42,600 ton ship to break the world record for the deepest drill at 7 miles

https://blog.bostonorganics.com/chinas-42600-ton-meng-xiang-aims-drill-7-miles-deep-breaking-records/

37•speckx•3h ago

Comments

twic•2h ago

Great article on Chinese oil exploration from, uh

> At Boston Organics, we believe that access to healthy, local, and responsibly grown food should be simple and accessible to everyone. That’s why we deliver fresh, organic produce while respecting the environment, supporting small farms, and building strong, sustainable communities.

Is this some sort of weird content mill domain squatting situation?

Official press release with lots of photos: https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202411/17/content_WS6739adf7...

Science Insider piece: https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-dreamy-new-s...

worewood•2h ago

The entire text reads like multiple AI-produced excerpts glued together

unwind•1h ago

That science.org article at least manages to show an image of the ship, the OP covered the only (!) image with the headline, and then every time in the article when you thought an image was coming, it was ads.

Anyway, I know absolutely nothing about being on the bridge of such a ship, but can't help to think that it looks/feels "wrong" for a mariner not to be able to see the sky ahead, since there is a helicopter pad jutting out over the bridge. Oh well, I guess they can go to the side.

engineer_22•57m ago

Why would mariner need to see directly overhead?

ge96•2h ago

wonder is their drill still that threaded design, link them together

auspiv•2h ago

of course it is, how else are you going to create a drill string that needs to grow to 10000m+ long? drill pipe is flexible(ish, for varying definitions of "flexible") but not nearly enough to do a coil of it for that long. coil tubing is a thing but is much thinner and smaller diameter and isn't nearly as strong. it also can't rotate.

drill string comments aside, this appears to be a very standard deepwater offshore drill ship

mk_stjames•2h ago

I was recently thinking about super deep drilling after coming across a very neat mini-documetary [0] self-filmed by a geophysicist around the work at the Kola superdeep borehole [1] in 1992.

It is project I had heard about before but only in bullshit-passing articles and scrolling past brain rot youtube videos (seriously, search 'Kola superdeep borehole' on youtube and take note of how absolutely trash every other thumbnail appears concerning what in reality is just a normal scientific endeavour). So this video by David Smythe of the actual work there was wonderful and also a nice little nostalgic look at science and research as filmed by a VHS camcorder in that era. The computer equipment stuggles, etc...

It left me wondering about new research in this area and surprised I had not heard of any other such projects recently, so this news in interesting.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4mzEGeMNAI [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole

pjs_•2h ago

We getting to agartha soon with this tech

jihadjihad•2h ago

The idea is to go beneath the crust and into the mantle below. Some more pictures and content at [0].

I wonder how much pipe you have to trip to make it all the way down there? It's hard to see from the photos how much space they have for drill pipe. Assuming it's a typical ~30 foot length it would take over a thousand segments of pipe to get there.

0: https://www.science.org/content/article/china-s-dreamy-new-s...

hydrogen7800•2h ago

And how do they manage the twist of a 7 mile drill. The torsional strain energy must be enormous; you can't just let it go. You would need to unwind that energy in a managed way. I suppose this is not a new situation for any oil drilling, even just a few hundred feet. This is one of those things a layperson thinks about in the first minute, and has been obviously been thought of and dealt with in a simple manner by experts.

m4rtink•24m ago

For modern directional drilling they use what is called a "mud motor":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_motor

You basically use the drilling mud that circulates through the hole anyway (providing counter pressure, cooling, lubricataion, bringing up cuttings) to run a motor that rotates the drill bit.

This way the drill string does not need to rotate & you can even change the direction by manipulating the angle of the drill attached to the mud motor.

Tenemo•1h ago

The topic and the ship are super interesting, but this whole article is blatantly AI-generated. Presumably they used an LLM to translate and summarize from Chinese?

Razengan•1h ago

Do we not have enough shit already going on in the world to really need to poke Cthulhu up too?

hatthew•1h ago

maybe cthulhu will be nice

pfdietz•1h ago

The return of Project Mohole!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mohole

metalman•9m ago

main lift does 907 tons, or 2.17 million pounds, which is presumably a bit more than the planed weight of the drill string, and the core. The core will then be automoticaly placed in, refrigerated storage rack for study on board. extream kit.

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