Kola hole

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Kola borehole (Europe)
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Building of the drilling site under the northern lights and stylized technical sketch of the drilling with casing, drill rods, turbine, reduction gear, core catcher and chisel  cf. (for details see text ) as a Soviet stamp motif, 1987

The Kola borehole ( Russian Кольская сверхглубокая скважина Kolʹskaja swerchglubokaja skwashina ), also known as Kola SG-3 ( СГ-3 ) or KSDB (from English K ola S uper d eep B orehole ), was carried out for scientific purposes from 1970 to 1992 Ultra-deep geological drilling on the Russian Kola Peninsula , about ten kilometers southwest of the small town of Sapoljarny . It reached 12,262 meters depth (1989) and, since 1979, the deepest hole in the world. It also had the longest borehole until 2008. It is also the only extra deep well in a stable craton or continental shield . The Kola well was the first of a total of 11 planned extra-deep wells in an ambitious state research program in the Soviet Union . Work on the second of these wells, which only reached a depth of 8200 m, also began in the early 1970s in Saatly in the oil fields of the Kura Basin ( Azerbaijan ).

Regional geology

The Kola Peninsula is part of the Baltic Shield , the largest outcrop of the Precambrian basement of the European Craton ( Baltica ). The Baltic Shield is characterized by crystalline rocks, i.e. intensely folded and mostly high-grade metamorphic rocks (mainly various gneisses ) and unmetamorphic igneous rocks (mainly granitoids ). The northeast of the Baltic Shield including the Kola Peninsula is its oldest part ( archaic core), with rock ages up to 3.5 billion years. Approximately parallel to the coast of the Barents Sea and the White Sea , NW-SE runs Underlining the so-called Kola Province, longitudinally through the interior of the Kola Peninsula. The Kola Province has a very complex structure, is interpreted as part of an archaic- paleoproterozoic orogen and, in addition to various granitoid-gneiss complexes, also contains so-called greenstone belts . The Kola SG-3 drilling site is located within the Kola Province in the outcrop of the so-called Pechenga Complex (also called the Pechenga structure or the Pechenga greenstone belt), a paleoproterozoic, low to medium-grade metamorphic sequence of volcanic , volcanosedimentary and various sedimentary rocks , which is interpreted as orogenetically shaped filling of a rift valley (Petschenga-Varsuga-Rift) or backarc basin .

aims

The remote location near Sapoljarny was selected, among other things, because of the Sudbury- type sulphidic copper-nickel deposit , which has been mined not far from the drilling site since the late 1940s. The purpose of the drilling was to trace this deposit in depth and to gain knowledge of its formation. The original target depth for the bore was 15,000 m. Further objectives and expectations were

  • the exploration or sampling of areas of the earth's crust in which seismic discontinuity areas were registered, in particular the so-called Conrad discontinuity , the interface between the upper (or middle) and lower earth crust,
  • the exploration of geothermal conditions and the potential occurrence of water and gases in greater crustal depths and
  • checking the practicability of the drilling and measuring technology specially developed for this record drilling and gaining new knowledge for further development of the same.

Technical details and chronology

Rig the Uralmash-15000 in 2007, the remaining buildings of the drilling are obscured by hills
Derelict main building without the derrick, which had already been demolished in 2012
The sealed wellhead of the Kola well (2012)

The planning and preparations for the borehole began in the early 1960s. On May 24, 1970 drilling began using the Uralmash -4E drilling rig, which is also used for conventional oil drilling . At the beginning of 1975 the work was interrupted when a depth of 7,263 m was reached, the drilling rig was dismantled and replaced over the course of a year by the specially developed, 68 m high Uralmasch-15000 , which was specially designed for the target depth of 15,000 m. Due to the unfavorable weather conditions in the tundra of the Kola Peninsula, the drilling rigs were each fully clad and designed to be heatable. Control and measurement technology, workshops, material and core storage as well as offices and sleeping quarters for the members of the drilling team were housed in the adjoining and surrounding buildings.

