Drilling For Oil With Megawatt Lasers

Deglr6328 writes: "The U.S. Department of Energy's Fossil Energy site has a story about using lasers to drill through rock at 10 to 100 times as fast as conventional rock boring technologies. One of the lasers tested was the 2.2 megawatt M.I.R.A.C.L., which was originally designed in 1985 for the star wars program. A cool video clip of its test firing can be found at the GTI page here. It looks like we'll be stuck with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas for some time, so we might as well do it James Bond style!" Sounds more like Real Genius style to me. Who brought the popcorn?

Comments

Heh, it's a weapon alright...

[Feng]

Anyone notice the number of kills painted on the side of the laser in the pic off the page?

Looks like five planes, a missile and two other things I can't make out.

Feng.

Fossil fuels aren't inevitable

[fhwang]

It looks like we'll be stuck with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas for some time ...

Sure, the new drilling technology is cool, and its engineers are to be commended. But but the tree-hugging lefty in me feels obliged to point out that our reliance on fossil fuels isn't so much an inevitability as it is a political choice we have made.

Take, for example, the recent actions of the German government to encourage wind power. Due to a plan initiated ten years ago, the state of Schleswig-Holstein now generates about 19 percent of electricity from wind, and nationwide the wind industry employs about 15,000 people.

The first way to lose a political argument is to agree with those who say "this is the only way to do it." There's always another way to do it (see also: Perl); very often, there's a better way to do it, too.

I can see it now...

[lowe0]

"No, Mr. Tux... I expect you to die..."

More details on MIRACL

[Vireo]

MIRACL stands for Middle Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser. As its name implies, it is indeed a chemical laser, that is, one that gets the lasing medium excited with a chemical reaction instead of a more conventional current source or flash lamp. The structure of MIRACL is really one of a reactor, with the starting material being C2H4 (ethylene), NF3 and helium. This mixture is burnt to provide free fluorine atoms that reacts with injected deuterium molecules further down the stream. This reaction is really violent, so that the laser is in a perpetual explosion state. Vibrationnally excited deuterium-fluorine molecules in the produced supersonic flow thus constitutes the lasing medium. So you now have to put mirrors and windows inside this reactor to get your laser. One of my profs said once "I don't understand why they use chemical lasers as lasers; they would be much more efficient as bombs".

Main source: Lasers and Electro-Optics, Davis, Cambridge Editor.

Re:Potential Problem

[bmongar]

Firstly conventional drilling technology employs fixed drill bits, which use water and suction to remove rock debris. This system has no such facility for that

Why not? I see no reason that they can't run pipes down as they drill to evacuate gasses and dust as the rock is vaporized

Also it is very difficult to drill down and then sideways, as is common with current methods. Without this facility, the oil rig or platform is useless once the oil below has been used up

Maybe, but I would think there would be a way to drill at an angle, maybe with some high grade reflective joints. I'm not an optical physicist though

Conventional drilling also places a pipe as the bit moves forward, cementing the drill hole. With this system the hole must be "burned" and then a pipe forced down. This process will negate any speed gains in the actual drilling

Once again there is no reason the pipes can't be pushed through the hole as you go, keeping the speed gains