Good afternoon and considering the viewers we have today for this webinar also, good morning and good evening. My name is Frank van Bergen, and today I'm hosting this webinar on novel drilling technologies to accelerate the heat transition. Gladly, I'm not alone. So I have with me here today my colleague Andreas Reinicke from TNO. Jan Jette Blangé from Canopus Drilling Solutions and Liam Lines from GA Drilling in Houston. So today, after a short scoping introduction for myself about the heat transition in Europe and the Netherlands, I would like to give the floor to Andreas Reinicke, who will talk about the who will give an overview of emerging drilling technologies. Hand over to Jan who will talk about directional drilling.
Before we shift to Houston, where Liam will talk about how to make the geothermal anywhere a reality, and we will close off this session with a panel discussion and questions. So just as an introduction, how does this interactive webinar work? We invite you actually to ask questions. You can do that by using the button below at the right bottom in the video screen. if we cannot answer your questions today, we will follow up and we will connect to you after the after the webinar to to provide you with the answers. Where possible, this webinar itself can be watched online on demand at tonal. so I would like to start with, with scoping a little bit on why we we're having this webinar today and talk about the heat transition in Europe and the Netherlands.
So last week we have seen the closure of the Cop 29. And although there were, I think, some heavy debates about who's going to pay for what measures throughout the world. I think there's a general consensus that we need actually to take some actions regarding the climate, and also we need to shift from oil and gas towards more renewable resources for energy. Um, and with that, there was also a call for action to, to actually take some steps towards the, towards the production of energy.
And what I would like to point forward also is this is a editorial paper from from nature that clearly states that we need the subsurface, and we also need the geologists and the engineers, etc., who work in the subsurface to bring us actually the all the requirements that we need for this energy transition. So that can be in the part of mining for, for the the critical raw materials. But also the topic that we're discussing today is about CCS.
It's about hydrogen storage. It's about the storage of heat. Et cetera. Et cetera. And of course geothermal. But we're based in the Netherlands.
And if we look into the situation that we have here in the Netherlands, some colleagues of mine have they have actually done the modeling on what it actually takes to reach the the agreed targets for the, for the Paris Agreement. And if you take the subsurface out of the equation, there's just no way that we're getting towards the the goals that we that we need. So we need the whole portfolio of, of options that the subsurface Servers actually can offer, whether that's geothermal, hydrogen storage, carbon dioxide storage, heat storage, and geothermal. And if you then zoom in a little bit towards the geothermal situation that we have in the Netherlands at the moment, we can actually see that there are several options and several technologies that we're that we're deploying at the moment. So on one end, there's the open geothermal systems, which in the Netherlands are usually at the depth of around two kilometers, 2 to 3km. On the other hand, there's a major effort in development of of the Artis systems.
So the aquifer thermal energy storage systems that usually are developed at a depth of around 200m but can be slightly deeper. And we have the closed systems, the beta systems that actually are developed for the most part at now down to around 150m. But there are some developments that actually take this. This development also also deeper.
And what these three things, although they are all part of the geothermal family, is they all require quite specific drilling technologies and drilling techniques. And with that, I would like to pinpoint and point out that drilling as such is not new. We've been drilling as an industry, I think, for, for, for, for decades, even going probably millennia back when, when, when the first drilling operations were taking place in, in China. Um, we have, I think, in the recent years drilled further, drilled deeper, drilled complex reservoirs. Et cetera. Et cetera, et cetera.
But what we're facing now is actually we we have a little bit of scope change towards carbon dioxide, towards hydrogen, towards heat. And what these, um, technologies also have in common is that. The business cases are, are more marginal than we are used to in oil and gas. So it also means that in terms of competition towards oil and gas, we are.
From an energy for the energy transition. We are probably on the we're probably need to be more competitive in other ways. So that will require new developments and new developments that are probably dedicated towards the purposes that that that are requested. So with that, I'm representing here the center for Sustainable Energy.
And what we tried to do is actually we try to accelerate the implementation of new technologies, technologies for the energy transition. And we do that by by experimental testing at a 1 to 1 scale. And from that research is also the, uh, basically some of the topics that are being handled and discussed today. I think they are put on the spotlight here. And with that I would like to hand over to my colleague Andreas, who can take the floor. Perfect Thanks, Frank.
And I'm very happy today to talk about the overview of emerging drilling technologies. I'm Andreas Reinicke, I'm the lead scientist, world Technology at TNO. And these emerging drilling technologies I'm talking about are really here for, for geothermal provision and, and for the subsurface as well, and is really going for the shallow, the deep and the ultra deep resources. And Frank mentioned it already. We have a family, let's say of of geothermal solutions nowadays. And we really going from what you see here very much to the left is really to the ball heat exchangers a couple of hundred meters deep here and to to buffering solutions where the first hundred of meters are really used, for storage of heat and then extraction and extraction of heat.
Again, this is not classical geothermal, but we need a lot of drilling for this as well and good technologies for this as well. And then here in the middle we come to the low and mid temperature extraction. So that's what we classically know the medium depths here. So greenhouses heating of greenhouses is a very good example for it. And that goes in already to the three kilometer about three kilometer depth really to have the heat provision up to 150 degrees C. And the next step and there we see quite some exciting developments as well at the moment is really going deep, going very deep, drilling into the basement, into the hard crystalline rocks that we have.
