China is drilling the world's deepest hole in the name of science I immediately found
this fascinating because of research I was doing for another video turns out there's
some really important materials deep in the Earth's crust plus there have been some other
drilling breakthroughs of late so let's see if we can't figure this out together and see
why China is actually investing and doing this I'm Ricky and this is two-bit da Vinci
this video is brought to you by delete me it turns out that we know more about the moon and
Mars than we do about deep in the Earth's crust or the depths of our oceans so on the surface China's
claims that this is the name of science does make sense according to the Chinese state-run
xinhua news a borehole drilling project began on June 23rd in the Taran Basin Desert in China's
Northwestern xinjiang region the narrow shaft is planned to retake depth of 11 100 meters 36 400
feet and penetrate more than 10 Continental strata to reach the Cretaceous system of the
Earth's crust a Rockler that dates back over 145 million years remember that the Earth is like an
onion made of different layers the outermost layer is a crust which is like the planet's thin skin
it's only about 25 miles thick on average Beyond this is the 1800 mile deep mantle and beyond that
you arrive at the Earth's core well the Chinese are digging a hole that'll bore into the first
seven miles of crust to put that into perspective if the Earth was the same diameter as your arm
it would be like making a hole about 1 50th of an inch or half a millimeter deep into your arm's
skin so while 36 000 feet sounds amazing it is not very big in the whole grand scheme of things
the project is expected to take 457 days and is being called a landmark in China's deep Earth
exploration by the Chinese media so why are they drilling this hole the Deep exploration
will allow scientists to study the internal structure and evolution of the earth and provide
data for geoscience research said China National Petroleum Corporation the country's leading oil
and gas producer which is leading the project in a statement and there it is I was wondering
who's going to pay for all this since most other deep drilling projects ultimately die due to lack
of funding and we'll get back to that in a minute I'm all for science but science isn't cheap and in
many cases it's funded by large corporations with Deep Pockets like the oil and gas industry while
that isn't in and of itself a bad thing especially if some good comes out of it it does give us some
hints about the projects we real motives the xinjiang region is known for its Rich mineral
deposits and oil reserves recently cenopac China's largest refining company discovered
significant oil and gas flows in an exploration well in the term Basin at a depth of over 8 500
meters below the surface okay so Drilling in a region known for oil and gas deposits at depths
of excess of 8 500 meters it's kind of starting to make sense but we gotta give credit where it's
due the project is part of China's effort to explore New Frontiers in space and below the
Earth's surface in 2021 the Chinese president urged the country's leading scientists to break
new barriers in different areas including deep Earth exploration and two years later it's paying
off China already overtook the U.S to become the biggest contributor to Nature science journals
in a sign of the country's growing influence in the world of academic research but there's
actually a lot more to this story dating all the way back to the Cold War you see during the Cold
War besides the nuclear arms race and the first Space Race deep Earth exploration was also seen
as a Showcase of a country's technological and Engineering prowess and for good reason
as you'll see here in a minute it's incredibly challenging before we get into that let's talk
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description huge thanks to delete me and you for supporting the show let's talk about why I think
China is making the investment especially because I think you're going to be surprised the first is
geothermal energy geothermal is one of the most promising green Energy Solutions that could help
us completely decarbonize our base load power generation you see unlike wind and solar which
are intermittent geothermal energy is a reliable power source that's on 24 hours a day seven days
a week the reason we don't use geothermal plants everywhere is that to make it economically viable
we need to access temperatures above 705 degrees Fahrenheit and pressure is above 3200 PSI where
water becomes super critical this is a special state where water is a mix between a liquid and
a gas and is much better at extracting heat from the ground than either liquid water or
vapor so working at these temperatures makes the plant much more efficient and you can only
get temperatures that high at shallow depths near volcanoes or fault lines but if you could manage
to drill deep enough and economically enough you could access highly efficient geothermal energy
literally anywhere on the face of the Earth and that would be an absolute Game Changer and whoever
gets there first like every arms race will have a clear advantage over the rest of the world the
second reason I see for China drill in this hole is raw material exploration in 2021 China was
the world's third largest producer of iron ore only behind Australia and Brazil iron ore is the
second largest market in the world accounting for over 283 billion dollars in 2022 second
only the crude oil exports which added up to 2.1 trillion dollars iron ore is one of Humanity's
most important materials and it's what makes our modern world possible especially when alloyed into
steel China is also the world's largest steel producer they single-handedly produce 1 billion
tons of steel in 2022 which is 54 of the world's total production that year but iron is only the
tip of a very large iceberg China's dominance in many other strategic metals and minerals is
