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."

Comments

Re:1 MB/s? Here's a guess...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.