And develop your reservoir, actually build or engineer your reservoir down there. On the one hand, with the enhanced geothermal systems, where then fractures are created between the well bores and water circulated, or even the advanced geothermal system, the deep closed loop solutions. And all this needs to need very different kinds of of drilling technology developments. And we're looking at the trends and the potential at the moment in Europe. I mean, there are already quite some great, great, great improvements going on here.
On the on the left side, you have a recent map of the heat and electricity production in, in in Europe, coming from the IG market report 2023. And there's heat in Europe. We have now 6.3GW thermal already produced from geothermal. And if you look into the Netherlands here, then even if you look at by area of the Netherlands and the Netherlands is even doing and doing best in, in, in Europe and, but interestingly, still the potential on top of it is even much higher.
So we have at the moment we have 0.2% electricity from special places, special locations in Europe and 2.8% of heating and cooling. And if you look into the potential which is laid out in the plants for the EU. Yeah. Then we can even get a factor of 50 higher in electricity provision and a factor of ten higher in heating and cooling. And what you have here in the centre where is these actually these heating and cooling.
Where is these output. Where's this coming from. In the centre here. A global review of the direct utilisation of geothermal. And what you see is the industrial is not really taking off.
There are some improvements. But it takes quite a while. But we're really really the the Terra Joule per year are produced at the ground source heat pumps. So the shallow to mid-depth systems a lot of them are really shallow drilling bowl heat exchangers installed. And from their these terajoules they're produced.
And I can tell you if you look at these numbers here, obviously these are millions of millions of metres that have been drilled and need to be drilled in future as well. Let's look at the challenges of shallow and medium depth resources and shallow. The drilling itself is not in shallow resource. The drilling itself is not difficult.
This is fast. So this is well known and relatively cheap, you could say. But what is the challenge here as well is a space limitations where often you're in an urban environment there where you need your heat here and you need to put your rig somewhere and you have quite some noise limitations. You cannot operate during night usually, so you really need to take that into account. You want to have electric driven systems for your emissions.
Here we have you have on silent drilling systems as well. And then mid depths here usually the space there is not the challenge anymore but the challenge what you have is that the costs are obviously getting up. This is much more an oil and gas type of drilling operation to mid depths to let's say 3000 meter of depth here. And what you see then is and this is in the in the lower in the lower right bottom graph you see. To the point where you have proven your resources, where you have your confirmation drilling done already, a couple of millions are spent. And these drilling of it is about half of these costs here that you have to spend.
So that's obviously where we can improve on. On the other hand, the good thing really for these mid depths and that's why we have so much focus on it, is that the most of the wells, a lot of these wells that are drilled in that region down to 3000m have sufficient yield. So you have resources that you can efficiently produce. And technically we can drill there.
So there's an example. The upper example here is from Munich, where about 100% of the wells have been technically realizable. That goes down if you go to deeper resources. And that brings me to my next slide. Because these deep and ultra deep resources, that's quite an interesting arena with a lot of focus on. On the one hand, technically drilling them becomes much more difficult, so the technical risks are really going up, the upfront costs are really going up. You need much more people.
You need actually much more expertise to go there. But we are going into that arena of geothermal anywhere that we can, that we're getting much more independent from our location where we are. And interestingly, you bring your levelized costs here for such a system. You effectively bring them down if you can effectively technically drill to that depth. And I have there are two nice examples from us from from from two papers. And the you see in the upper one is from advanced geothermal system, the lower one from enhanced geothermal systems to studies here.
And I start with the lower one, which is a recent study from us looking at that. And the first one here is one kilometer depth. And you see, if you take $100 per megawatt hour as a threshold, there are only a couple of tens, a couple of tens of sites where you could drill economically, clearly.
I mean, this is one kilometre, but if you go to 4 kilometre or 8 kilometre, if you go deep, then you shift that a to much more economic solutions, and you go to 10,000 of potential sites where you could actually economically develop it. And that's the same for AGS. In principle, if you can construct that, if you can drill that technically.
Then we are bringing you see that here in that curved blue arrow. Then we are bringing the specific capital cost of these installations. We bring them down and we're narrowing the spread. So we're really coming to solutions here that you can do in almost every site. Obviously I mentioned already these costs are high.
We're talking about 100 of millions that you need to invest up front. And there's a lot of optimization and innovation coming into that here, really to help that to bring costs down, to make it more efficient. Now these drilling and let me talk about some of these emerging technologies. Let me talk about this one here. I start with shallow again with the ultralight and light drilling rigs.
very interesting developments ongoing for the urban area. And you see here on the on the left side you see hammer drum. This comes from Switzerland a small startup. We said we can do drilling much more like a mining process here at this point, or a tunneling machine process at this point, and bringing it to just a container. So you can place this one big container in your city and it drills your wellbore almost automatically. And this functions with a system with a hammer and reamer system that anchors itself into the well.
It's operated on the wireline. Then it fills up a container, pulls it out, empties the container with the debris and goes into it. So and their concept is really this is slow but it's cost efficient.
What we're doing here and it's very compact for the urban area. Then in the middle you see the Geo Machine GmbH 2000, a very exciting project. They had a very compact rig that you see here.
This is a pneumatic or an air driven hammer that they're using, some really specialized for hard rock drilling at this point. But they could show with this very compact rig that they're very, very cost efficiently drill even a two kilometer depth here. So this is for special cases where at this moment do not need a well control. If you look at that rig design. But but yeah, this is very cost efficient.
