4 ms·
That's strange, wouldn't a plastic be much easier to drill into? Maybe it required a different kind of drill head that they had no way of getting down there wit
by tinco 4y ago
That's strange, wouldn't a plastic be much easier to drill into? Maybe it required a different kind of drill head that they had no way of getting down there within budget?
- _nalply 4y agoThe problem is the pressure. Even steel gets soft when it gets hot enough and with the pressure its like trying to push folded toilet paper through cake dough.
- pmoriarty 4y agoIf it's already that hot, why do they even need to dig any deeper? Why not extract the heat from there and use it to create power?
- _nalply 4y agoYeah, that's exactly what people do already. And secondly it doesn't take an extremely high temperature to reduce steel's strength. Many steels starts losing strength at 200°C, cast iron at 400°C. Source: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/metal-temperature-strength-d_1353.html https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/metal-temperature-strengt... This doesn't mean that the drill is soft but at extreme depth extreme hardness is required.
- pmoriarty 4y agoSo why is that not enough? What would digging even deeper get us?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYou need about 500C for steam turbines to be good, and the relatively weak heat won't last. I guess you could use the heat as you go to try to cool it enough to keep drilling over a few years.
- pmoriarty 4y agoAnother idea might be to have solar panels or wind turbines up top and geothermal below. Both could use molten salt storage, from which energy is generated on demand. This way, any heat generated from geothermal would not be wasted. It's just a matter of whether the economics of drilling and maintaining the bore hole would be worth it.
- _nalply 4y agoI don't know. I am afraid that article is bullshit. So it doesn't make sense to give an answer to your question. This aside, let me give some examples about geothermy. In Iceland and in New Zealand it is possible to get hot water from the ground without deep drillings. In Switzerland there was a failed project about geothermy, because the drill down to the granite bedrock at a depth of about 2700 m and deeper caused an earthquake. People in Basel are very sensitive because it was a location of an huge earthquake 1356. In other words, we don't need to drill so deep at all. YAGNI.