the table?

Their timeline is pretty tight with first rig in 2 years and commercial level first power plant in another 2. They should have demonstrated at least a couple of holes deeper than a few km by now you'd assume.

> So what is the secret sauce here?

There isn't one.

> Is it a scam?

It won't work.

I do not have the ability to tell if it's a scam. They might really believe it. A scam would require them to know they were wrong.

> Are they bringing anything new to the table?

No.

> Their timeline is pretty tight with first rig in 2 years and commercial level first power plant in another 2.

You can't even build a bog standard coal plant that fast.

> They should have demonstrated at least a couple of holes deeper than a few km by now you'd assume.

If you believed in them, yes, I'd agree.

The whole point is that microwave ablation of these materials does not require drilling mud and is self-stabilizing by the pressures and molten material generated, while also sealing the bore hole and preventing quite a lot of water table, H2S, etc contamination. In theory it should allow substantially deeper boreholes.

The technology is real, and the required power density is surprisingly low.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286571247_Penetrati...

Vaporized into what? Something that you’ll have to keep heated to 5000c for 20km until you can vent it?

Apparently that's what they intend. I wonder how you can keep 20km oven warm enough.

They'll be pumping neutral gas (probably N2 or argon) to purge the borehole. I would expect the ablated material to resolidify as fine particulate, which would get carried to the surface at ambient temperature and trapped in a filter.

A 20km borehole with a 10cm diameter is only ~157m3 of rock. If the dig takes four weeks (which would be unprecedentedly fast), you only need to purge ~64cm3/s, which is pretty trivial.

They'll need to do something like mix the dust into concrete. Silicate dust is a respiratory hazard. But that doesn't strike me as a significant hurdle.

>the deepest hole ever drilled by anyone was 7Km

12.2 km - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

And that was over three decades ago, you'd kind of expect technology to advance a bit in that time.

> earthquakes, screwing up water tables, or leaking gas and other chemicals out of the ground

You seem to be describing fracking which is a completely different technology.

Actually, I’m describing peoples misconceptions and fears to any process that penetrates deep below ground for resources (energy included). The general public will always be bringing up perceived or real dangers to drilling that deep (as they should, there is a lot of dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials that come from large well bores).

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