It's very compact and and and it's fully automated. You operate that complete rig that complete operations with two people on a on a joystick. With a remote control to the right there's Hausmann. Hausmann. Then we're going more to the design of a real oil and gas drilling unit type of but everything compact on one trailer. So one big trailer. This is your rig. This is what you need for your drilling operation, complete with well
controlled with your platform on top of it. They can integrate even different drilling technologies with a specialized top drive that they have developed for this one. And this is really optimized for medium depths in the city. So in urban areas, fully electrified system. Now let's move from the medium to really the deep hard rocks here, the crystalline rocks. And there you have a whole world, let's say, of so-called novel hole making technologies, a whole world of developments or projects that are upcoming with new systems, how you can remove your rock in front of the bit.
And this is your percussion drilling. Percussion drilling is known is very effective, let's say for up to the mid depths here with these air driven hammers. There's a lot used as well. But the big challenge is always, how do I bring that to depth? How do I work with drilling fluid? How do I work with mud? And I have here two projects I want to present. One is geo drill, one is orchid and Geo drill.
Really looked into remove all the valves that you need in such a hammer system and mud driven hammer system. Completely with developing with focusing on the so-called Coanda effect. That's a fluid oscillator that producing these pulses that you need for your hammer downhole without any valves in it. And that brought that really to the prototype level, tested that in shallow depths.
And then orchid, another very interesting project where they combined two systems and they actually combined a commercially available hammer with a high pressure jetting. So it had a downhole intensifier to jet a groove around your whole bottom. With that, release the stresses of the whole bottom and make the hammer much more effective. And they could really show that bring these type of systems, they could bring that really to the prototype level. Both projects are recently stopped, but there might be coming more with these interesting percussion drilling systems here.
Another one very exciting. One novel hole making system is based on pulse plasma or electro-pulse drilling. And important is here the word pulse.
Because it's not a continuous plasma that is burning at your hole bottom. No, it's a pulses of plasma. Like a flash here. Like a that is happening. And these flashes actually happen in the rock.
You see that in the small picture with the electrodes on top of the rock. And then these plasma discharge is produced within the rock and lifting off the cuttings. This is a very efficient process in terms of let's say rock removal on the one hand very energy efficient. On the other hand, you're aware on your electrodes is almost zero. It's minimal. So you can drill quite long footage with such a system, which is one of the big advantages of parts plasma and. But the requirements for your pulse plasma generation downhole are quite high.
So you need to switch fast below 500 nanoseconds. And you have these very high voltages of 500 kilovolts that you need for it. We are working together.
We are working in a project that is called Deep Light. And deep light is really looking into the full integration of these pulse plasma generation in your bottomhole assembly. So you have a turbine, you have a generator, you have a transformer and a pulse generator.
You have that all in your bottomhole profile. So it's not a cable that you're running from surface. You have that downhole and take your energy from your fluid mud that you circulate. You see two pictures. One is really a shallow a shallow test where the prototype was tested for drilling.
The other one is our full size rig that we have at TNO, and as part of the Deep Light project, we want to integrate that type of drilling system and our full with our rig in a full drilling operation. Next one is from the novel home is steel shot drilling, a kind of abrasive jet drilling, you could say. And there are two exciting projects and that are really ongoing at the moment.
And the steel shot drilling actually works, that you have your nozzles that you have in your bit, in your drilling bit anyhow, and you accelerate, such as steel shot, high density at hammers on your rock. It creates fractures there in the rock. Your high pressure fluid can enter that propagate, that fractures, and then the shear forces remove that the cutting. So these kind of steel shots and hands or their modify actually your whole bottom.
And both of the projects that you see here are combining I say a PDC bit with these steel shot erosive action. So there's a hybrid systems where they combine the best of these both worlds Here you will hear more about deploy from yanita or from deploy and from Colombo from Yanita. In the next presentation, because what Canopus did is even using that steal shots not only to make your drilling performance better, but to steer that system as well. So you have a novel directional control, you have higher IOP, you get enhanced bit life from these combination of these two drilling technologies. And with that there's an effective way of drilling, producing multilaterals.
With that, you can increase your productivity and produce much more resources than we can do nowadays. We tested that in our labs. For instance, in the cuttings flow loop we see here in the pictures here where we have circulated or shown what it means to transport these steel shots in your in your drilling fluid. And we tested it as well in our drilling simulator. These the red one here big vessel where you can drill into rocks under pressure. This brings me to an overview of these drilling technologies here. And you see now much more names than technologies I talked about effectively, obviously, because there is more.
And they needed to pick somewhere involved as well. And let me start here in that overview. Let me start here on the right side with the electromagnetic wave technology.
So you have quakes and due to active projects going up on quite innovative. These projects really taking your energy from the surface with its microwave, with its laser, taking it from the surface, bringing it to the downhole. And with that, doing your drilling actually a melting and and spallation process that you do downhole there, they're both early stage and there are quite some challenges obviously to get your energy there.
But very interesting to have very different concepts of hole making here. Then we have plasma pulse. I mentioned it there are several projects and going on to have these advantages of the system that you have these effective rock removal mechanism plus these bit life or these electrode life here to combine that really for drilling long well bores and hard rocks and crystalline rocks here. They're ongoing. And many of them they brought it to the prototype stage here are working on that one.
