Geothermal Energy and Drilling Methods

Nowadays, I pay attention to writing articles on geothermal energy because our country is one of the lucky ones among other countries in the world in this regard.

With its mountainous structure, it is obvious that Anatolia was once a volcanic geography. We just don't have active volcanoes anymore, they are all extinct. But we have plenty of hot springs, as I wrote in a previous article. 

In other words, we actually have a rich geography in terms of geothermal energy.

But for some reason, I think the politicians in charge have not paid enough attention to this issue until today.

However, if we look at it from a strategic point of view, there is oil in the Arab geography, Russia's territory is rich in both oil and natural gas, many countries of the world can be said to be lucky geographies in terms of such fossil fuels, but we have almost no fossil fuels! There is only the natural gas that is said to be found around Batman and in the Black Sea, but that is not a huge amount.

So our energy resources seem to be quite scarce compared to some other countries in the world.

That's why we have not been able to get our heads straight and our economy has been limping along for years.

We are an energy dependent country and this necessarily makes us dependent on foreign sources in the economy.

This means that the politicians who ruled the country throughout the history of the Republic should have been aware of this fact and should have sought a remedy and found a solution to the energy problem.

Yes, the ancients thought of building hydroelectric power plants for energy. Our rivers are not scarce. This is one of your natural energy sources. 

But it wasn't enough, they also built thermal power plants. Once upon a time, we also thought of burning coal for energy. The quality of our coal is not good though, it pollutes the air a lot and does not give much energy when burned.

Therefore, in the last twenty-odd years, most of these thermal power plants have been converted to natural gas. 

Natural gas plants are cleaner and more efficient energy sources.

But this time, our dependence on foreign energy has increased. As a result, apart from the Black Sea gas, there is no natural gas in our country!

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You are a country rich in geothermal energy and you are investing in dams or thermal power plants, not geothermal energy!

You are even investing in HEPPs, which under normal conditions cannot produce proper energy and are destroying nature in the Black Sea!

Don't you think there is something wrong with this?

I think geothermal energy investments should have been made more than ever. After all, we say we are a country rich in geothermal energy! I say hot springs, who knows how many thousands of years it has been known that there are hot springs there! Therefore, it has been known for thousands of years that there are underground heat sources in these places!

Why haven't these resources been utilized until today?

There are a few geothermal investments, but very few. 

I think at least the energy ministry should have seriously addressed this issue.

Anyway, it's not too late, like hair, we have the root anyway.

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What is the main problem of geothermal power plant investments? 

Or what is the main issue that prevents investments in power plants?

Drilling!

The cost of drilling constitutes almost half of the investment cost!

Otherwise, the technology of electricity generation in geothermal power plants is quite simple, you can generate electricity with a simple steam turbine and this investment is not a very costly investment.

What is difficult is drilling!

You have to drill down to the layers underground that can heat the water enough to turn it into steam, and this depth can sometimes be more than 4 kilometers deep.

Moreover, if you start this work without doing a good engineering study beforehand, you risk reviving volcanoes that have been silent for hundreds and thousands of years.

This is why drilling in geothermal power plants is a costly issue. It requires special technology because it requires drilling down to the hot layers.

If you don't have the technology, and if you yourself are a bit, how shall I put it, I don't want to say anything bad, but let's say you are handicapped in developing technology, then you have difficulties in making these investments.

That's probably our problem, we don't know the technology!

However, if you really look at it from a broad perspective, geothermal energy is a subject that will save you from the foreign energy dependency that has been forcing you until today.

I think this issue should have been addressed until today.

If necessary, engineers should have been brought from Iceland, which specializes in this subject, or students should have been sent to Iceland to receive training on this subject.

Although we have a lot of geological engineers, at least the engineers we have could have been encouraged to work on this subject.

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We had built a factory in Kostroma, Russia, producing oil drilling equipment for an American investor. That factory had really expensive equipment.

I received news that the Americans had to close the factory because of the recent developments, and of course it makes you sad to see a factory that you have spent so much time and effort to build closed down. 

I think the Russians, who allowed the investment in the first place, closed down this investment of the Americans in retaliation when the embargoes came because of the Ukraine issue. I don't know if it will be reopened one day.

However, when the factory was established, the plan was to renew the equipment in the Russian oil wells, which were quite old, and to drill new wells with much more technological equipment. 

The Americans were interested in making money and the Russians were interested in learning technology.

I don't know if the Russians or the Americans got what they wanted, but at least for me it was useful to learn the technology of a factory that actually makes drilling equipment.

Actually, drilling equipment is not that difficult to make. 

Of course, it has its own tricks, but its factory does not require much higher technology than a normal steel production factory.

We established two separate facilities in the first place, one is the steel production facility where the tower is made and the other is the pipe facility where the pipes are produced.

Of course, the head diamond required for drilling was not produced in these facilities we built, we were planning to build that facility in the future, but it was not such a great facility. 

There was a facility in the company's factory in Dubai where that equipment was also made. We visited that facility during our visit to Dubai.

You just had to use much better quality steel and they had a very special big milling cutter to make that tool. 

I think they were also diamonding the very end in a separate place. The diamonding process requires a separate technology of its own, after all. But as I said, it was not such a great facility.

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In other words, if desired, such a factory to make drilling equipment can be established in Turkey.

If you build such a plant with local and national means, then who will hold you back? 

Then drill everywhere.

Maybe you can even find oil with local and national resources.

Look, I have no objection to the establishment of such a factory with foreign investment.

But such investors first want legal security in the country.

Since we have cuckoo instead of law, I guess it is not that easy to attract investors under the current government conditions.

Look at the fact that the Americans even invested in Russia, knowing the risks involved. I can say that the capitalist world sometimes knows no rules, or has other rules that do not make sense.

