After rotary drilling, what?

Some technology will succeed rotary drilling.  Rotary drilling is approaching the limit of how good it can make a hole in the ground. These holes can be very complex curly-cues several miles long, twisting down like parking-garage ramps, guided by directional tools steered by pulses in the drilling mud.

When a technology is in full flower, its successor may be already sprouting from the seed.  Iron-hulled clipper ships were the supreme form of sailing vessel, and they were developed after steamships began to cross the oceans.

Rotary drilling was the technology that made Howard Hughes’ fortune when Hughes Tool introduced the tricone bit in 1933 (hxxp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_drilling). For 75 years, all holes have been drilled using rotary drilling. What will be next?  My money says an air-drilling method using lasers or some other method of turning rock into plasma.  Who’s the next Howard Hughes going to be?  One of you?  Enjoy your foot-long fingernails and endless loop of Ice Station Zebra…

oops, "had begun" sorry.

Mind controlled flies that melt away rock with their digestive juices.

Focussing 2 gamma rays onto rocks, the gamma rays pass through tons of rock without losing much energy. The Gamma rays cross at the point you want to drill, the frequency is then tweaked until they resonate releasing enough energy to causing the rock to explode so it can be removed. You then focus it on the next point.

Once a successor to rotary drilling shows up, valuable ore deposits can be reached, which weren't even considered before.  I mean the ore bodies--yet unmapped--which lie in Proterozoic rocks buried beneath Phanerozoic overburden in such places as Kansas, Ohio, Colorado; France, Germany, Russia; Angola, Libya, Egypt; and so on.  The Witwatersrand is this sort of thing, and more may exist, deeply buried, elsewhere.  The inventor of post-rotary drilling may be in for some huge piles of cash. 

I love yuppies.  Who else understands so little about practical reality but can come up with convoluted solutions that only fit a technical reality?

The successor to rotary drilling is BETTER rotary drilling.  Gamma rays?  Melting rock?  Where do you people think all that energy is going to come from?

Once you get all that Star Trek energy nonsense out of your mind, you come to realize that a lot of the solutions used in the real world are optimal for the Big Four concerns of any particular engineering application:

· Speed of work.
· Cost of work.
· Quality of work.
· The energy required to work.

For almost all drilling applications, a rotary bit is the solution.  It does the job acceptably fast, with acceptable maintenance and operational costs, with controllable results, and uses many of the current power systems.  In short, rotary drilling is the OPTIMAL solution in the practical world.

Right off the bat, using radiation would involve so much power that the applications are limited.  So, a deep driller using such esoterica as radiation or just heat, is not usable.

The next generation of deep drilling would undoubtedly involve a more autonomous drilling head, which would largely still be connected to the wellhead by means of cables and tubes for power and control.  This drill head would be able to drill in any arbitrary direction, making a large-scaled 3D maze in rock if it so desired.  It may be followed by push/pull slave units that assist in delivery of cabling or fuel, and in removal of drill debris.

The generation after THAT will involve the completely autonomous drill head, which by necessity would be fairly large (up to 20FT diameter) to accommodate the nuclear power source.  This autonomous drill head would only be the head of a large linear system for moving debris back to the entrance, as well as using intermediary units to perform various tasks like sampling, inspection, crack filling, sheathing, and whatever other finishing operation is required.

>>6
Gamma rays.

Speed of work = speed of light.
Cost of work = Same as running an airliner.
Quality of work = Only machinery needed is to remove the excess vapourised rock.
The energy required to work = a mere 150 MW

Done. When is the world going to admit they are inferior in intelligence to me?

>>Gamma rays?  Melting rock?  Where do you people think all that energy is going to come from?

STEAM! 

Wait, all kidding aside, how about steam?

Like I said, #6, yuppies are great for technical solutions that having nothing to do with practical solutions.

Speed of work = Speed of light?  That's not the work speed I was talking about, Mr. Overeducated Ignoramus.  The speed of work is the TOTAL operation of removal ... measured in inches per minute, probably.  Rotary drilling is the only thing *for the power delivered* that achieves a workable speed.  A "gamma ray" system just can't get enough power to the drill face to match.  However, a tiny, radiation drill might have suitable applications ... just not the bedrock driller that you falsely thought you were analyzing.  We use ultrasonic drills today to great effect ... but again, not for a bedrock penetrator.

Cost of work = Airliner?  I'm so glad you pulled that result right out of your ass.  A system that emits gamma rays and attempts to move bedrock like a rotary drill would be outrageously expensive.  This is why we still use rotary drills, hint-effin'-hint.

Quality of work = Handles vaporized rock.  This does have some potential; beside having some high temperatures to consider (moderated by small quantities of such masses at any one time), rock vapor can be emitted as a slurry when mixed with a transport liquid.  It might also be possible to convert the vapor to a cold dust or other particulate that can be transported with air.  Rotary drills have the same problem -- how to get rid of the debris?

Energy required = Again, this not an issue of some bookwormy calculation of the energy required, but the totality of energy+delivery+cost.  I don't even know which orifice you pulled 150MW out of, but even if true, it's a hellacious amount of power to deliver to a drill head.  Once again, it's just not practical.

The world may be inferior in the intelligence that it takes to play mind games with gamma rays, but an experienced engineer will underbid and outperform your competing contract each and every time.

As usual, performance trumps plans.  Anybody can come up with a plan, and it takes even less to write the engineering equivalent of an episode of Star Trek.  Come back with you have your wonderful high-radiation driller operational.  By then, you can set you own price and laugh at us Old Fogies all the way to the bank.  It's all too likely instead that you'll be serving burgers and fries to real engineers.  "Get me a bacon cheeseburger, pal, and make it snappy ... I'm only in town for a few days while I setup the autonomous, rotary drilling rig that I invented which saves 6% in running costs."

Don't call me gay, but I need some mary jay!

Marijuana MUST be legalized.