And GA drilling Liam will talk in a couple of minutes about their specific technology. They're working on Plasma Pulse as well, but they're doing even much more with a fully integrated system for drilling for geothermal anywhere and then hybrid in the center. A lot of technologies, obviously, because hybrid combining the best of both worlds, you see a lot of pdcs or existing PDC technology combined with a different drilling mechanism like steel shot. Jan Jette will talk more about it, but as well with jetting combined with laser combined with percussion as well, which could be interesting in a way as well to do that. And then the percussion world I mentioned already, percussion is out there for very long and very effective for the air hammers here or pneumatic hammers, but then bringing percussion really to depth, you need to go for, for liquids, for drilling muds and that's still ongoing. So there are various projects ongoing and brought it to the prototype level.
Let's see where this is going really because it is a challenge here. But there are some new aspects like these Coanda effect which works completely without valves, which would eliminate one of the big problems of having the percussion downhole at depths. And then important to mention for me as well rotary drilling. So the classical drilling with PDC bits here, that made quite some advantages as well. There is one is really guess you know the project really driving forward, drilling hard granite rocks with PDC, very effective high IOP increased the footage to the bit life as well and fervor is doing that as well next to the Utah Forge site for their eggs project. So we see there's quite an optimization ongoing there as well. But I say innovation is not only about efficiency.
That's a big part of it, but it's really, really about unlocking new frontiers to see where can we be and how can we get there with our new technology to open up these new frontiers? And believe it or not, 50 years ago the PDC bit started as well and they needed to develop that as well about five decades ago, and really started with single cutter testing to see if such a system can survive at these conditions here. And what you see here at these overview is really that's coming from a work that we did for the geothermal altogether. With the geothermal, they funded these type of work really to get an overview of emerging drilling technologies for geothermal energy provision. And there is an IEA report upcoming next year as well about that.
With that, thank you for your attention. And back to Frank. thank you very much, Andreas, for a very interesting talk. We have some questions coming in. So also I would like to invite the audience actually to put in more questions.
first question on the list. if you would have to put your own money into one of these technologies, who's given this, this great overview, where would you put it? Andreas. thanks. Obviously, a very good question.
And yeah I would definitely focusing on a hybrid solution because there's already I mentioned that there are so many progress ongoing with the PDC bits and this is such a developed system and for two reasons. On the one hand, you can make that much better with a different hole making technology that you add to the already existing one. With getting more reach to enhance your bit life, enhance your radon penetration on the one hand. On the other hand, you're not changing the complete world.
You can hook up your system then really to existing drilling operations. So that makes it so attractive to focus on a hybrid. And I mean with hybrid you're really combining it with PDC drilling technology. And at there an additional mechanism to make it more effective.
I would definitely I would go for that. thank you very much. Another question. you mentioned medium depth. can you define that? So for example, for you mentioned the horseman rig. How deep could that go? So the horseman rig I mean, what you saw here is a 100 and 150 50 tons hook load system.
What they're working on is something like 2.5km. So what you could say. So this is a range but it's for me medium depth is up to 2.5km here in that range. What we're talking about. So the resources that you usually technically you can do them
very effectively. And I mentioned that the yield is high enough as well. You can usually produce your success rate is high in these operations. But I have to say and there's interesting developments on that, even with much smaller rigs with much smaller hook load, you reach to that medium depth. So and and this is super interesting in particular when you're thinking about that we have all these uptake of heat exchangers.
So these closed loop systems where actually your yield is well known or what you get out of it is well known. That we bring that to, to larger depths, reduce reduce spaces. So we need very compact, drilling systems. And cost effective drilling system to reach to the depths here to to install that. So in terms of rig size there's an overlap.
But the depth is whatever the 2.5km range that we need to reach. Yeah. Clearly there are lower temperatures, at least in the situation in the Netherlands with a relatively mild geothermal gradient.
How do you compensate for that? And our drilling technologies offering something for that. To compensate for the for the lower temperature, for the lower temperatures? I mean, so what you need to obviously, I mean, it's economics, right in the end, what you need to do, if you need to compensate for the lower temperature or the lower yield, what you can get out of it, obviously you need to the one hand you need to get cheaper. It's what it is. And your drilling technology what you can do as well. Obviously you can have lateral outreach.
I mean then to then it's not depth. So it's the length of your. Well and with that, let's say the lengths that you have, that you have, that you have available for your, let's say for to for your heat conduction. If we're talking about heat exchanger system. So and diameter maybe.
Yes. But then we're talking open systems. And if it's about diameter to say then usually I mean for the classical open hole systems. When we're talking about drilling to medium depths then we need to have the larger rigs because then we need to have sufficient capacity to have this big wells here to handle the casings, obviously to install these systems here. And we need to have the high flow rates. Then we compensate.
At that point we compensate with high flow rates for for lower temperatures that we get. But then we need to have the big enough rigs to handle these operations as well. Thanks. I have another question. This is more about the evaluation and the comparison between the different technologies. The question is, did you do some sort of multi-criteria analysis to
compare them or did you use another. So what I did, I mean that will come in the IEA report, I had a set of criteria so that, that I put out here. So but this set of criteria is really what depths they can reach. So what what kind of TRL levels. They have these technologies here.
And that's how I would not say ranked because that's not what I'm doing. It was really about to understand what is out there. How much are there developed these technologies. And let's say what what is their way to market. So to see that.
And that's what we use. So we have actually nine criteria that we looked into it here. And just just to have a color coding as well in the end. So just to give you an expression where technology is here and for what it is, is it depth. Is it hard rock.
what is the TRL level here. So what is the kind of application that you want to do with it? Well, thank you very much. There are a couple of more questions, but we'll save them to the end because I would like to give the floor to Janet to introduce actually the technology that you're working on. Thank you very much, Frank. A great pleasure to be here as a founder of Canopus.