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Of course, when we talk about geothermal energy, it is not as simple as I mentioned above.

At the very least, since drilling is very costly, they are trying to develop a lot of new methods to reduce the cost of drilling in the world.

Since it is not an easy task to dig at such depths with sufficient torque and power by rotating such long pipes, one of the methods is to lower the motors that provide the rotation power to the bottom of the borehole when it reaches a certain depth and to continue drilling from there by fixing it at that depth.

Of course, this requires a well large enough for the motor to be lowered down, and this is a factor that increases the cost. 

So you can drill deeper, but because you drill wider, both time and cost increase relatively.

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Another method is hammer drilling. 

You know the impact drills, sometimes you have no choice but to use impact to drill, especially in hard rock strata. 

These are very expensive pieces of equipment.

It takes quite a long time for the diamond bit to drill through the rocks just by rotating it, and time is also a cost.

Impact drilling rigs seem to have the advantage of reducing the drilling time, but they have the problem of failing very quickly. 

It can sometimes take weeks to fix the malfunction in these works.

Of course, all those engineers and skilled workers sit idle at such times. 

Since the idle time of these staff, whose salaries are also quite high, has to be paid, this is another factor that increases the cost of drilling.

There are different optimization methods to reduce all these labor costs. 

Working on multiple wells at the same time is one such method. 

In the event of a failure in one of the wells, this method has a positive effect on labor costs as it helps the team not to be idle.

However, in this case, it is necessary to plan for multiple drilling equipment from the beginning, which is also a cost factor in terms of upfront investment.

In short, depending on the project, cost optimization is made in each project in some way.

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What other methods are used in drilling?

For example, it is said that one method is to pressurize water between the rock layers underground and then use special coolers to break up the rocks with the freezing water.

This way, when drilling in this layer later on, the machines can drill through the layer without difficulty.

Doesn't nature also break down huge rocks by freezing the water entering the cracks? This method is an application of the same thing by human hands.

Since diamond bits have to be replaced after a certain period of time in these jobs, the weaker the layer you drill, the longer the diamond bit will probably last.

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Another method is drilling with water. When I say water, I mean drilling equipment that drills with water. Water is pumped into the borehole while drilling is being done.

However, the water drilling I am talking about is the method of cutting the strata with pressurized water using the jet method.

As you know, it is possible to cut even iron with water jet. 

It is also a method to cut the rocks with the help of such a water jet with a specially made drilling head and it is said to be an effective drilling method.

I don't know if it's cheaper than a diamond bit in terms of cost, but at least these water jet heads probably don't wear out as quickly as diamond bits.

Of course, is a huge rotary engine more costly? Or high-pressure compressors that can make water jets? That is also a subject I do not know.

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Another method is called penetrating hard rock layers with a laser. 

I don't know whether the cost of drilling with laser light is lower than the cost of drilling with a diamond bit, but as far as I understand, laser has also started to be used in drilling recently.

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One way or another, drilling is a costly process. 

Unfortunately, for some reason, we do not have very specialized staff in this field.

As I said, when your strategic goals are not right from the beginning, you do not train the necessary staff on time.

This cannot be explained by the fact that there is no oil in the country!

Look, there is no oil production in the Netherlands either, but the Netherlands has one of the biggest oil distribution companies in the world. 

Vitol Group!

These things are a bit related to entrepreneurship.

Shell is also a very big company that extracts oil and at the same time distributes it, so it is a giant Dutch company.

Look, Tamoil is another oil company based in the Netherlands.

How could the Netherlands have such big oil companies?

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Does anyone have a word for the British BP?

What about the French Elf, Total? 

They don't know much, but there is also a Schlumberger company in France.

So you don't necessarily need to have oil in your country to be an expert in this field. 

As long as you make smart investments from the beginning, be smart, be entrepreneurial and more importantly, invest in the country with love for the country.

If you invest just for the sake of making money, you can't go beyond selling the same model Fiat car to this country for years like the Turkish rich people of yesterday, with minor changes at most. And the people of this country will be happy to pay the world's money for a stupid car.

Local and national investment!

However, if you had even the slightest love for your country, then you would be ashamed of yourself for what you are doing. At least you would realize that what you do to make money actually harms the country.

I think that if the old rich capital owners of yesterday, whose sons are now doing more useful things for the country, had given a little more importance to geothermal energy investments in their time, we would be in a much different position as a country today.

The world is both technologically finding new methods that at least reduce the cost of drilling and trying to reduce its energy dependence on certain centers that try to use energy distribution for their political purposes. 

To this end, Europe has developed energy sources that were unthinkable until yesterday.

Even though Europe is still dependent on foreign energy, I think Europe will soon find a solution and we will be left in the dark.

As always, we will have to pay the world's money for the new technologies they come up with. We are already paying the world's money for both solar panels and wind turbines because Europe has developed the technology.

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All these efforts are to obtain energy.

I don't understand what we are waiting for when we have such an energy source?

If we scrape that soil with our fingernails, first the shuhada will gush out, and then geothermal energy will come out from underneath.

I think geothermal energy is the most important energy source we have in terms of the country's energy independence.

Other energy sources, unfortunately, either require a great deal of technology or, if we are talking about fossil fuels, unfortunately, our country does not produce enough of them and we have to buy them from abroad. We have already pushed the limits of the energy obtained from dam-style rivers.

Maybe our country is not an oil-rich country, but we can say that we are one of the few countries in the world rich in geothermal energy. 

Even Europe has enough geothermal resources according to the map, but at least it is not as rich as us.

I think we need to accelerate geothermal energy investments before it is too late!

Maybe this way we can reduce our dependence on foreign energy and maybe we can recover a little bit economically.

Love and respect to everyone from Moscow.