I worked a couple years ( early 90s ) near Middletown California which sits east from the area known as "The Geysers"in northern California. The earths crust is considerably thinner in this area and sometimes you will see steam rising from the ground when driving in this mountainous area. The way you drill for steam is done with compressed air because using drilling fluids would kill the well. We would start out with mud and then switch to air at a certain safe depth ) It is the nastiest type of drilling I have ever worked around and its easy to get burned. Temperatures of the drill string when you get down around 10,000 feet ( drill pipe and drill collars ) reaches about 250 plus degrees when tripping pipe out of the hole and handling this pipe is a real pain. Big sealed asbestos gloves were used back then to push the pipe back on the rig floor. . Just breaking a tool joint apart will sometimes cause hot pipe dope to spray the floor hands with minute amounts of this pipe dope that could burn exposed skin. Imagine working to the point that even your jeans are completely wet from sweat. When a fishing event (lost drill string ) happens the hole has to be left open and the steam is escaping at a velocity that sounds like a jet engine is screaming right next to you on the rig floor. Under normal drilling conditions the steam is sent through a pipe to a muffler that is about 15 feet across and twenty or twenty five feet high. Even though the muffler weighs several tons it is staked to the ground because it has a tendency to jiggle around a little bit.
For a time the biggest steam turbine in use in the world as well as smaller units were used to convert the steam to electric power. Cooling towers were also employed with water run off systems feeding back into depleted wells or wherever. Santa Fe and Calpine are the only 2 companies I remember contracting with drilling companies at that time. 11,000 feet was about as deep as the drilling tech at that time could drill. At depth a good drill bit run was about 15 hours on bottom. After that the risk of losing part of the drill string downhole and causing a fishing job was too high. The wear factor on drill pipe meant you laid down about half of the drill pipe every time ( 4000 to 5000 feet ) we tripped out for a new drill bit. If you lost some air pressure while drilling that meant a hole had worn through the pipe. When that happened the driller would pick up the drill string and rotate the pipe slowly and wait for the hole, the weak spot, in the pipe to break away. Then, trip out of the hole and see what fishing tool was required to snag the remaining drill string still sitting at the bottom of the hole. . To attempt to pull out a drill string with a hole in it could be a disaster if it breaks while part of the way out. The broken string would drop to the bottom at near free fall speed and then break into pieces that would wedge themselves so tightly that all would be lost, or impossible to get unstuck. That means the hole and all the time, money and energy to drill it would be lost short of total completion depth. It was a stressful operation!
The power generated there at that time was sent to the Los Angeles market on high tension lines.
I am grateful for the experience but would never do it again unless it paid about 3 times what I make now.
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