We started about five years ago. Four years ago we started to work together with TNO. And I would like to start with an acknowledgement as well to the Council for West, who is funding the Delft pilot that we are going to conduct in January, but also TKI and the Rvo, who is also supporting Great European Project, deployed the heat that Andreas mentioned as well.
You can see here a great picture. I think of the horizontal drilling pilot that we did in Switzerland with the directional steel shot drilling technology last year. It gives you an indication that we are working pretty far with integrating the system with actual hole making equipment that is being used in the field. But I'll first go into an overview of what actually is the SSD or directional steel shield drilling. Well, it is a drilling service.
We don't bring the rig to the site. That's the rig contractor. But we can mount our system on any drilling rig that is active somewhere and specified according to the depth of the drilling operation. So we can apply this technology both in shallow and middle deep, whatever the definition is, we can use it there.
The components of the technology are steel shots. And we combine that with PDC drilling. In the first picture you can see the steel particles.
They're pretty small and we have selected them based on the hole cleaning capabilities of these particles. You still you have to add something to the myth, but you still have, of course, to circulate it and keep the well safe during the operation. But then you have to control the concentration pretty well as well. We keep it to 0.5 volume percent, and we do that by a completely automated steel shot
injection unit. And by keeping it at this low concentration, which is smaller than the usual cuttings concentration in the drilling mud, we minimize the burden. This is the only burden to the drilling system compared to conventional drilling systems. We can use any conventional mud with this. Then the particles travel through the drill string, reach the bottom hole assembly, which consists out of a steering chip, and the Canopus drill bit.
The steering chip is effectively. The whole system is a rotary steerable system, which has very many advantages. By being able to rotate the string, you have better home cleaning and a better reach of the system as well. But by the method which I will describe in a minute, we can make this rotary steerable system, which is notoriously expensive.
We can make it much more. We can make it much lower cost so that we can apply it also in shallow drilling operations and any, any drilling operations for any depth. It's also an ROP booster. I will come back to that as well.
Important to stress as well that the pressure bit drop is in our case around 50 to 250 bar. And there are other jetting systems that don't use particles. They go to very high pressures. We want to differentiate from these with the 50 to 250 bar pressure range over the bit.
We don't have to modify the the usual drilling systems that are being used on drilling platforms, which is a big advantage from operational efficiency point of view. The mud and steel shot circulation system is shown in the diagram on the left. It is important to keep the mud tank and the pump free of steel particles, and that's why we inject the steel shot particles after the pump, when the mud is already pressurized and we remove them from the drilling mud. Just before the mud reaches the mud tank, we remove them together with the rock cuttings and separate them from the rock cuttings by a magnetic drum separator. And then we re-inject them.
So the steel shot circulation system is closed, as well as the mud circulation system is closed as well. But the mud tanks and the pumps don't see the steel particles. We prefer the injection system to be automated because it is at enhanced pressure, and you don't want an operator to be next to it. Apart from that, we also monitor the rig performance closely, and that is because we want to be able to balance the erosive action of the bit with the mechanical action of the bit. And the only way you can do that is by closely monitoring both the rig system and using that as an input for the steel shot injection.
So this is kind of also a next level drilling automation system, which the oil and gas industry have been struggling to implement as well. That's another interesting story, but not for now the drill bit, it was already mentioned. This is a hybrid technology mentioned by by Andreas. The drill bits are polycrystalline diamond cutter bits. We have designed them together with certain lab and GPS, uh, drill bits.
And we believe that we have used the latest on polycrystalline diamond compact cutter bits. And building on top of that with our steel shot erosion. we have done tests in limestone and concrete. Concrete is of course a bit simpler, but with limestone it's nice and hard, and you can do a reasonably better controlled rope test. On the top right hand side you can see the borehole drilled in Belgium limestone. You can see how smooth the borehole wall is, high quality and also in the softer concrete.
The borehole quality is great and you don't see any particles embedded in the wall or something like that. And what you can also see in both pictures is that the whole bottom is not the typical nice regular groove that you get with a PDC bit, but you can see here the impact of the jets that help out, making the whole bottom a bit more irregular, and it gives much better control grip of the PDC cutters on the on the whole bottom. You can also see in the long vertical picture in the middle that the jet configuration is asymmetric. And that's important for the next slide.
it's important for the steering mechanism, which I will describe in the following slide. This slide goes a little bit further on the bit rock interaction. And that is extremely important for the relative penetration improvement that we think is especially important for hard rock drilling. this curve is horizontal axis is the weight on bit. The vertical axis is the rate of penetration. It's a very popular way to describe the bit efficiency for for oil and gas wells.
And what you can see is for rotary only that you have say an inactive area, then a steep incline of the performance. And at the end you reach the depth of cut the dock where you have consumed all the length of your cutters, and you cannot go faster when you add steel shots to the system, then you remove rock because of the erosion itself. Of course, that increases the rope on top of this rope, but it also weakens the rock face, as described by Andreas in his presentation. Like I mentioned, that increases the grip and that increases the rope. If you go through to this graph, you can see that the the curve for rotary and steel shield is moved to the to the left compared to the rotary only.
