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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g?
The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
Actually, this is good environmentally. With better drilling tech, more oil can be obtained from fewer wells, reducing the need to "explore" places like ANWAR.
Why is it all the whacko enviro greeny extremists seem to think that everything is an either/or proposition?
As if the DOE had a budget of X dollars and was required to spend all of X on drilling tech or all of X on alternative fuels tech.
The reality is that the budget is just that... a budget. Some money goes to oil tech, some money goes to a variety of alternative energy tech, and the rest goes into the vast sink hole of spending that is the federal beaurocracy.
Thank you for reading this far into my diatribe about the stupid and ignorant people of the world and how they managed to get on the net.