Natural resources

Abstract

The vast scale of drilling worldwide for economic goals dwarfs the number of scientific drilling projects. This alone creates a strong incentive for the ICDP to collaborate with industry. Given the current world energy situation, the growing amount of drilling for unconventional energy resources is increasing opportunities for such collaboration. Two examples are discussed here, the Mallik Gas Hydrate Production Research Program, and the ongoing Iceland Deep Drilling Project. The Mallik project was collaboration between industry and government agencies that investigated gas hydrates in permafrost in Arctic Canada. Gas hydrates are a new, and potentially large, source of energy. Past periods of rapid atmospheric warming in the geologic record may have been initiated, or significantly accelerated, by dissociation of such gas hydrates. The Iceland Deep Drilling Project is another collaboration between industry and government, but it is investigating unconventional geothermal resources in Iceland. This project will drill a series of 4 to 5 km deep wells in the search for supercritical hydrothermal fluids at temperatures of 450-500 °C. It is estimated that power output from wells producing supercritical fluid will be an order of magnitude greater than produced from conventional geothermal wells. Supercritical fluids play a fundamental role in coupling magmatic and hydrothermal systems on mid-ocean ridges. In the future, many other important scientific questions could be addressed by the ICDP participating in similar natural resource drilling projects. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.