And also that the founder point is increased as well. How far you can move to the left and up is not clear yet, but we have done a number of tests and we want to connect that to also a theoretical model by which we can explain that. But the lab test that we have conducted with the drill bit test facility of RCCG is that we have seen for the softer rock, that we can go a factor of 2 or 3 higher. And for the hard rock, it was even above the factor of five faster rate of penetration, depending, of course, on the settings of weight, on bit, torque and bit and rpm, etc. it is definitely a big improvement on rate of penetration, but rate of penetration is not everything. Like Andreas again mentioned, bit life is extremely important as well. You don't want to drill for ten minutes very fast, but you want to drill
sufficiently long to be able to drill a complete whole section in one go, and we are working on that. It is a big improvement on ROP and how much that will be say reported in publications and next year on various conferences, then the steering chip. And once again it is a rotary steerable system, which means that the complete drill string is rotating the bit as well. The bit has asymmetric nozzles, which means that if you have a device that changes the continuous supply of steilshoop particles to the bit into a pulsed concentration, and you can correlate that to the rotation of the bit. Then you can, to ensure that you erode more on one side of the whole bottom than on the other side of the whole bottom. And then you have steering effect.
It's as simple as that. And that is what we are building and testing at the moment, and which we have tested in Switzerland last year as well. We built we drilled a few bends in in that Swiss mountain and confirmation that the system is working and that we can build the first field tools, and that's what we are doing right now. It is very energy efficient. This system, which is an indication that you need minimal amount of energy to steer, and that is an indication that you have much more reduced wear than when you try to steer with manipulating the torsion bit, the weight on bit huge forces.
Then you need very expensive systems that are hard to maintain on the rig site, etc. that's the reason why we think this is such an effective, simple but very accurate steering system. Just a quick description of the type of drilling assembly that we have, especially for shallow drilling that I will come to in a few slides. Up to 500m.
Then you can go from the drill pipe directly to the drilling assembly. The total length is about ten ten meters for the drilling assembly. And the flexibility of that drilling assembly determines the build of the angle that we can drill. We can make it as flexible as we want. But for many of the applications, the ten degrees per 30m bend is pretty effective and nice to have. So that's what we are focusing right now.
The steering action is much faster, as you could see on the on the slide. With the steering sub, you can go around the corner with the steering action 90 degrees within three meters. But of course then the assembly cannot follow. So this is a difference yet again from oil and gas field drilling where the assembly stiffness is determining the flexibility of the curves and not the steering action. Directional module we integrated so we have a complete drilling solution with the system and are independent of other vendors, interfaces, etc.. Very quickly, two slides on where we think the impact of the technology is very clear.
We had there was a study done by TNO and KBenergy on specifically the slaughter formation. And on the top right hand side you can see the transmissivity map of that formation. You can see also that the say when geothermal becomes economic for the slaughter formation, you need kind of a transmissivity that is yellow or turning further red. There is not that much yellow in the graph on the top right. And with our technology by drilling multilaterals.
And that has been proven already in the Paris basin and in München, that is extremely affecting. Effective on boosting the productivity with the SSD technology, we can drill multilaterals that conventional technology cannot drill and then we can open up move say the color the the economical map of the Netherlands for the slaughter formation from yellow to blue, which opens up quite a lot of geothermal projects. Of course, when you have multilaterals, you also increase the chance of accessing good reservoirs. So also the risk of developments is reduced as well. For shallow we will have a drill test, a pilot in Delft by the end of January.
There we will drill through two borehole heat exchangers, a vertical one and a curved one. And what we want to demonstrate there is that the curved one is going to produce much more energy than the vertical one, and that we are able to drill such a curved ball heat exchanger. It's a closed system. You can place 1 or 2 of these YouTubes on the inside. Circulate only through that. It's not an open system, so you don't have any interference with with with the surroundings. why are we thinking that this makes a big difference? If you look at what a group of curved borehole heat exchangers can, can deliver in terms of heat and heating and cooling, then the length is longer because you can steer, you know, that you're not going to collide with other wells.
Even better, you can drill them away from each other, which is why you reduce the the interference between the between the several borehole heat exchangers. You have additional length and you have a you can you drill deeper than the normally 150m that Frank mentioned as well? We go to up to 400 500m depth. That means that you have also a higher temperature that you can produce for the for the heating. If you add up all these factors, then that means that with only 5 or
10 of these type of borehole heat exchangers drilled from a smaller location, you can have as much energy produced as 55 zero, vertical conventional borehole heat exchangers. A big impact, and that's what we want to demonstrate in Delft. And this is the last slide just to give want to give a brief overview of where we are with the technology. Thanks to all the factory acceptance testing that we did at Rcg. We have de-risked the technology so that we can have the pilot in Delft, of course, that we have the first commercial shallow drilling operations. We expect to be able to do in five, up to 500m depths next year, and in 2026 after a field test field pilot in in Ada, which has been lined up as well as part of the pilot of the deployed heat project. We expect to be commercial for 500 to 3km kilometres depth of drilling and you can see the nice pictures of the SSG facilities, the cuttings flow loop and the steel shot circulation. The tests were done there.
The vessel with the drill bit testing and the rig where we did the full assembly testing. Thank you. Thank you for also introducing the the CSG. And I think it's also please reach out if you ever want to visit us and have a look at what we can offer.
But it's an exciting development I think. Given the time, I would like to switch actually to Houston, to Liam. I'm collecting the questions here and we can take the questions for Janet also after after Liam's presentation. So. Liam. Go ahead.
