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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."
data transfer over mud isn't new. The best oilfield services companies have been doing it for quite some time.
As for why they need to get data out, consider that when you're looking for oil, you need to figure out what the EXACT geological formations look like (in 3 dimensions) a mile or 2 underneath the surface of the earth. The more data you can get out of a hole about any number of factors (rock hardness, resistivity, etc...) at a known depth, the better your odds are of figuring out what's down there in the main.
Dojo: defanging browsers so you don't have to
While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?
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Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL?
Well, for starters you could put an array of accoustic, microwave, or electrical transmitters & sensors in the pipe just BEHIND the drill and image the region ahead of the drill with radar and/or sonar. If you see a pocket of something that sounds/conducts/reflects like oil a bit off to one side, you can adjust the drill to curve in that direction (or send the NEXT one over that way).
10 BPS just doesn't cut it for uploading imaging information, even if you put most of the fancy processing down with the sensore. But T1 rates are just fine.
There's lots of other stuff you want to monitor - temperature, pressure, conductivity, etc. to find out what sort of stuff you're drilling through.
And it's important to know when to give up, stop pouring money down THIS hole and start over somewhere else. It costs a LOT to run the rig long enough to drill even another foot...
I recall, back in the early days, a company in Ann Arbor made a little board with a CMOS Z80-clone, a ROM with a BASIC interpreter, a serial port, and a few I/O ports - including some analog inputs. They sold a LOT of 'em to an oil company.
Seems that every now and then they would pull up the drill and send one of these down to measure some stuff. Then they would send the drill down behind it and grind it up. It was cheaper to buy a new one (and the associated cable) each time than to leave the rig idle long enough to pull the old one up. (And considering how fast a winch can crank, and how much custom computer stuff cost back in those days, that will tell you a lot about the per-minute cost of an oil rig and drilling team.)
So imagine how much they can save if they don't need to pull the DRILL up - disassembling it as they go - then reverse the whole process to put it back down, every time they want to take another reading.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The western nations spent as much money on weapons as they thought was neccessary, combined with personal greed and kickbacks. Western Nations feared being conquered by the USSR and communism. Ask an oversimplified questiong, get an oversimplified answer.
We went to fight in the middle east to raise OPEC's price per barrel because that raises US Oil (the country, not the company) prices per barrel. The whole situation is created by big oil. So I suppose so. But if we were using hydrogen, it would probably be sold to us by the people who now run big oil, and they'd find someone else to get us pushed into a war with.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Directional and horizontal drilling have been in development for the better part of 20 years. This will be a godsend to them. As it is, the equipment required to transfer control and status data back and forth to the motors is bulky, expensive, and prone to failure.
Most of you don't realize it, but this type of drilling is used all over the place now for all kinds of things. The largest use other than the oil industry is for drilling underneath things (anything, roads, buildings, ship channels, etc) so that cabling, or really damn near anything requiring a hole in the ground can be laid without destruction to the overlying structure. In the early 90's, my dad participated in a project to raise a half-sunken ship from the bottom of a Danish port. They drilled horizontally under the ground beneath the ship, and ran metal cabling underneath it. The cabling was attached to barges on either side of the ship. They pulled apart and raised it off the ocean floor.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
And I'm sure that they are just going to air-lift the drilling equipment, living quarters, monitoring equipment, etc. in, right? No paths need to be made to get there, or to get the oil out.
Obviously you haven't seen pictures of it or been there yourself. Just because there aren't trees blooming 50 feet in the air doesn't make it desolate. There's this neat (but very fragile) ecology called Tundra. ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not ANWAR) is a Wildlife Refuge for a reason. And that reason is not that is is devoid of life.
Define better. More developed. Sure. More westernized. I grant you that. But the native cultures are struggling for survival. These are cultures that have existed far longer than western "civilization".
Developing (or exploiting, it all depends on how you wish to look at it) ANWR (remember, its first and foremost a Wildlife Refuge, not an oil field) will certainly be beneficial (in the short term) to Alaska's economy. I personally wonder if the benefits are worth the potential harm.
Yeah, it's offtopic. I'm probably feeding trolls as well. Life is hell.