HyperSciences Wants To Drill Into The Earth With A Huge Gun

Thursday, July 23, 2015 - 16:00 in Earth & Climate

HypersciencesA head-on view of the projectile Hyperscience will use to bore into the Earth's crust.It’s no secret—there’s a lot of energy held just a few thousand feet under Earth’s surface. To harness any sizable amount of our planet’s underlying geothermal energy for steam power, we would have to bore more than two miles into the crust. Unfortunately, the current drilling process is prohibitively expensive for most interested parties, ranging from $5 to 20 million depending on the depth desired.Mark Russell, CEO of Hypersciences, wants to change that. His method? Repeatedly firing projectiles into the Earth’s crust, which Russell claims is ten times faster than traditional drilling. He received a patent last year for his projectile-based system, and was recently funded about one million dollars by Shell’s GameChanger program to continue his research, according to GeekWire.The process works by loading a projectile with a special abrasive core...

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