The upper part of the drill rod used (up to 2,000 m) was made of steel, including a high-strength aluminum alloy, so that the weight of the entire rod did not exceed the 400 tons of lifting force of the drilling rig even in the area over 10,000 m depth (including that caused by the rod being in contact frictional resistance generated by the borehole wall). The aluminum alloy was temperature stable up to around 250 ° C. The for obtaining core samples or due to wear replacement of the drill bit required pulling the entire boom ( English roundtrip ) took place at the Uralmash-15000 fully automatic, requiring at 12 km depth only 18 hours. Effective drilling was still only 3.1% of the time between the 10,000 and 11,500 m mark (i.e. an average of 45 min / d), compared to 27.1% for the first 2,000 m (6.5 h / d). d). Instead of the conventional rotary method , the turbine method was used to drill. There is (at least) one turbine above the drill bit, which is driven by the drilling fluid injected at high pressure * and which in turn drives the bit . As a result, no torsional forces act on the linkage, which as a result is much less prone to breakage and can consist of less rigid, but lighter material. The rods in the Kola borehole nevertheless rotated at a few revolutions per minute to prevent jamming in the borehole. A planetary gear with high torque reduced the rotational speed were used always - the chisel roller bits with tungsten carbide warts without diamond - to a maximum of 150 revolutions per minute, to slow the wear of the material. The telemetry for rotational speed, torque, chisel pressure on the bottom of the borehole, etc. was carried out innovatively by means of a largely heat-insensitive hydraulic line, in which the information was supplied in the form of pressure pulses from the instruments at the bottom of the borehole to the control room. The inclination of the borehole with respect to the vertical is on average 10 degrees, the bottom at a depth of 12 km deviates around 750 m ** to the side. Originally a small distance as possible should the borehole cased in order to save costs and to as much "open hole" (English. Open-hole ) for scientific measurements to have available. The standpipe has a diameter of 426 mm *** and is around 40 m long. From there, initially uncased was drilled to a depth of 5,300 m with a chisel diameter of 215 mm. Then, due to eruptions from the borehole wall at 1,800 m in the area of ​​a heavily water-bearing formation, the borehole had to be drilled further down to a depth of 2,000 m and a casing with a 342 mm *** diameter had to be cemented . To protect it, a replaceable pipe string with a diameter of 245 mm was pulled into this piping. By 1990, the inner pipe string was extended as permanent piping to a depth of 8,770 m , using newly developed cement mixtures that can set at temperatures well over 100 ° C. Of the first 11,500 m drilling section, 9,325.2 m were core (core diameter 60 mm). This was relatively unproblematic up to a depth of 4,600 m, with a core gain of 53%. However, including the rock began (Engl. As a result of pressure relief sliced to burst disking ), the wedged in the core tube. This reduced the core profit by more than half. From the beginning of the use of the Uralmasch-15000 at around 7,300 m, the core gain was initially increased again to 40% due to the use of a double core tube with a non-rotating inner tube, but fell again to 29% below 9,000 m. A total of 3,700.1 m drill core had been recovered by 1982/83 (40%).

On June 6, 1979, the depth mark of 9,584 meters was reached, surpassing the previous record hole Bertha Rogers in Oklahoma, USA, by 1 m. But long before that, Kola was the deepest borehole that had ever been drilled outside of a sedimentary basin or completely in crystalline rock . In 1980 the borehole reached a depth of 10,700 m. For August 1982 a depth of 11,515 m was given. On December 27, 1983, the bore reached the 12,000 m mark and on August 10, 1984 the depth was 12,046 m.

Until 1984 the Kola well was a single well. Then on September 27th, after reaching the depth mark of 12,066 m, the rods tilted in the borehole when it was pulled and tore off at a depth of approx. 7,000 m when attempting to loosen it, so that approx. 5,000 m of drill string plus turbine, reduction gear and chisels remained irretrievably in the borehole. Subsequently, in several new attempts, partial boreholes ‡ were created, which branch off from the main borehole from a depth of approx. 7,000 m. Three partial holes penetrated below the 11,600 m mark, and one of these three finally reached the final depth in 1989 at 12,262 m. The drilling team was faced with increasing technical difficulties with increasing depth. The unexpectedly high temperatures of 180 to over 200 ° C in the depth range below 11,000 m, which brought the technology to the limit of its capabilities, were problematic. After it was announced in July 1992 that they wanted to reach at least the 13,000 m mark, the drilling work was finally stopped in the same year. The facility was initially used for seismic and various other scientific measurements and experiments.

In 2008 ITAR-TASS reported that the dismantling of the station was already in progress. The derrick was completely demolished by 2012. The remaining buildings were left standing and left to decay. In 2014 a report from ITAR-TASS indicated that the property was owned by a private "Kola drilling company" at the time, which in turn was being liquidated .

