It wouldn’t help that much, because you only have one atmosphere of pressure to remove (which for reference is only enough to suck water up about 35 ft.).
That’s theoretically possible, but how do you install them? Power them? Deal with abrasive particles and lubrication issues?
What people have decided is more practical is: have a big bucket in the hole, and have compressed air blow the cuttings into the bucket. Then it’s periodically lifted up and emptied. But liquid drilling fluid has other advantages, like balancing pressure down in the hole.
Of course, with microwave drilling you can’t use liquid and need a large mass flow of air for cooling.
If the ambient temperature is already close to 500°C (at a depth of around 13 km), I cannot see how you want to work with a liquid—and there is (NOT YET) no drill at all working and generating additional heat! And your great diamond drill bit will be worn out in no time at such a temperature. The idea with the bucket will certainly work up to several hundred meters—if the drill and rods have been removed from the borehole beforehand—I am curious to see what the client says about a drilling system where the entire string has to be pulled back every 10 minutes to clear the drilling debris.
Incidentally, cooling and blowing out is NOT carried out with air but with inert gas—e.g. liquid CO2.
Since several cross connections between the two vertical deep boreholes have to be created for the “closed loop system” and provided with pressure-tight walls, it would be interesting to know how you would clear a horizontal, 0.5-1km long borehole at a depth of 15km with a bucket! And for several 100 MW, you need—a whole bundle - such cross pipes as heat exchangers—which also have to be tight for the 300 bar pressure of the supercritical water! Approx. 900 l/s (0.9688 kWh/kg ) for 1GW output power of the generators - - - which needs 3 MW of power for the approx. 15 high pressure pumps—to produce that stream!
It wouldn’t help that much, because you only have one atmosphere of pressure to remove (which for reference is only enough to suck water up about 35 ft.).
I guess that’s right… what if you have a series of pumps in the same pipe, say one every kilometer?
That’s theoretically possible, but how do you install them? Power them? Deal with abrasive particles and lubrication issues?
What people have decided is more practical is: have a big bucket in the hole, and have compressed air blow the cuttings into the bucket. Then it’s periodically lifted up and emptied. But liquid drilling fluid has other advantages, like balancing pressure down in the hole.
Of course, with microwave drilling you can’t use liquid and need a large mass flow of air for cooling.
If the ambient temperature is already close to 500°C (at a depth of around 13 km), I cannot see how you want to work with a liquid—and there is (NOT YET) no drill at all working and generating additional heat! And your great diamond drill bit will be worn out in no time at such a temperature. The idea with the bucket will certainly work up to several hundred meters—if the drill and rods have been removed from the borehole beforehand—I am curious to see what the client says about a drilling system where the entire string has to be pulled back every 10 minutes to clear the drilling debris.
Incidentally, cooling and blowing out is NOT carried out with air but with inert gas—e.g. liquid CO2.
Since several cross connections between the two vertical deep boreholes have to be created for the “closed loop system” and provided with pressure-tight walls, it would be interesting to know how you would clear a horizontal, 0.5-1km long borehole at a depth of 15km with a bucket! And for several 100 MW, you need—a whole bundle - such cross pipes as heat exchangers—which also have to be tight for the 300 bar pressure of the supercritical water! Approx. 900 l/s (0.9688 kWh/kg ) for 1GW output power of the generators - - - which needs 3 MW of power for the approx. 15 high pressure pumps—to produce that stream!
e.g. https://de.starpumpalliance.com/pumpen/verdraengerpumpen/plungerpumpen/