Drilling Costs By Depth

Terraformer · 2023-09-02 07:08:00

Does anyone have ballpark figures? It's hard to find online. Especially broken down by the individual costs of mud, drill replacement, labour etc.

Small mobile augers can apparently reach up to 4-5m, enough to take soil samples so it doesn't seem like holes that deep should cost too much per metre.

For drilling 20m deep, this gives a cost of £2500, but they don't say if additional boreholes would cost the same because they're in the business of wells and only one is needed -- given additional boreholes don't cost as much as the first for other purposes (geothermal heat pumps), I expect it would be lower than this if more than one is drilled.

kbD512 has mentioned deep boreholes costing $50 per metre?

The cost of additional boreholes for heat pumps is £6000 (£10,000 for the first, presumably because of the fixed cost of setting up the equipment), so assuming on average they're 60m deep that's £100 per metre.

My intuition is that costs should be significantly lower for shallow boreholes, since there's less friction to fight against and less pressure to collapse the hole?

EDIT: apparently the figures for heat pump boreholes are lower than I remembered. This gives a cost of £25-50 a metre for deep boreholes, more in line with American costs. My guess is that the costs have come down a lot due to experience being gained and companies entering the market -- unlike America, we don't have a great many houses on well water, so there isn't a pre-established industry for this sort of drilling.

Last edited by Terraformer (2023-09-02 07:18:49)

tahanson43206 · 2023-09-02 07:30:20

For Terraformer re new topic ...

This post is primarily intended to get your new topic past the fatal "first reply" hurdle.

This is a topic that could become a repository of information that could be useful to others.

However, someone will need to invest some time, and it would help if the topic were at least moderately organized.

In order for the topic to be useful, posts need to be provided with tags that would make searches useful.

The typical random text that shows up in forum posts is not (usually) helpful for searching.

Companies that do drilling might be identified by country and region.

Terrain to be dealt with is a significant factor, as you have pointed out.

My guess is that there are entire books devoted to the industry, and others to the science of drilling.

You can edit the title by editing Post #1. If you want this topic to concentrate on the Earth, please say so.

GW Johnson has devoted considerable thought to the problem of drilling for water on Mars. There are several posts in the archive on that topic.

(th)

kbd512 · 2023-09-02 17:16:01

Terraformer,

The kind of detailed cost breakdown you're after is only available after the well is drilled. There are no two identical drilling jobs. Every well is drilling through different amounts of different materials, thus the mud properties will be different. Generally speaking, there are broad similarities for a given field or rock formation, but that is never guaranteed, and no two fields are alike. Labor will be cheaper if you have dozens of repetitive jobs lined up for them. Water-based mud has no special disposal requirements, whereas all oil-based mud has to be reconditioned to like-new for the next job. Properly disposing of oil-based mud is very expensive, because it involves separating out all the stuff you mixed into it. Some oil-based mud uses synthetic oil to permit going to higher temperatures, but most uses diesel fuel. All jobs involve variable losses. Most of the mud is lost during drilling, but accidents or bad chemistry can lose a lot more.

There are additional costs, sometimes a lot more cost, for cleaning and casing operations. The cleaning solutions, in particular, are very costly, especially bromines. I don't remember all the chemistry involved in why they use one solution over another, but there are engineering reasons. The casing materials cost will depend on the concrete mix required, total section length, and bore hole diameter. Some outfits probably cut costs by cutting corners, but this is highly inadvisable. I know the least amount about casing operations, but I had someone from that division explain what they did. It's not particularly complex or even time consuming, but you need the right people / equipment / materials to all show up at the correct time. Efficient drilling / cleaning / casing of shallow wells is mostly a matter of applying the basics, LGS removal efficiency, and logistics. There's an enormous amount of planning, coordination, and logistics involved. The deeper you go, the more geology and rheology you'd need to know. After the initial prep / plan / move effort, roughnecks run can and do run some of the onshore drilling ops, so no expensive mud engineer or project engineer is required onsite.

A good roughneck knows just enough to be dangerous. A few of them would make good mud engineers if we sent them to mud school. A mud engineer probably has the best working knowledge of how to run the mud system and prevent catastrophic losses. He or she is normally on the rig with the roughnecks. A good project engineer understands the logistics of herding cats. You couldn't pay me enough to do their job. I would rather have one well recap report in my hands from the field we intend to drill in, than all the engineering knowledge on the planet. If I have 5 or 10 of those reports from the same field, the engineering knowledge is probably superfluous. If we're doing exploratory drilling, then the well recap reports are probably meaningless and I'd rather have the best engineering staff money can buy.

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#1 2023-09-02 07:08:00

Drilling Costs By Depth

#2 2023-09-02 07:30:20

Re: Drilling Costs By Depth

#3 2023-09-02 17:16:01

Re: Drilling Costs By Depth

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