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…

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.