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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."
Is it completely necessary to reference The Core? It makes me remember it all over again. My poor, feeble mind will implode if I even try to comprehend the physics behind that film, let alone the acting. Oh god, the acting...
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Why isn't a robotic drilling submarine used ? It could operate in any depths and the drilling operation wouldn't depend on local weather condition.
There is already an infrastructure to deliver oil to the customers. this infrastructure didn't pop up over night, it was developed over 50+ years. spending money in finding new ways to find oil and gas is cheaper then spending money to find a new alternative source of power and deliver it to the customer.
finding a new source of energy and creating the infrastructure to support the use of the energy should be a long term goal. for the short term we should spend money on deep drilling projects like this, government money, one.
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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 problem with electric cars, if that's what you have in mind, is: batteries. Think of your laptop. You may well, have Moore's Law in full swing for the CPU, but that hasn't applied to batteries too. They're big, they're bulky and they can store only so much juice.
That's the problem. We may control nuclear energy, and we may already build very good electric engines, but _storing_ that energy for the car to use is the weakest link. By far. As energy-per-lbs goes, nothing comes even _near_ chemical stuff that burns. Gasoline packs more joules per kg than any battery. (And gunpowder packs even more, which is why soldiers still use that, instead of railguns with a battery pack.)
However, it's still not all lost. If you have another energy supply, you can make enough stuff that will burn in a car's conventional engine.
E.g., a real no-brainer is using the electricity generated by a nuclear plant to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen can be then burned in a relatively conventional internal combustion engine, taking the oxygen back from the atmosphere and giving water vapour back.
Other ways exist to combine that hydrogen with carbon from coal (of which there are far more reserves than oil), creating synthetic liquid fuel. You don't even need a nuclear plant for that.
(A lot of the panzer warfare in WW2 happened on synthetic fuel. It wasn't that cheap, but it kept the panzers rolling.)
Or in some limited cases you can just replace the fossil fuel use with electricity. E.g., see how we replaced the coal and diesel train engines with electric ones. Electric busses and trams exist already, and could eventually replace the diesel ones if the economics are right. Also, if the investment were justified, one could build a power grid along highways to support at least electric trucks.
Ultimately, though, everything boils down to economics. As long as it's cheaper to bring in oil from the middle east, than to brew local synthetic fuels, people will bring oil from the middle east. As long as it's cheaper to fill up your tank with gas coming from the middle east, than to get an expensive hydrogen powered car and hydrogen, people will continue importing oil from the middle east. And as long as electric cars will continue to be expensive _and_ have a 50 mile range, after which they need several hours to recharge (as opposed to minutes to fill a fuel tank), people will buy conventional cars.
When the economics will be right, however, expect to see someone coming with such replacements. The whole civilization collapsing into anarchy and famine as soon as we pumped the last barrel of oil out, makes a good Hollywood scenario, but ain't gonna happen in RL. More realistically we'll then start producing synthetic fuel in the short run, and pumping billions into R&D for better solutions, and life will go on. It won't be as cheap as it is today, but it ain't gonna be Armageddon either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here in Nigeria (!) we are developing deep space mining ships and your money will help us continue our secret space mining program...
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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