Great. Thank you very much. So my name is Liam, director of engineering here at Gar drilling. At Gar drilling. Our mission is to make geothermal anywhere reality. It's in our DNA. It's in our name. That's what GA stands for.
And we've got many different technologies under development to help us get there. One I'm going to focus on today is an innovative downhole anchoring and drive system for drilling hard rock faster for the deeper and most importantly, hotter. So as you've heard a little bit about some of the ongoing pilot projects, you know, advanced geothermal systems like the ones from from Evo drilling, this network of well bores downhole, intersecting them to create that closed loop system.
You've also got enhanced geothermal systems where you're drilling wells in close proximity to one another and fracturing between them. what they have in common is they need long inclined or horizontal wellbore sections to be drilled. A lot of them, and hard rock, funnily enough, is hard to drill and drilling can amount to upwards of 75% of the total geothermal well costs and therefore a significant proportion of project development costs. The ability to drill longer lateral sections cost effectively is really key to our project economics. So we've mentioned these great pilot projects in the US.
We've got fervo drilling in Utah indicated by the blue star on the heat map on the left, and then you've got Eva in southern Germany and Europe, drilling indicated by the red star towards the middle of the screen. What's important is that to scale these projects, you need to be able to drill deeper. So if you look at these heat maps, the upper ones are showing temperatures at about 15,000ft, five kilometers deep.
And you're looking at the orange areas. That's where the reservoirs are, around 150, 175 degrees C. That's where people are typically targeting. You can see that areas are limited and those sort of depths, it's around about 10% of the Earth's surface. what we are doing, is making it possible to drill to to 33 or 10 kilometer deep wells. And when you do that, you can see how the the accessibility to those sort of reservoirs really takes off.
And that's what we're enabling. That's geothermal anywhere. That's where 70% plus of the Earth's surface can get access to the types of reservoir heat that you need to make these projects economical. So geothermal wells occur in hard rock, ultra high strength hard rock, 30,000 to £50,000 per square inch of compressive strength. That's around 200 to 350 megapascals, which is 2 to 3 times stronger than most hydrocarbon reservoirs high strength rock.
Hard rock is associated typically with high well costs. Why? Because it requires a lot of energy to drill energy when it comes to drilling scales. With the strength of the formation, the typical drilling technologies can be limited in how much energy they can get down there at the rock face. That results in slow drilling, that results in more drilling days, and that ultimately results in more cost. Time is money. In addition to that, you have joined dysfunctions which will damage you downhole tools and wear out your drill bits and also result in poor drilling efficiency.
And then lastly, but not least, it's hot, right that's why we're there. And that can have a big impact on tool life and reliability, but ultimately results in short run lengths, which means you have to trip in and trip out to where to to replace damaged components or worn components, and that results in short run lengths of about 400ft to about 3000. You're seeing a lot of improvements now in conventional technologies, like getting those run lengths up. But as both Janet and Andreas mentioned, you know, the target here is to drill these sections, these long central sections in 1 in 1 run. Okay. Now if you look at the business end at the drill bits and we've talked a little bit
about hybrid technology, um, it comes down to getting the energy, maximizing the energy, at the drill bit to destroy that rock. And what it comes down to is, is torque and speed. So, torque comes from the cutters, right those black things on the face of the drill bit. Nice image of a fixed cutter drill bit that's now pretty synonymous with hard rock
drilling. It comes down to getting those cutters engaged with the rock. and you do that by applying a force. Now when it comes down to soft rocks, like a soft sandstone, for instance, the rock doesn't push back as much right. So to get that depth of penetration of the cutters into the rock requires less force than it requires to get that same depth of penetration into a hard rock, like like granite. And what that means is you need a lot of weight, a lot of force in drilling terms, that's that's called weight on bit and the ability to get the weight to get the depth of cut, to get the cutters engaged and then turn the bit is what dictates your rate of penetration or how fast you drill.
So to drill fast and also actually to maximize the life of the cutters. You need to have a high amount of weight on bit. Now a really nice example from guys that are out there doing it today.
This is from Fervo in Utah. It's published earlier on this year at the Stanford University Geothermal Conference. The quote granite Rock, renowned for both its rock hardness and abrasion, poses a unique challenge where an extremely high levels of friction impede the ability to transfer weight to the drill bit, and simultaneously, you need more weight than typical oil and gas applications to drill those hard rocks effectively. So when you look at the section of of a wellbore and the drilling process, your weight is coming from the vertical section and you're putting compression into all of that drilling assembly or drill pipe beneath that point of weight to get the weight to the drill bit. So when you do that, you have compression.
You have things like sinusoidal or helical buckling that can happen, and you have drag of the of the drilling assembly on the formation. Friction factors in granite are a lot higher than they are in conventional unconventional reservoirs that robs the weight on bit, so you end up needing more, but you can get less in these applications. The solution brings us to our first technology is the downhole anchoring and drive system. So this system is placed just above the drilling bar. It has elements in there which expand to grip the rock, and it uses hydraulic energy available down there to apply a weight via reacting into the rock to the drill bit.
So this ability to create that weight on bit downhole directly above the drilling bar, helps eliminate that buckling, right? Because now you require less weight from the vertical section. You can also pull everything along using this system. It allows a lot more weight to reach the drill bit because you don't have that buckling anymore. It can apply more weight on bit. It also a great benefit is it allows extra control of the drilling process, because you're right there at the drill bit, within 100 200ft, you're able to sense what's going on and you're able to change the weight accordingly. A nice case study in a paper we published a couple of months ago at the Geothermal Rising conference, showed that by adding the downhole anchoring system into the bottom hole assembly in a in a well in Thailand, the longest granite well in Thailand that was drilled, this system could add an extra 70% of length into the lateral section just by the addition of that weight on bit downhole.
