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Changes In Rocks Noted Before Earthquakes
Smivs writes with this snippet from an article at the BBC, well worth reading: "Scientists have made an
important advance in their efforts to predict earthquakes, the journal Nature says. A team of US researchers has detected stress-induced changes in rocks that occurred hours before two small tremors in California's San Andreas Fault. The observations used sensors lowered down holes drilled into the quake zone. The team says we are a long way from routine tremor forecasts but the latest findings hold out hope that such services might be possible one day."
How much is it? It costs a lot of money. I work for a Geology company and we had our Geologists out on site during the drilling of the SAFOD project. I was out there for a week relieving the other hands. The main cost of the operation is time. If you want to drill a hole, you have to contract out a drilling rig. That's 10's of thousands of dollars a day. The longer it takes to drill a well, the more it costs.
They were drilling directionally with a 17" bit; that's a huge bit and it costs a lot of money. It's thousands of dollars for one. They used several bits to drill the hole.
Drilling directionally takes a lot longer to do for various reasons. The biggest reason was because they were drilling directly into a Granite formation. Granite is a hard, silica-rich, igneous rock. It does not break apart easily like Sandstone. It takes a long time to drill, when I was there, we were making between 5-10 feet/hour - at that rate, a 5000'-8000' deep hole takes a LONG time to drill, especially with the directional part factored in. And that Granite just chews up those big 17" bits, which means you have to replace them a lot.
Then you have to pay for the mud. The mud was a water-based system designed to lubricate the hole, keep it from collapsing, and use it to treat any problems. Like anything else, the longer they're producing mud, the more it costs. I've seen mud bills over a million dollars on one well before.
Then you have to pay all the people on location. The Company Man, sort of the Foreman of a location, costs at least 2000-4000 dollars every day he's out there. You have to pay the Roughnecks every day they're out there to drill, the mud engineers, geologists, safety guys, etc. And since this was a far more scientifically oriented job than most wells drilled, there was a lot of other cool stuff and personnel that had to be paid.
In the end, we're talking millions of dollars. Millions and millions. I don't really have an exact price to tell you, I was just a contractor on part of the job. But it was a really long job, I feel safe guessing at least 10 million dollars.
And that's just for one hole. If you can streamline the process and figure out where delays happened and if you can fix those delays on the next job, you'll be able to do subsequent wells cheaper.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
You know how you can tell that an earthquake is going to occur by a city? IT'S BUILT ON A FREAKING FAULT LINE. Wouldn't it just make more sense to make building a bit more earthquake proof? Why do so many people REBUILD by a fault line and then say "ZOMFG I hope another tragedy like this doesn't occur. Might as well douse yourself in gasoline and hope a spark never goes off.
And yet the largest recorded quake in the Southeastern US occurred right in the middle of a tectonic plate...
This guy's the limit!
That would be like rebuilding a hurricane flooded city that is below sea level and only protected by weak levies... like that's going to happen! ... oh wait....