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."

Why the core?

[Hungus]

"and the necessary references to Megalodon and none other than The Core."

I would have thought the The Abyss [imdb.com] would have been a much better reference than The Core. Certainly better science, and for that matter better science fiction.

More info on the Chikyu here

[seaker]

http://www.jamstec.go.jp/jamstec-e/odinfo/sdsrepor t.html

Corrected URL

[bairy]

here [jamstec.go.jp] Curious, /. keeps putting a space between the r and t in report.. i.e. repor t.html

Re:no more oil from the middle east.

[InternationalCow]

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.

Gulf of Mexico Offshore Drilling

[DaRat]

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).

Answer, logistics, and power

[the_twisted_pair]

A quick Google will show you just how big all the equipment involved in drilling really is, and just how much power is required to support drilling operations - a hint, it's in the megawatt range. You are not doing it with batteries. Ships like this have huge deck-mounted powerplant independant of the propulsion requirements to cope with demand.

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 is Japanese for...

[B4RSK]

Chikyu (should be Chikyuu actually) is Japanese for Earth, as in the planet we live on.

Just in case anyone is curious.

Re:Why the core?

[HFXPro]

At that depth and pressure, I thought a mixture of helium and oxygen was more the norm...though I don't remember the science behind it. But I guess they didn't want everyone talking like Mickey Mouse, though it may have been more entertaining.

You would not have to use helium just because it is deep. A normal sealevel atmospheric composition will work fine, and provided your hull is tough enough, you could leave it at 1 atmosphere. Of course this would pose to problems:

1. Having to make the hull really strong since their is no counterbalance; or

2. if the structure is pressurized to better match that of the surrounding seawater (thus letting you get buy with a more fragile hull), then any sudden drop in the air pressure would likely result in nitrogren bubbling in the blood (the bends).

HeliOx mixtures are most often used because they allow more rapid rises to and from the deep and because they are safer. A normal atmospheric composition would require someone to most likely spend days just rising from say 1,000 feet safely. The ocean is fundamentally a much harder place to explore safely then is space.

Its not about oil

[Anonymous Coward]

So far most of the posts here have been referring to oil. While oil is commonly drilled for, it is not the only reason one would explore the sediment and rock under the seafloor.

most notably, paleoclimate and paleocirculation studies use various proxies found the sediments of the seafloor. The oceans provide a much more continuous record than one can find on land. these proxies can be correlated with other methods and other locations. From these records everything from sea surface temperature to icecap volumes can be modeled.

Re:Liquid isn't compressible.

[general_re]

On the last point, a liquid isn't compressible in itself.

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 [flinders.edu.au] (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.

the US wastes huge amounts of electricity

[zogger]

Every night, electrical demand goes down, but the plants keep running. That electricty is just wasted. It is a HUGE number of megawatts. Some places will even give you a rate decrease if you buy your juice only at night, yet very few homeowners or businesses take advantage of the fact. One factory I worked at had their new building built with a thermal storage scheme for heating that used pipes embedded in the concrete floors. An antifreeze liquid was circulated while it was heated with the cheaper electric at night, it heated the concrete, which radiated heat evenly up through the floor during the day. This was up in massacussetts with cold winters, and it worked great.

Electrical cars would be cheaper if they were only/mostly recharged at night, and you had a smart meter or a separate meter for the charging. We could also have battery storage in more homes and businesses, like the alternative energy rigs use now, for use during the day. Just by using thisa wasted night time juice we could eliminate the need for a lot of the new plants proposed, and by switchiung to electric cars more, eliminate the need for getting additional petroleum products.

The government could also offer tax breaks to corporations and individuals for running a third shift at night as a standard instead of a normal first shift, just to take advantage of the wasted energy. Combined with the cheaper energy they could get then, it would be quite a deal in a lot of ways. If it was significant enough taxc breaks combined with cheaper utility costs, then a lot of businesses would switch, and it would become commonplace to have the third shift as normal.