* in the range of several 10 M Pa (several 100  atm ), the Uralmasch-15000 pumping system could generate an injection pressure of 35 to 40 MPa (approx. 350 to 400 atm); Kozlovsky (1984) speaks specifically of 250 atm
** Kozlovsky (1984) gives the greatest horizontal deviation of 840 m at 10,500 m depth, after which it goes back again. Vidal (1985) reports a 560 m deviation at a depth of 11,000 m.
*** The information on the diameter of the piping is also partly different in Vidal (1985) and in the Russian sources. The latter give a diameter of 720 mm for the standpipe and a diameter of 325 mm for the outer piping up to 2000 m.
Schulze (2001) speaks of an uncased section between 8,280 and 8,580 m in 1996 in connection with fluid level measurements in the Kola borehole.
‡ An article in the Uralmash house sheet states that there were a total of 12 partial wells

Scientific results

This section needs to be revised: The paraphrasing of the sources was often unfortunate, to the point of incomprehensibility.
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In 1984, 31 international scientists were invited to take a look at the project on site, including Helmut Vidal, a West German geologist and pioneer of the continental deep drilling program of the Federal Republic of Germany (KTB) .

The Proterozoic reached a depth of 6842 m. Four phases can be distinguished:

At 1,500 to 1,800 m, the ultra-basic intrusions also contain copper- and nickel-bearing sulphidic ores of the Sudbury type, which were mined elsewhere on the Kola Peninsula.

The Archean from 6842 to 12000 m consists of a gneiss - granite complex, whereby the gneiss is strongly metamorphic (up to granulitization ). Around two-thirds of these consisted of rhythmically embedded sequences of biotite and two- mica plagioclase gneisses, which experienced temperatures of 750 to 900 ° C (and pressures of 500 to 110 Mega) during the metamorphosis 2.7 to 2.8 billion years ago -Pascal). At the Conrad discontinuity at around 7000 m, a basaltic layer was actually expected instead of the gneiss-granite complex. At a depth of 4500 to 9000 m there was an inversion zone with lower propagation speed of seismic waves, but also without transition to basalts at the discontinuity at 9000 m. The Kola well was the first well to reach this discontinuity.

Between 4500 and 11000 m there is evidence of hydrothermal ore formation (there are zones of crushed rocks cemented with calcites, quartz and sulphide ores). Contrary to expectations, tectonically heavily stressed rocks with relatively high permeability and circulation of fluids with a high mineral content (bromine, iodine, some heavy metals) were found at depths of over 4500 m. They also contained gases, including methane and other hydrocarbons. According to isotope dating, the carbon dioxide was partly of archaic origin (from the mantle), partly Proterozoic and biogenic. Microfossils were found in the roughly two billion year old metamorphic rocks (emerged from sandstones and conglomerates).

The temperature gradient on the surface was previously determined to be 1 ° C per 100 m. A gradient of 2.5 ° C per 100 m was found at a depth of 3000 m. At a depth of 12,000 m, a temperature of 205 ° C was reached, which was also above expectations.

Measurements of the liquid level in the borehole (carried out from 1996) allow conclusions to be drawn about mechanical interactions between the rocks in the earth's crust and the liquids in their pore space, among other things caused by earth tides .

Most of the more than 45,000 rock samples have not yet been examined (as of 2010).

Legends

In 1989 rumors began to circulate about strange occurrences during the drilling operation. This gave rise to the legend that hell had been drilled into, because microphones were lowered into the borehole to record noises that turned out to be “human screams from thousands of tormented throats”. This story was later embellished by a Norwegian teacher who was critical of religion and leaked in his version to the religious American television family Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), which, despite doubts about its authenticity, passed it on to a Texan television preacher , who eventually passed it on in spread throughout the United States. From then on it became independent and has recently been distributed mainly via the Internet.

record

The length of the Kola well was only exceeded in 2008 by a deep-sea well in the Al Shaheen oil field in Qatar . However, this borehole only reaches a depth of 1,500 meters below the sea floor as most of this borehole (10,902 meters) was horizontal.

In 2011, the Sakhalin I project broke this record. The Odoptu OP-11 borehole reached a length of 12,345 m and a lateral extension of 11,475 m.

