disruptive technology, page-3

No they are doing shake down trials of the equipment in the field to get any operational bugs out of it, at the same time no one has ever drilled that deep in the area so there is some general geological interest, and there is certianly a lot of granite there. The designer sold his previous rig building business to Brandrill a couple of years ago for lots of zeros so he could concentrate on developing a mobile rig that had the power to get to 4 plus kilometres. I spoke to him on the phone and he said they had actually peaked at 38 metres an hour, which is something like 5 times the conventional drilling rates in granite and he is not doing it at the expense of his drill bits, the rotary motion of the drill is only two turns every inch, so maybe 40 rpm, its the air hammer doing the work. In limestone and sandstone, the sort of formations being drilled for the hot sedimentary aquifers this kit is going to really cut wood and that means a lot of savings for geoT companies.