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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud 148

Posted by timothy from the for-the-filthiest-dirtiest-data dept.
An anonymous reader writes "You might have laid Ethernet through some pretty aggressive environments, but how about through a 4-inch diameter steel pipe immersed in electrically conductive mud at pressures up to 1000 atmospheres, temperatures up to 150 deg C, and with vibrational accelerations of hundreds of g? The Department of Energy has announced the invention of a system to allow data transmission up to 1 Mbit/s along drillpipe. That might not sound too fast, but the current technology uses some pretty neat electromechanical engineering to get ... 10 bits per second (on a good day). This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability to see where its wells are going and steer them into pockets of oil."
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High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud More

High-Speed Data Transfer Over ... Mud

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  • M.U.D. (Score:5, Funny)

    by newr00tic ( 471568 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:11PM (#4397727) Journal

    I read this as M.U.D. at first (Multi User Dungeon).

    "While you drill for oil, you see a vibrant pixie nearby".
    "Something is scribbled in the mud here.."

    The message in the mud reads:
    "high-speed network via M.U.D. is under construction; announce it on /."

    Possible exits: Down, Up, Home

  • This will revolutionize the oil industry's ability ... and steer them into pockets of oil.

    Well that's good news! They certainly need all the help they can get bringing us all that Texas Tea that we need to live fulfilling lives.

    I can sleep easy now. Thanks, technology!

  • 1 MB/s? (Score:2, Funny)

    by octalc0de ( 601035 )
    Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL? The drill doesn't need all that bandwidth.... or perhaps it needs to fulfill its porn fill of the day? ;)
    • The drill isn't the only thing sending data. They are trying to scan and map underground so that they cna steer the drill.

    • Re:1 MB/s? (Score:5, Funny)

      by bunyip ( 17018 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:33PM (#4397831)
      I agree, no drill bit is ever going to need more that 640 Kbits / second.

    • Re:1 MB/s? Here's a guess... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @02:48PM (#4398184) Journal
      Why do you need 1 MB/s for a big honking DRILL?

      Well, for starters you could put an array of accoustic, microwave, or electrical transmitters & sensors in the pipe just BEHIND the drill and image the region ahead of the drill with radar and/or sonar. If you see a pocket of something that sounds/conducts/reflects like oil a bit off to one side, you can adjust the drill to curve in that direction (or send the NEXT one over that way).

      10 BPS just doesn't cut it for uploading imaging information, even if you put most of the fancy processing down with the sensore. But T1 rates are just fine.

      There's lots of other stuff you want to monitor - temperature, pressure, conductivity, etc. to find out what sort of stuff you're drilling through.

      And it's important to know when to give up, stop pouring money down THIS hole and start over somewhere else. It costs a LOT to run the rig long enough to drill even another foot...

      I recall, back in the early days, a company in Ann Arbor made a little board with a CMOS Z80-clone, a ROM with a BASIC interpreter, a serial port, and a few I/O ports - including some analog inputs. They sold a LOT of 'em to an oil company.

      Seems that every now and then they would pull up the drill and send one of these down to measure some stuff. Then they would send the drill down behind it and grind it up. It was cheaper to buy a new one (and the associated cable) each time than to leave the rig idle long enough to pull the old one up. (And considering how fast a winch can crank, and how much custom computer stuff cost back in those days, that will tell you a lot about the per-minute cost of an oil rig and drilling team.)

      So imagine how much they can save if they don't need to pull the DRILL up - disassembling it as they go - then reverse the whole process to put it back down, every time they want to take another reading.
    • Mudcam.
      Look for it soon, only $1 a minute in streaming video.
      Written transcript: Black, black, brown, gray, black, brown...

  • More than mud? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:16PM (#4397747) Homepage
    Maybe eventually they can put that dust collecting above the ceiling tiles at our school to good use. I mean, the layer is about five inches thick.
    Or, they could just use wifi...

  • Mud + 802.11b (Score:4, Funny)

    by Devil's BSD ( 562630 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:18PM (#4397757) Homepage
    Hey, if you used that mud as a 802.11b antenna or something, you would be WARMUDSLINGING!