And for longer range trips with electric cars, say on the weekends you want to go asomeplace camping whatever, or on vacation, etc, the solution is simple, you have small trailers that attach to the cars that contain a normal fuel tank and a generator. The trailers could be 1/2 normal cargo, 1/2 generator and fuel tank. The range of electrics now is fine for getting to work and back for millions of people, there's just not a lot of electrics to be had. The GM EV1 cars (more 100 miles range not 50) were a hit, the owners loved them, but GM only leased them and is destroying them now, despite thousands of owners begging to purchase them. By all accounts, what I have read and heard people say, they were roomy enough, fast enough, both from a stop and on the highway, could carry enough stuff, and were a no brainer maintenance-wise. They were cheap to run, and night time reduced rate charging would have cut those expenses in half, which were good to begin with. Heck, I live out in the country and an electric car with a 100 mile range would be good enough for our purposes, we only go to town once a week, and 100 miles is more than enough to get there and back, plus some. The battery tech is good enough now, I think that's a strawman argument. It's not a solution for every single application you use a vehicle for, but for millions and millions of people it could be, just with two pieces of legislation passed,mandated cheaper electric bought only at night-not a local electrico option but they are mandated to do so, and the tax breaks for night time business in general to help reduce peak daytime demand loads. And one other piece of legilsation would be very useful to save another untold billions a year in energy costs, no new construction that didn't adhere to R-50 or better insulation standards.

We don't have near as much an energy problem as most people think, we have a problem with how we use what we already have, and how much gets totally wasted. I've worked on superinsulated residential structures and seen the difference-absolutely no comparison with normal construction. Literally drops the homes major heating and cooling bills to like a fifth what they would be normally. And really, solar and wind are here now and work, they just aren't being pushed much. I've used it enough to know it's practical for a lot of people, generally speaking.

There isn't one single magic bullet, but enough solutions exist today to mitigate a lot of our energy needs using what is available NOW, not have to develop vast new infrastructure with totally new devices and processes.

Peak Oil is near

[per11]

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."

Re:Diamonds?

[SubtleNuance]

Diamonds are note really rare. Diamonds can be manufactured indistinguishable from mined diamonds (arguably better, the environmental impact of diamond mines is presently offloaded to the commons (yes, i know making diamonds require energy etc)

Diamonds are a scam in every way... mostly, I feel sorry for people who spend money thinking its an investment, when really, it is the ultimate testiment to consumer culture and shallowness. The more you spend on diamonds, the more empty headed you are.

Re:Liquid isn't compressible.

[general_re]

BTW, if my back-of-the-envelope scribblings are correct, at 16,000 PSI - the very deep parts of the ocean - water would lose about 5% of its volume due to the pressure.

This isn't about oil, it is about science

[TheMeddler]

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 [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.

Re:Diamonds?

[mpe]

Diamonds are note really rare.

Just well controlled by a cartel.

Diamonds can be manufactured indistinguishable from mined diamonds (arguably better, the environmental impact of diamond mines is presently offloaded to the commons (yes, i know making diamonds require energy etc)

Quite a lot of work has been invested in being able to distinguish a mined and manufactured gem diamond. For industrial diamonds there is less of a fuss to be made.

Diamonds are a scam in every way... mostly, I feel sorry for people who spend money thinking its an investment, when really, it is the ultimate testiment to consumer culture and shallowness.

The idea "a diamond is forever" was though up specifically to prevent a second hand gem market.

Re:Diamonds?

[WhiteBandit]

Excellent article on man-made diamonds via Wired Magazine">Wired Magazine [wired.com].

The Science of the DSDP/ODP/IODP

[trillian42]

In case some of you didn't RTFAs, I'd like to point out that these scientific drilling programs have almost nothing to do with finding oil (the marine scientists leave that to the oil companies for the most part). Instead they are about understanding geologic processes that take place on the ocean floor.

On land, you can usually find a natural outcrop or a quarry or a mine to walk up to and examine the history of the Earth's crust in that area. Sometimes you even get hints to what's going on deeper in the mantle. On the seafloor, deep sea drilling is one of the key ways to get at the same kinds of information. What are the different layers in the crust, and how would they look on a seismic profile? Where do the sediments come from? What can they tell us about past climate change? Did higher temperatures or different atmospheric chemistries get recorded in the shells of oceanic micro-critters? How does fluid move through the crust, and how does that affect the hydrothermal vent communities that live on mid-ocean ridges in extreme conditions (300 degrees C, wierd water chemistries)?

Scientific drilling has very very little to do with extracting fossil fuels and a lot to do with figuring out how the Earth works.

Re:no no no no no

[WhiteBandit]

Err, as others have stated, the goal of the IODP (and before that, the ODP) isn't to find mineral deposits. It's strictly a research vessel to carry out science.

Quite a bit of interesting science has been carried out. Last year, Dr. Alan Mix [oregonstate.edu], a professor who worked on the ship, spoke at our school for a seminar. He dealt with paleoclimates. Using the ODP to extract cores from the sea floor, he was able to determine global temperatures from the amount of Oxygen-18 (I believe?) isotopes that were trapped in fossilized diatoms.

In short, RTFA instead of posting knee jerk reactions to an article that contains the word "oil" in it. :-P