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It's named after a Nordic god and drills deep into the heart of a volcano: "Thor" is a rig that symbolises Iceland's leading-edge efforts to produce powerful clean energy.
If successful, the experimental project could produce up to 10 times more energy than an existing conventional gas or oil well, by generating electricity from the heat stored inside the earth: in this case, volcanic areas.
Launched in August last year, the drilling was completed on January 25, reaching a record-breaking depth of 4,659 metres (nearly 3 miles).
At this depth, engineers hope to access hot liquids under extreme pressure and at temperatures of 427 degrees C (800 F), creating steam that turns a turbine to generate clean electricity.
Iceland's decision to harness the heat inside the earth in a process known as geothermal energy dates back to the 1970s and the oil crisis.
But the new geothermal well is expected to generate far more energy, as the extreme heat and pressure at that depth makes the water take the form of a "supercritical" fluid, which is neither gas nor liquid.
"We expect to get five to 10 times more power from the well than a conventional well today," said Albert Albertsson, an engineer at the Icelandic energy company HS Orka, involved in the drilling project.
(Score: 2) by Alphatool on Saturday May 06 2017, @03:00PM
I really hope that the energy production stays high for the well. Part of me thinks that going deeper should allow quicker replacement of the removed energy than happens for a shallow well, so hopefully that is the case and it stays high. Hopefully the well doesn't produce too much scale either so that flow rates don't decrease too much either. If this does turn out to be viable in the long term it has amazing promise, both as grid connected renewable power and also as a cheap and reliable power source in remote locations - it could be life changing in places like the Solomon Islands and Indonesia.
The whole idea of comparing a geothermal well to an oil well is silly, not least because selecting oil wells for comparison is a tough one. The geothermal well was placed in one of the best locations on earth for this sort of thing, so I chose to use oil production numbers from some of the best wells today. I considered using the best historical oil wells to match the location advantage, which would have given starting flows over 100 000 barrels per day, but that didn't seem to be a particularly fair comparison. Using really low flow rates, say less than 100 barrels per day seemed unfair in the other direction - drillers would be pretty disappointed if a long well in a productive field only produced 100 barrels a day. This lead to my 30 000 barrels per day starting point which I tried to get as a fair balance, but I can see how you could easily chose much bigger or smaller numbers.