  • nothing new (Score:1, Interesting)

    by russcoon ( 34224 )
    data transfer over mud isn't new. The best oilfield services companies have been doing it for quite some time.

    As for why they need to get data out, consider that when you're looking for oil, you need to figure out what the EXACT geological formations look like (in 3 dimensions) a mile or 2 underneath the surface of the earth. The more data you can get out of a hole about any number of factors (rock hardness, resistivity, etc...) at a known depth, the better your odds are of figuring out what's down there in the main.
    • What makes this article news is the sudden jump in bandwidth over the current technology: from 10bps to 1Mbps. That's a 100x increase, which sounds pretty interesting to me. I mean, if Cisco came to you and said their new switches could pass 10,000% more data per second, would you blow them off, saying "sorry, but packet switching is old news, not interested"?

  • That's Nothing! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jouster ( 144775 ) <<moc.qaflegna> <ta> <todhsals>> on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:33PM (#4397830) Homepage Journal
    I've had to put Cat5 through sales and marketing cubes!

    Much easier communication than the old "pulsed-bullshit" telemetry, though.

    Jouster
  • hurrah, 1mbit is worthy of a slashdotting, on three...
  • ....cried. Personally, I think this is great, but I know some who wouldn't like this.

  • But is it backhoe proof? Then I'll be impressed.
    Stupid contractors keep cutting through damn cables in my area.

  • more details (Score:4, Informative)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:37PM (#4397852) Journal
    The key to the new system is a unique non-contacting coupler embedded in connections between 30-foot long sections of drill pipe. The coupler permits data to be sent across the connection and on through a high-speed cable attached to the inner pipe wall.

    For more than 60 years, engineers have struggled with the problem of a drill pipe connection, or "tool joint," that would stand up to the wear and tear of increasingly hostile downhole drilling conditions, yet provide reliable electrical connections every 30 feet over thousands of feet of pipe penetrating deep into some of nature's harshest environments. [...]

    But the excruciatingly slow pace of mud pulse telemetry - 3 to 10 bits per second - often meant that data resolution was so poor that the driller could not make crucial decisions in real time. Often, time-consuming operations would be required to retrieve the downhole data or drilling would have to stop while other procedures were employed to confirm the low-resolution data pulsed to the surface.

    And there is this link, complete with pretty graphics, from the company that actually developed the technology

    http://www.grantprideco.com/gptechnologies/Intelli Pipe.asp [grantprideco.com]

    have fun

  • "I run my drill on Linux! There's a public-domain webserver where you can view the realtime stats!"

    Ugh, /.'ed drillpipe.

    Jouster
    • "I run my drill on Linux! ..."

      That's right, and any oil pumped through it must have the source code for the drill software. Any gas produced from teh oil must then contain the code for the oil and the drill. The gas that's produced can only be run in non proprietary engines and the owner of the engine can request the source for the drill at any time.

  • For more information on the origin of this problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by DaedalusLogic ( 449896 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @01:52PM (#4397922)
    Check out Schlumberger www.slb.com. They're the 800 lb gorilla of the oilfield services industry. Their original solution to finding what was going on at the other end of a drilling rig was to simply pulse mud. Switch it on and off and measure the changes in this signal on the end of the drilling rig. When drilling a rig mud is used to stabilize the walls of the shaft . The advantage of this technique is this... No circular conductor built into the pipe means it can be adapted easily to old equipment and its cheaper. This new system described will eventually make its gains... but its gonna be a while... I saw someone mention wireless... Totally unfriendly environment and there is WAY to much noise, not to mention these holes are so deep you're not going to penetrate all the way back up the hole to the rig on the surface. Anyway... that's a really basic description of what the old new and a couple considerations are in the industry... Look up Schlumberger for a little more info... or Halliburton...

