Drilling Hits an Active Magma Chamber In Hawaii

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting that drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber. Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several meters before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study. Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made. 'This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,' the Johns Hopkins University professor told BBC News. 'Before, all we had to deal with were lava flows; but they are the end of a magma's life. They're lying there on the surface, they've de-gassed. It's not the natural habitat.' It is hoped the site can now become a laboratory, with a series of cores drilled around the chamber to better characterise the crystallisation changes occurring in the rock as it loses temperature."

Hot Drill Bit

[JamJam]

I wonder if the magma melted the drill bit?

They found it

[Lord Apathy]

Well they found it. Seems to me this would be the best source of geothermal they could hope for. If they could just keep it from plugging up the bore hole.

Oblig. Daniel Plainview post

[east coast]

If you have a glass of magma, and I have a glass of magma and I have a straw. And let's say my straw and it reaches across the room and into your magma. I drink your magma. I DRINK IT UP!

Re:Old news.... This happened in 2005

[denis-The-menace]

RE: So what were they not confident about?

Getting suppressed by W. and Co.

-It's science... check
-It threatens oil usage... check

Re:Hot Drill Bit

[Endo13]

I'm fairly certain you're wrong in your reasoning, but I also am not an expert on the subject so I could be wrong as well.

However, first thing is the material that has to be removed as they drill. They would probably need some kind of rotary drill for this. Also, I can tell you from experience drilling other types of things (such as wood and concrete) that a rotary drill will never entirely occupy the volume of the borehole - there's always some slop that happens as you drill, and some space beside the drill bit. The other thing you may not have considered is that the magma could have forced a rotary drill up the borehole.

Re:Perfectly safe?

[Thelasko]

This whole thing makes me wonder if they are in fact dealing with lava and not magma (yes, there is a difference). Lava is known to form lava tubes, [wikipedia.org] which could be mistaken for magma. Hey, I'm no geologist, I'm just saying... how are they so sure?

Drilling for geothermal energy may harm your home

[fzimper]

In the German city of Staufen, they drilled some 140m deep holes to get geothermal energy for heating the town hall and adjacent buildings.

Unfortunately, this drilling caused many cracks in houses around the city centre. Some of these cracks are said to be big enough that you can put your fingers in.

According to this article [spiegel.de] on the English Spiegel (a German news magazine) website, dated March 2008, the whole city is sinking. In a recent German article [spiegel.de] from November, they write that the city has risen several centimeters due to water mixing with gypsum deep down and therefore causing the gypsum to expand.

Re:Not granite...

[lmckayjo]

Read the article. This magma chamber is NOT apparently basaltic, and has much in common with magmas that produce granite. 67% silica content - which is very uncommon to see in anything on the surface here in Hawaii.

That said, the important thing isn't probably going to be understanding how volcanoes in other parts of the world work, but just in how this volcano works. That won't get as much funding as studying "how continents originally formed" or other highly derived hypotheses that this site might generate, so the geologists are focusing on what sounds good to people OTHER than Hawaiians (who are generally against messin' with da aina anyway).

-L

Re:They found it

[Fluffeh]

Not quite the best source of geothermal. You see these sort of bubbles of magma aren't really truly connected to the lower greater heat sources. It was most likely formed due to one of the eruptions from the 50's or 60's (From TFA) and therefore isn't going to keep the same level of heat. The article even says that they want to study it as it cools.

For a proper geothermal energy supply you want to drill down to the real stuff, not a random bubble up close that you found by luck that might be there for for another 20-50 years before it's a big bubble of rock.

Most geothermal energy sources [wikipedia.org] rely on much much cooler things than molten rock. We simply don't have anywhere near the technology to harness this sort of heat into energy.

Re:Hot Drill Bit

[James McP]

TFA says This is not the first time drillers have encountered magma; the depth of the hit and the setting are, however, thought to be unique.

I'll summarize. a) this is dacite as compared to basalt (aka this is closer to "continental" magma than "Hawaiian" magma). b) It's close to the surface (2.5km) and c) it's freaking hot.

"We were at about 2.5km which is pretty routine drilling depth," explained Mr Teplow.

"But that is half the depth of experimental projects in Europe and Australia where they are drilling very deep into hot granite - some 5-5.5km down - and getting 260C rock; and here we're getting 1,050C rock."

I don't feel like doing the math right now but the power generating options from a 1000C heat source is very, very, very good.

If the geologists figure out how to find shallow magma anywhere near a cross-connected power grid, you can product a ton of energy.

For a localized environment like Hawaii, they could make huge strides in cutting external fuel needs. I'm generally anti-hydrogen because of the losses between generation and transportation but it would be very feasible for Hawaii to use the excess power from a geothermal power plant to produce hydrogen that could be transported the relatively short distances between islands by boat to provide fuel to other islands. I'm not an EE, but it seems like converting their current fuel-oil generators to hydrogen would be a fairly inexpensive process.

They already have an electric car initiative which would further cut down the bulk of their fuel oil imports.

Re:Hot Drill Bit

[darrenbjohnson]

2.5 Km isn't all that deep for a drill. I've spent more time then I would like to admit on a LF230 Rig and depending on the rod size they can go a lot deeper. I imagine the drilling went something like this: So you are drilling down, maintaining torque and rodfeed, all of a sudden you hit a void (this case magma pocket) and your torque drops off to zero your rodfeed hits zero resistance. So you stop the rods slowly, you don't want a twist off in a void. You turn up your mud, you notice that there is some serious pressure in your rods, you pull the rods up 20 or so feet. By this time your core barrel is filled with magma and melting, but it's in a nice wet mud casing cooling it. You then notice the pressure wont drop cause your drill shoe is solid rock. You turn off the mud, look over at your helper, grin and say it's gonna be a fun night. You then proceed to remove all 2.5km of rods from the whole, a big pain in the ass. The whole trip out is wet as the mud has nowhere to go but out of where you disconnect them every 40 feet or so, the drilling helper and hopefully the drill op is soaked in mud. They finally get to the last 10 ft rod, look down the rod at a giant tube of rock, the helper runs out of the rig, the operator starts throwing stuff. Nothing amazing, a 2 or 3 in diameter tube of cooled magma sits in your rod. You just ruined $50K+ worth of stuff depending on the rods, the bit, the core barrel, and etc. You then proceed to wait for the foreman to come and laugh at you.