impressive the European critical raw materials Alliance classifies 30 raw materials that are
absolutely vital to the world economy of those 30 critical raw materials China ranks as the world's
number one largest producer in 14 of the cases the second largest producer in another two this means
that China literally dominates over half of all the most important critical raw materials on Earth
China produces over 90 percent of the world's rare earth metals and rare earth metals are needed for
powerful permanent magnets which allow us to do all sorts of things in the world of electric
motors sensors and large wind turbines and even hybrid cars besides providing raw materials for
their domestic Industries this dominance is important for China as leverage on the
international stage for example only a couple days ago on July 3 2023 China announced restrictions
on exports of gallium and germanium which are widely used in the semiconductor industry and this
really comes into play in the world of the current chip Wars which we've covered in a recent video
we discussed how the US is actively undermining China's access to the most advanced computer chips
by not allowing companies like asml to sell their best chip making machines to China now
China's striking back by cutting down the supply of raw materials this is just one example of why
mineral exploration is so important for China they need to diversify as much as possible to
remain relevant Dubai made its wealth in oil and gas but they know fossil fuels won't last forever
so they've built a thriving service and financial economy to diversify its income that's how they're
going to stay relevant for years to come now this is really important because China has been the
manufacturing heart of the planet for the last 50 years but that's changing as the cost of living
and labor rates are going up in China as their Workforce is becoming more and more advanced so
does manufacturing and now companies are moving to other countries like Vietnam for example example
for more of their manufacturing so the first thing China could do is stop making things for other
companies and let local Chinese companies start to dominate the market and this is already happening
with companies like DJI one of the best companies that make drones and camera equipment they're just
dominant and there's a ton of other companies like that another example of the rare materials that
come into play here is iridium iridium is one of the rarest elements in the Earth's crust and it's
easy to understand why it is so dense and metal that it's constantly sinking into the Earth's
core So in theory the deeper you drill the more likely you'll find more iridium and it turns out
iridium is one of the best catalysts for hydrogen production using electrolysis if China wants to
get an even stronger footing in the hydrogen economy controlling more and more of the Global
ertigian Production is definitely a smart move finally we have scientific research if you're
wondering why we know so much about drilling already it's because this new drilling project
won't be the deepest humans have ever drilled that distinction goes to the cola super D borehole in
Northwest Russia with a depth of 40 200 feet finished in 1989 after 20 years of drilling
this exploration brought a slew of important discoveries for example the temperature at the
bottom of the borehole was 180 degrees Celsius much higher than the expected 100. Rock samples
from three kilometers deep turned out to be almost identical to moon rocks suggesting that the moon
was once a part of the earth and got chipped Away by an asteroid or something similar millions of
years ago there was also water discovered at depths of more than 10 kilometers which
was surprising because it was thought that water could not exist at such high pressures there were
fossils of microorganisms in rocks as old as 2.7 billion years which suggested that life existed in
the Precambrian era and there were Gases such as hydrogen and methane in the Rocks which could have
been produced by chemical reactions or biological activity this goes to show how little we actually
know about the Earth crust let alone the mantle or even the core I used to think that we knew a
lot more about the core and that we had actually collected samples and studied them but it turns
out that we have barely scratched the surface in fact just a couple of weeks ago we managed
to drill through the Earth's mantle for the first time in human history and that was a
deep sea drilling experiment in one of the thinnest parts of the Earth's crust in the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean the question is why why is it so hard to drill deep into the Earth
it turns out drilling at these depths comes with a slew of engineering challenges the most important
challenges of drilling in miles into the Earth is related to how hard and hot the Rocks get down
there the top layer of Earth's crust is rather soft and easy to punch through with traditional
low-cost rotary drilling equipment however when you hit basement rock you need harder
bits to chew through the Rock The Big Challenge is that as things get hotter most materials like
steel and tungsten carbide lose many of their properties turning softer which makes them wear
out more quickly besides the obvious added cost of having to constantly replace drilling bits
it can also take a couple of days to replace the second big limiting factor is the weight of the
shaft itself we need to be able to pull out the entire shaft every time we have to replace a bit
and that means that a the shaft must be able to withstand its own weight B we have heavy
machinery on the surface capable of lifting the entire weight of the drilling equipment making
the shafts thicker to make them stronger doesn't work because it adds more weight which offset
the added strength almost exactly so the only real solution is to use stronger lighter and
more expensive metal alloys but there is a limit to how hard we can make these Alloys because the
