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Drilling Under the Sea
prof_peabody writes "The IODP (Intergrated Ocean Drilling Program) is about to get rolling in a couple of days. If you live in one of these countries then your tax dollars have contributed to the construction of the giant drillship Chikyu, which was launched a little while back (project timeline). The American contigent website is loaded with info and obligatory acronyms. The first leg of the IODP will investigate how water flows through rock formations beneath the seafloor during an eight-week expedition this summer to the eastern flank of the Juan de Fuca Ridge off the coast of British Columbia. Some of you geeks with beards may remember the DSDP (Deep Sea Drilling Project) or the recently completed ODP (Ocean Drilling Program). The real advance in the new program that will cost well over a billion dollars is the IODP riser drill ship that 'will provide a way to drill into continental margins where oil and gas deposits can cause drilling safety concerns and into regions with thick sediment sections, fault zones, and unstable formations.' A good overview of the IODP can be found here, and the necessary references to Megalodon and none other than The Core."
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You confuse fuel with energy source. The problem with alternative fuels is that you need energy to generate the most promising of those, ie hydrogen. So we would need solar, nuclear, wind or whatever power to get us the hydrogen. Fusion is not here yet. Non-fossil fuel is not trivial. Vegetable or other biomass fuels will also generate hydrocarbons. And I agree with you that as long as we keep looking for oil and keep getting it there will be little incentive for the big players (oil companies...) to go into renewable energy sources. So for the time being, unfortunately, we'll keep our dependence upon the middle east. By the way - oil is not only fuel. Plastics and so on are also made from it. That may even be the worst dependence. Imagine a world without plastics. If only for that reason we'll keep using oil for at least a couple of decades.
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The US does do plenty of offshore drilling, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico and, to a lesser extent, off of California. However, most of the oil doesn't go into government stockpiles or the military, but does go into general oil use: mostly gasoline, but also chemicals, heating oil, and plasticis).
There's simply not enough space to store the necessary equipment on board, esp. when you consider the need for bentonite coolant circulation etc. Assembling the drill string either through or outside the hull would be an interesting problem, as would the bouyancy/stability control as you dump a few hundred tons of payload overboard.
So a nice idea, but much more economical done from a big surface ship - even when it means waiting on the weather.
Chikyu (should be Chikyuu actually) is Japanese for Earth, as in the planet we live on.
Just in case anyone is curious.
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Of course it is. If you hold the temperature and salinity constant, then the density of seawater increases with the depth due to progressively higher pressures as you go deeper - you can see that quite clearly by playing with this seawater density calculator (try 15 degrees and a salinity of 35, then increase the pressure from 1 to 1000 to 10,000 kPa, and watch what happens to the density).
Greater density means more seawater per unit of volume as you go deeper, which you can do because liquids are, in fact, readily compressible, albeit not as compressible as gases are. Bringing water up from a depth of 10 meters simply isn't deep enough to observe the effect you want to observe. Bring water up from 10,000 meters, say from the bottom of the Marianas trench, and you will indeed observe it expanding quite forcefully when you open its container - if you don't have a container that can withstand the internal pressure of that water trying to expand, it'll go pop as you try to bring it back up.
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This is just another indicator that oil production is beginning to decline. To keep up with the growing market demand from increased population, developing countries, etc., oil companies are looking into new and dangerous ways to get the remaining oil on earth. For more information, Google "peak oil."
IODP does not search for oil - it is collecting scientific data. Don't bother bringing up any conspiracy theories - the oil companies have much better proprietary data in the areas that IODP is drilling than the open-source (i.e. IODP) ocean science community will EVEER have.
IODPs previous ships (or rather, ODP, its predecessor oceandrilling.org ) were not able to drill in areas of the continental margin that might have contained oil deposists. It is actually pretty dangerous - if you hit a gas deposit, the density of the water can be reduced to the point that the ship loses bouyancy and sinks - almost instantly.
As a result of safety concerns related to this, IODP was unable to drill in some very enticing (i.e. data rich) environments. This new vessel will allow them to drill pretty much anywhere, which should greatly increase the available database. IODP research is focussed largely on earth dynamics, paleontology, paleoclimate/climate change, and stratigraphy. Oil is near the bottom of the list - as previously mentioned, the oil companies already have better data. Researchers interested in oil are typically working elsewhere.
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