Hmm maybe it was deeper. I remember being shocked at the time, but my memory of the scale may be significantly off. It was discussed in the context of "there is barely any water in this aquifer these days."
Likely the second - they usually base drilling depth on the known area and a wide margin, so everyone probably thought 75 feet was fine, do a hundred to be safe.
The article mentioned 100-160ft from the surface, so i'm not sure where the "deep" part mentioned in the headlines comes in. Perhaps their ultimate plan is for deep & this demo didn't try to address the deep part? That said, if 100ft below had enough forces to produce 100kw (ecological issues aside) that sounds pretty fantastic, even if just a demo.
I think we should dig the California viaduct deeper. Make it one long lake. Or dig giant water holes all along it. All the excess water can just fill up the holes along its 700 mile length. No idea if it's practical(probably not), but watching all that water flow into the ocean this winter seemed like such a waste.
The WRCB's plan is to store 600,000 acre feet of water which is 26,136,000,000 cubic feet. If we took 500 miles of viaduct (2,640,000 feet) at an average depth of 30 feet and average width of 40 feet ( = 3,168,000,000 cubic feet) and dug it 10x deeper, we'd be styling.
I mean, a 300 foot trench along the middle of California is doable, right?
Wow, they are less than 2 mi from the ocean and they had to dig 1300 feet to get water, including about 850 feet below sea level! That must be some pretty impermeable ground they've got.
My understanding is that the well is measured from the point at which drilling starts -- so the Deepwater Horizon started lower down, and one can therefore argue that the depth they reached (as opposed to the depth they drilled) is 11,944m.
It's maybe not a useful technical measure, but it's a lot closer in "depth" than I imagined it would be given the amount of attention given to the Kola borehole, and especially the tales of the difficulties they faced. Makes me think that one of the big oil companies could probably beat the record if they wanted.
I think the deepest people drill is not much more than 300 ft (still takes a lot of energy to raise a head of water) so maybe you’re right. It doesn’t seem that deep in geological terms so seeing traces on the surface is plausible to me(but again, I’m no geologist).
I thought the BOP was 30,000 feet down or is that the length of the bore hole? I've been fairly ignorant as to paying in depth attention to the whole debacle.
It may be that the aquifer in Devil's Hole is somehow connected to a network of underwater aquifers thousands of miles away in Mexico… but we just don't know, and have no way of knowing right now.
I think you're being overly generous to Nature. By my read, they just misinterpreted "deepest hole drilled offshore for scientific purposes" as "deepest hole drilled offshore for any purpose".
The water depth was already cited in the top-level comment:
> deepwater horizon drilled to 10,683 m in 1,259 m of water
If you set your bar this low, did you have to dig a trench first? What did you do when you hit the water table? Did ground heat ever become a problem as you edged closer to the Mantle?
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