
Abadoned Kola Superdeep Borehole - ramgorur
http://rusue.com/abandoned-kola-superdeep-borehole/
======
abcd_f
For the lazy -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole)

Edit: from the Russian version of the page -

A single drill bit lasted about 4 hours, which was enough to drill between 7
and 10 meters. In comparison, raising and lowering the drilling column took up
to 18 hours.

It also mentions that due to the core samples being saturated with hydrogen,
they turned to a fine dust unless they were raised very slowly to allow the
gas to dissipate.

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iamben
Re the "cries and groans" \-
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_to_Hell_hoax](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_to_Hell_hoax)

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VladTheImplier
Getting some real Doom 3 vibes here:

"It is rumored that at some point the drilling rig began to vibrate
unnaturally, as if someone were jerking for it from below. When the well
reached a mark of about 12,000 meters, scientific equipment recorded sounds
resembling the cries and groans of thousands of martyrs emanating from the
depths."

~~~
zaarn
Sadly, that is only an urban myth, there is some explanation on how it
appeared on the wikipedia page of the site.

~~~
mikeash
Personally, I’m quite happy that this supposed Hell turned out to be a myth.

~~~
zaarn
Idunno, Hell could have been a potential source of geothermal energy.

Or maybe it could aid in the discovery in previously unknown energy production
methods.

~~~
mikeash
Now there’s a fun moral dilemma. Is it ethical to generate electricity with
the torment of the damned if it replaces polluting power plants and they’d be
tormented anyway?

~~~
zaarn
I mean, they're gonna be tormented either way so why not make that useful...

I was playing at the DOOM (2016) scenario though.

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dotsh
Maybe they've excavated Balrog... any Grey hat want to go down there to check
what they found? And you know, maybe you'll turn into a white hat... ;)

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scrumper
Seems like it curved as it went down, I did not expect to see that but,
thinking about it, no reason it should just go straight down.

~~~
jofer
No boreholes are perfectly straight and vertical. In most cases, you're
twisting the drillstring at the top, so it naturally "wants" to corkscrew.
Furthermore, anisotropy in the rock causes things to deflect (deviate in
drilling terminology). Usually you don't know exactly where the well went
until you run a directional survey afterwards (basically, you lower a
gyroscope down the hole).

At the scale of a well, the steel drillstring is more like cooked spaghetti.
You don't "push" down, you use the weight of fluid (drilling mud) for
pressure. The drillstring is only meant to transmit torque. It's easy for it
to bend over long distances. (You can even turn things entirely around and use
fluid pressure to turn the bit, in which case the drillstring is basically a
steel hose that's stored coiled up.)

~~~
scrumper
Thank you, really interesting.

Is the drilling mud pumped down to create that pressure then, or is it
naturally present? Or one pumps water down to turn the grit into a slurry?

~~~
jofer
It is pumped, but the pumps are there to force circulation and keep things
under control rather than to provide the pressure directly.

You need a steady gradient of pressure. The pressure you need at the bottom of
the hole will fracture the rock in the shallow section. Pumps add a constant
pressure, so there's no way to get the right pressures at each depth with a
pump.

Instead, drilling exploits gravity to do the hard work. The drilling mud is
very dense (almost as dense as the rock) so that the pressure at the bottom of
the borehole from the weight of the mud is just a bit less than the pressure
from the weight of the rocks.

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Aardwolf
Nice, there's so much material for level design of a new Fallout-like game on
that website!

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Shivetya
how useful is hydrogen from such wells? is the quantity sufficient to warrant
just drilling for it or simply burning it to power the drilling?

~~~
lb1lf
-I would guess (mind, guess, I don't know the first thing about gas drilling) that as they needed to take great care retrieving the core samples slowly to allow the hydrogen to evaporate without damaging the sample (as per @abcd_f's comment above), the rate of hydrogen release from the rocks is simply too low for it to make any sense to drill for it.

After all, if hydrogen is slow to escape from the core sample, it stands to
reason it will be slow to escape from the surrounding rock, too.

(Given a bit of electricity, we can easily get lots and lots of hydrogen from
water, anyway.)

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kevin_thibedeau
No smiles in the 15km celebration photo.

~~~
ramgorur
Good catch, may be the work was too exhaustive and the exhaustion led to
depression once you realize that whatever you do it does not matter at the
end, everyone is paid the same, even all the credits go to the "united workers
of the world", not you.

~~~
sml156
They stopped because it was too hot, 180 Celsius.

The rock was more like plastic than rock.

------
RickJWagner
Boring.

~~~
sctb
Would you please start posting civilly and substantively?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
eps
It's a pun. These guys were boring holes.