See also

literature

  • JW Clarke, RC McDowell, JR Matzko, PP Hearn, DJ Milton, DJ Percious, DB Vitaliano, Gregory Ulmishek: The Kola Superdeep Drill Hole by Ye. A. Kozlovskiy (1984): A detailed summary. Open-File Report 86-517. United States Geological Survey, Washington, DC 1986, doi: 10.3133 / ofr86517 (English long summary of the Russian anthology published by the then Soviet geology minister Yevgeny Koslowski [Евгений Козловский], Moscow Кольская сверханя 1987, Publishing house Кольская сверхагл -Publisher in full English translation under the title The Superdeep Well of the Kola Peninsula , ISBN 978-3-642-71139-8 ).
  • Yevgeny A. Kozlovsky: Kola super-deep: interim results and prospects. Episodes. Vol. 5, No. 4, 1982, pp. 9-11 ( PDF 500 kB).
  • Yevgeny A. Kozlovsky: The world's deepest well. Scientific American. Vol. 251, No. 6, 1984, pp. 98-104, doi: 10.1038 / scientificamerican1284-98 .
  • Helmut Vidal: Kola-SG-3, the deepest well in the world. Earth sciences in our time. Vol. 3, No. 2, 1985, pp. 52-57, doi : 10.2312 / geoscientific . 1985.3.52 .
  • Helmut Vidal: The Kola super-deep borehole SG-3 - first look at the deepest hole of the world. GeoJournal. Vol. 9, No. 4, 1984, pp. 431-432, doi: 10.1007 / BF00171607 .