That's massive for the ultimate economics of the the geothermal prospects. This is the system. This is one unit of the system. The system comprises at least two.
So it's powered by drilling fluid, keeping it nice and simple. It has an actuation system inside that diverts some of that fluid that's pumped through the system to to actually do work. It has gripper gripper elements you see in the middle of the screen, those rectangular elements there they are energized by the mud and they expand to grip the wellbore, and then each of these units can apply about £30,000 of thrust, you know.
So what's that? About 12 tons of thrust. And it can adjust that thrust up to 100 times a second to not only drill faster, but optimize the process and mitigate things like stick, slip or other dysfunctions. It has smart controls inside there and feedback so it can monitor what's going on in the drilling process and then adapt what it does to improve and optimize.
And then it can also communicate via canvas to other systems in the in the drilling assembly. Mwd tools, your tools, your tools to find out what's going on for them. Send data to them, vice versa, and then optimize the process ultimately. And then it's modular.
So you can put two of these in the drilling assembly. You can put four of them. It doesn't have to be an even number, but you need at least at least two to keep that continuous force in motion. And the key here with this system, it's like any other downhole tool. It's plug and play for the most part. So I can use any of the existing drilling technologies that rotary steerable tool or a bent motor for directional work.
And I can stick it in there and it's fairly agnostic, and you just get all the benefits and no additional uplift in terms of complexity. that in itself is super exciting, the plug and play nature. But what we see longer term is this is an enabler for a new way of drilling hard rock wells. So rather than having conventional drill pipe that's made up of 30 foot sections that have to be screwed together, we actually replace that with coiled tubing.
So think of a steel hose pipe on a reel. For instance. Coiled tubing is used today primarily for intervention, but there is some drilling work done with cog tubing. It can be tripped in and out of the hole 3 to 4 times faster than conventional drill pipe requires less manual handling, so you don't have people having to make up connections on the rig floor.
one of the great benefits for geothermal is you don't have to stop circulating fluids. So because you don't have to make connection, you can continuously circulate. And that's all important for keeping your downhole tools cool and within their operating window.
we also have wireline communications. So now you get real time data feedback from your drilling systems to optimize the drilling process and improve decision making abilities. One of the limiters for coiled tubing drilling, like I said, it's done today, but it's typically done on very small diameters and you need bigger diameters. For geothermal, it's that the coil itself, the coiled tubing, has torque and weight limitations. But now because we have the anchoring system, the anchoring system can can pass most of those forces and loads into the rock, rather than requiring to be transferred by the by the drill string, which is the key enabler to this technology.
And just to give it some additional merit other than my good, good words about it, is that geo drilling signed a multi-year development contract with Petrobras. Brazilian national oil company to develop this technology for offshore deepwater wells. Why? Because hard rock drilling technology is applicable in oil and gas, as it is in geothermal as it is in many other drilling applications. So where there's some great synergies there with, you know, talk about transition and getting conventional oil and gas companies involved, there's there's some great synergies there between what they do day in and day out. Overcome challenges, make it economical to drill and what geothermal needs to really to scale. We've built the prototype of this tool.
this is some some pictures of it being tested in Slovakia, where our headquarters is. And then, we've also taken that prototype to our Houston test facility, one of our investors test facilities actually. Be correct. and we we tested it in a in a shallow. Well, um, just to prove the gripping and anchoring concept, which we did. And then as a nice side effect, we also saw a significant reduction in vibration, just down to the action of those elements gripping the wellbore and helping to stabilize the drilling process. So in conclusion, to make geothermal anywhere the reality, we need to be able to drill cost effectively deeper, further, faster.
Hard rock is hard to drill, namely due to those high energy requirements getting more energy density into the drill bit or changing the rock itself through things like particle drilling or something exciting that we've got going on by using plasma to actually pre fracture the rock and then drill it with a PDC. they're all very exciting mechanisms to get through this. Uh, our anchoring system allows you to apply a lot more weight and therefore get a lot more bit engagement and a lot more energy that way into the drilling process.
And that's what unlocks the geothermal resources. So increased drillable lateral footage. We show how the the thrusting can help extend the the lateral reach.
Again very key for the economics of geothermal projects. It can increase the rate of penetration through having higher weight on bits, and then it can increase that run length through prevention of damage to the the drill bit and other downhole tools. We didn't talk much about the optimization that this tool can bring to the system, but these optimizations can significantly improve the life of the drilling technologies and the drilling assembly. And then ultimately longer term, you know, 3 to 5 years out, this technology will be an enabler to coiled tubing drilling for hot hard rock, which can really step change the cost of geothermal drilling. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Liam.
we're running a little bit over out of time. So if you have to leave, please. You would help us a lot. If you can fill in the survey.
We'll stay here for a couple of more minutes to answer some of the questions. So if you would like to stick with us, then you're more than welcome to. I would like to start with a question for you, Liam. for the gigabit system, what's the maximum anchoring diameter? Great question. So very, very important that it can expand enough to grip the wellbore. So the prototype system we're working on today for our first pilot applications, it can expand those gr
2025-01-11 13:25