Technology Review interviews Jefferson Tester, professor of chemical engineering at the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment about advancements in drilling technology and rock fracturing using oil-field stimulation technology. The article is named Abundant Power from Universal Geothermal Energy. He estimates that "universal heat mining is going to take an investment which won't be quite that quick. It might take 10 or 15 years of investment to get to the point where you have confidence that you can do this in virtually any site that you can go to. "

We believe universal geothermal power generation is already possible today with advanced geothermal energy extraction technology.

Following up on yesterday's post regarding the Kola project, read a summary of the German KBT project which was published in the Oilfield Review in spring 1995 named "The KBT borehole - Germany's Superdeep Telescope into the Earth's Crust" (direct link to pdf)

You may want to read this article on the website "Damn Interesting" posted in June 2006 which has a summary of the discoveries of the Russian deep drilling project. The borehole is 12,261 meters deep and the article goes on to say "Even more surprisingly, this deep rock was found to be saturated in water which filled the cracks. " These findings concur with those of GEOHIL, that deep rock is water saturated.

Further information is available at The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program website and also Wikipedia entry on Kola Superdeep Borehole.