Web links

Commons : Kola Bore  - Collection of Images, Videos, and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e YA Kozlovsky: The world's deepest well. 1984 (see literature ), p. 101 f.
  2. ↑ Yulia A. Uvarova, T. Kurtis Kyser, Elena Sokolova, Vadim I. Kazansky, Konstantin V. Lobanov: Significance of stable-isotope variations in crustal rocks from the Kola Superdeep Borehole and their surface analogues. Precambrian Research. Vol. 189, No. 1–2, 2011, pp. 104–113, doi: 10.1016 / j.precamres.2011.05.005 (alternative full text: SemanticScholar )
  3. ↑ a b c d e H. Vidal: The Kola super-deep borehole SG-3. 1984 (see literature )
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m H. Vidal: Kola-SG-3, the deepest bore in the world. 1985 (see literature )
  5. ↑ AI Slabunov, SB Lobach-Zhuchenko, EV Bibikova, P. Sorjonen-Ward, VV Balagansky, OI Volodichev, AA Shchipansky, SA Svetov, VP Chekulaev, NA Arestova, VS Stepanov: The Archaean nucleus of the Fennoscandian (Baltic) Shield. P. 627-644 in: DG Gee, RA Stephenson (Ed.): European Lithosphere Dynamics. Geological Society, London, Memoirs 32. 2006, doi: 10.1144 / GSL.MEM.2006.032.01.37
  6. ↑ Viktor A. Melezhik, Eero J. Hanski: Paleotectonic and palaeogeographic evolution of Fennoscandia in the Early Palaeoproterozoic. Pp. 111-178 in: Victor Melezhik, Anthony R. Prave, Anthony E. Fallick, Lee R. Kump, Harald Strauss, Aivo Lepland, Eero J. Hanski (eds.): Reading the Archive of Earth's Oxygenation. Volume 1: The Palaeoproterozoic of Fennoscandia as Context for the Fennoscandian Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project. Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-29681-9 , p. 114
  7. ↑ Anthony J. Naldrett: Magmatic Sulfide Deposits. Springer, 2004, ISBN 978-3-642-06099-1 , pp. 279 ff. (Chapter 5: Deposits of the Pechenga area, Russia)
  8. ^ Evgenii V. Sharkov, Valery F. Smolkin: The early Proterozoic Pechenga-Varzuga Belt: a case of Precambrian back-arc spreading. Precambrian Research. Vol. 82, No. 1-2, 1997, pp. 133-151, doi: 10.1016 / S0301-9268 (96) 00041-1
  9. ↑ The current operator of the local nickel ore mines is MMC Norilsk Nickel ( Nornickel ) or its regional subsidiary Kola MMC , see Nornickel Annual Report 2016. Moscow 2017 ( PDF 16 MB, p. 8, 46)
  10. ↑ USSR and Eastern Europe Scientific Abstracts: Geophysics, Astronomy and Space. No. 384. JPRS Report 68212. US Joint Publications Research Service, Arlington (VA) 1976 ( online ), p. 22 (English abstract of an article by A. Asan-Nuri and M. Woroshbitow in the Soviet journal Nauka i shisn [Наука и жизнь] No. 3/1976, pp. 34-40)
  11. ↑ Ur-Tower. Image 3 in the photo gallery of the Spiegel online article Oops, we've drilled through hell! by Danny Kringiel on April 26, 2011
  12. ^ A b YA Kozlovsky: Kola super-deep: interim results and prospects. 1982 (see literature )
  13. ↑ JW Clarke et al .: The Kola Superdeep Drill Hole by Ye. A. Kozlovskiy. 1986 (see literature ), p. 211
  14. ^ Yevgeny A. Kozlovsky: The USSR integrated program of continental crust investigations and studies of the earths deep structure under the “Globus” Project. Pp. 90-103 in: Karl Fuchs, Yevgeny A. Kozlovsky, Anatoly I. Krivtsov, Mark D. Zoback (eds.): Super-Deep Continental Drilling and Deep Geophysical Sounding. Springer-Verlag, 1990, ISBN 978-3-642-73457-1 , p. 96 f.
  15. ↑ a b JW Clarke et al .: The Kola Superdeep Drill Hole by Ye. A. Kozlovskiy. 1986 (see literature ), p. 214
  16. ↑ James S. Dahlem: Bit Design for Crystalline Rock. Pp. 235-261 in: Anders Bodén, K. Gösta Eriksson (Eds.): Deep Drilling in Crystalline Bedrock: Volume 2: Review of Deep Drilling Projects, Technology, Sciences and Prospects for the Future. Springer-Verlag, 1988, ISBN 978-3-642-73457-1 , p. 250 ff.
  17. ↑ JW Clarke et al .: The Kola Superdeep Drill Hole by Ye. A. Kozlovskiy. 1986 (see literature ), p. 4
  18. ↑ Picture 16 in the photo gallery for the Spiegel online article Oops, we've drilled through hell! by Danny Kringiel on April 26, 2011
  19. ↑ a b The Unbreakable Record. Excerpt from an article in United Heavy Machinery Gazette [Объединенная машиностроительная газета] (No. 28, 2004) on the Uralmash website, English version
  20. ↑ VR Vetrin, OM Turkina, J. Ludden: Petrology and geochemistry of rocks from the basement of the Pechenga paleorift. Russian Journal of Earth Sciences. Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 121-151, doi: 10.2205 / 2002ES000085 , Fig. 2.
  21. ↑ Russia won't drill superdeep Kola peninsula hole to 15,000 m target. Oil & Gas Journal, July 12, 1992
  22. ↑ a b Danny Kringiel: Oops, we've drilled into hell! In: Spiegel Online . April 26, 2011, accessed June 7, 2020 .
  23. ↑ Kola Superdeep Borehole Will Be Destroyed. Russia-IC, October 3, 2008
  24. ↑ Прокуратура: процедура банкротства научной скважины под Мурманском незаконно затянута. ITAR-TASS, June 10, 2014 (Russian)
  25. ↑ JW Clarke et al .: The Kola Superdeep Drill Hole by Ye. A. Kozlovskiy. 1986 (see literature ), p. 203
  26. ↑ Yuri A. FETKO: equipment Wellhead. Pp. 504-506 in: Yevgeny A. Kozlovsky (Ed.): The Superdeep Well of the Kola Peninsula. Springer-Verlag, 1987, ISBN 978-3-642-71139-8
  27. ↑ a b Katja Schulze: Measurement of fluid level fluctuations in the Kola borehole - introduction and objectives. ( Memento from January 20, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Web presence of the former Institute for Geodynamics and Geophysics of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 2001
  28. ^ After Helmut Vidal: The Kola Super-deep Borehole SG-3 - First Look at the Deepest Hole of the World. GeoJournal, Volume 9, 1984, Issue 4.
  29. ↑ Two micas: biotite and muscovite
  30. ↑ Kozlovsky: The world`s deepest well, Scientific American. December 1984, p. 98.
  31. ↑ Matthias Cassel: A dream of a hole . In GEO 7/2010, pp. 128-136.
  32. ↑ Transocean GSF Rig 127 Drills Deepest Extended-Reach Well. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on November 12, 2010 ; Retrieved April 26, 2011 .
  33. ↑ Continuous improvements lead to Maersk Oil Qatar's longest horizontal well in the world. Retrieved June 5, 2011 .
  34. ↑ Sakhalin-1 Project Drills World's Longest Extended-Reach Well

Coordinates: 69 ° 23 ′ 46 ″  N , 30 ° 36 ′ 31 ″  E