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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."
Well that's good news! They certainly need all the help they can get bringing us all that Texas Tea that we need to live fulfilling lives.
I can sleep easy now. Thanks, technology!
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But is it backhoe proof? Then I'll be impressed.
Stupid contractors keep cutting through damn cables in my area.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I seem to remember M.U.D. as standing for "Multi-User-Door"? Games on BBS's were called door games. Were there two meanings, or is this the same as the unknown origin of BNC?
Why bother making pipes and wells smarter when we can just beat up Iraq and take their oil instead?
OK, so we should immediately replace our current fossil fuel with a non-greenhouse gas emitting energy source, right?
Go Nuclear Power!
Everything else is just code for "make do with less energy useage" right now. Hydrogen is going to eventually be there, so will orbitally generated microwave beamed solar, as well as microturbine generators and a dozen other sources but none of them are here today. When it makes economic sense to switch, the US and the rest of the world will switch. Until then, hooray for oil!
The fact is that switching uneconomically shrinks our surplus. So what say the economically illiterate enviros. The problem is that this surplus is what is used to feed the starving, educate the poor ignorant, and various other good works (along with the usual self-indulgences). If you take away the surpluses, it's the hard up 3rd worlders that end up getting hit the hardest.