harder Metals become they usually also become more brittle and break more easily the next big
challenge is pressure and stopping the borehole from collapsing whenever you go down into the
Earth's crust every foot you drill increases pressure not on the hole itself but on the
surrounding walls of rock because it has another foot of rock pressing down upon it this pressure
tends to make the walls of the hole collapse to avoid this we need to inject a fluid into the well
to balance the pressure and stabilize the hole this fluid is pumped through a drill and shaft
it mixes with the debris from the drilling bit and pushes it up to the surface as a drilling mud at a
depth of seven miles into the Earth pressures will rise to almost 240 megapascals which is about 35
000 pounds per inch to give you some context the pressure that imploded the Titan a few weeks ago
near the Titanic wreckage was around 6000 PSI and the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana's
Trench 17 750 PSI so well this deep would have a pressure twice that of the deepest point in
the ocean's floor we need massive pumps to pressurize and move that fluid down and up
seven miles not easy at all and it may not even be possible since there's a limit to how heavy we
can make the mud the way drilling companies solve many of these drilling challenges is by starting
with a wide hole which is lined with steel to hold the hole open and sustain the pressure
then you run a smaller dribble inside the outer jacket to keep boring and you line the hole with
more steel and make the bit smaller and smaller as you go deeper into the Earth this means that
Engineers need to plan just how deep they want to reach because as these jackets continually
get smaller that will determine just how far they can reach but sometimes during drilling we'll hit
spots of higher pressure than we anticipated or an unstable part of the geology and will be forced to
line the hole earlier than expected this can cause a blowout which is game over for the crews on top
and the entire drilling operation fortunately there are new technologies that could change
all of this by replacing the rotary mechanical drilling bit with a powerful energy beam and
I might spinoff company called quays is using a gyrotron which is a machine used in nuclear
fusion experiments to shoot millimeter wave energy beams that can literally vaporize any kind of rock
the cool thing about this technology is that it doesn't have moving parts that wear off it
can withstand extremely high temperatures since it doesn't depend on the material's mechanical
properties and it doesn't need drilling mud to stabilize the borehole this last bit is
because as it vaporizes the rock it literally cauterizes or turns the holes walls into glass
with this technology quiz believes it can drill as deep as 12.4 miles into the Earth doubling
China's Target depth not only that but it'll also do so much faster China claims they'll be able to
reach their target depth in 457 days or in about a year and three months this is 16 times faster than
the Soviet Cola deep super hole took 20 years ago but quay's claims they can drill a 12 Mile d-pole
in just a hundred days which is almost 10 times faster than what the Chinese are planning to do
not only that but the cost Savings in time and an expensive drilling bits and shafts will also
make quases drilling technology much cheaper than conventional drilling according to Paul
waskov from MIT plasma science infusion center an 8 inch wide 10 kilometer deep hole would cost
around five hundred thousand dollars worth of electricity using the gyrotron death ray whereas
the cost of a traditional drilling apparatus at that depth would cost around 30 million dollars
so we're talking about 60 times cheaper drilling not bad at all in the world of engineering science
and business as new breakthroughs come along we shift the materials that we need right in the
age of lithium on batteries and electric cars suddenly you need lithium and nickel and the
demand and the consumption of nickel and lithium have absolutely skyrocketed in the future if we
want to have a hydrogen economy we're going to need iridium and where is that going to come from
because there is so little on Earth especially that's accessible to us so as you look forward
you should always be thinking about how Industries will shift the makeup of what materials that we
need like we mentioned iron without iron if iron was so abundant on Earth we wouldn't have all the
bridges and all the structures and cars that we have today and in the case of china I think what
they're doing is just like back in the cold war or in previous times they're seeing deep Earth
exploration as a true Frontier and a Showcase of just how capable they are and I really think it
does make sense to invest in this as I mentioned China is kind of transitioning they're no longer
just manufacturing everything for everyone because the labor rates are going up and other cheaper
countries we're going to start taking over that Crown so what does China do well they go from
making other people's stuff to making their own stuff companies like DJI how about the
invasion of electric vehicles we're about to see something that didn't happen in the gasoline car
era Chinese automakers doing massive levels of exporting to other countries that didn't happen
before but it's about to the number of Chinese EV startups and companies like byd and Neo xpang
there are so many companies now that want to enter this space and it's going to completely shift the
economics so I think their plan is to look at what they want to do in the future and figure out how
they can have access to the minerals that they need because every end product that you see is
not possible without every bit of tungsten and copper and cold and platinum needed to make it
that is the look of what we think China is up to but obviously there's not a lot
of information that we know if we learn more we'll share with all of you guys and if you
thought this was cool and interesting you gotta check out this video next