  • The Devil gets ethernet. (you know he'll be on AOL)
  • Whoa, what a coincidence. I read this story and then I heard an interview with the people actually producing this hardware on the radio. I have digital radio so I recorded it and put it on my site as a 16kbps MP3. It's only 160k. Here you go:

    http://www.boog.co.uk/media/wireless-oil.mp3 [boog.co.uk]
  • Now the metaphora comes to reality:

    Hey, get of your chair and go check that mudpit over there, we are been having some blackouts for the last five minutes...
  • This is awesome, I am going to the office in waders and I am going to start packing in mud,pipes, and oil through the new HR department!

    I am going to get away with it because I will link this article in an email to engineering discussing how this will avoid the plenum/firecode problem with UTP. I will send a second email to accounting discussing the massive ROI on using mud over expensive cabling projects.

    The the only part that will be better than watching their email open for two hours will be watching them cry about having to process my raise and promotion! This is the first Monday I have looked forward to in a LONG time, THANKS /.!
  • Wouldn't it be better if the Department of Energy had spent the money for this project on utilizing renewable resources instead?

    While I'm ranting. If western nations had have spent some of the money they used to design and build weapons to protect foriegn oil interests on renewable energy solutions instead; couldn't much of the middle east situation have been avoided?

    • Whacko extremists (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Why is it all the whacko enviro greeny extremists seem to think that everything is an either/or proposition?

      As if the DOE had a budget of X dollars and was required to spend all of X on drilling tech or all of X on alternative fuels tech.

      The reality is that the budget is just that... a budget. Some money goes to oil tech, some money goes to a variety of alternative energy tech, and the rest goes into the vast sink hole of spending that is the federal beaurocracy.

      Thank you for reading this far into my diatribe about the stupid and ignorant people of the world and how they managed to get on the net.
    • The western nations spent as much money on weapons as they thought was neccessary, combined with personal greed and kickbacks. Western Nations feared being conquered by the USSR and communism. Ask an oversimplified questiong, get an oversimplified answer.
    • We went to fight in the middle east to raise OPEC's price per barrel because that raises US Oil (the country, not the company) prices per barrel. The whole situation is created by big oil. So I suppose so. But if we were using hydrogen, it would probably be sold to us by the people who now run big oil, and they'd find someone else to get us pushed into a war with.
      • No, the Gulf War was fought to keep the prices low. If Saddam had invaded Saudi Arabia, then oil could have hit $100 per barrel. And that means world economic depression, 1930's style not recession. The US and world economy is dependent on foreign oil sources (regardless of the comparative US/Venezuela/Canda import export figures), high oil prices=economic implosion.

        Stating that the war was fought to keep prices high is so incredibly obtuse, I can't even begin to figure out where you're coming from with that statement unless its a paranoid deduction that Bush made money on oil=Bush must wage war to keep oil prices high.

        Oh and alternative energy sources are on their way... for now though keeping oil flowing smoothly seems to be a good thing. Keeps your car going and the power station in Lagos humming.
  • under a project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

    It's wonderful that the DOE pays for networking for needy companies. Is the DOE also going to fund my upgrade to 802.11a? I really need something faster than I have right now.

  • Good God! (Score:5, Funny)

    by phillymjs ( 234426 ) <slashdot@sta[ ].org ['ngo' in gap]> on Sunday October 06, 2002 @03:05PM (#4398249) Homepage Journal
    In one fell swoop, every citizen in the entire country of Elbonia [dilbert.com] would suddenly have broadband access... if only they had computers.

    ~Philly
  • "My modem is slower than mud"...
  • To me it seems really odd that a specific product of a specific company is marketed so openly without any critic on a .gov website. Is that a common practise there in the US?

    "The IntelliPipe is one of the most remarkable advances in drilling technology in the last 25 years," Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said. "President Bush, in the National Energy Policy, directed me to pursue advanced technology in energy production. I think the IntelliPipe is exactly the type of technology we need to move our domestic production capabilities into the next century."

    That sounds like it's fresh out from the TV shop.

  • As I was waiting for the link to load, I was guessing how this might be accomplished.....Pretty cool solution to this problem. The non-contact electrical connection was the most innovative thing about this. Looks like it uses an inductive ring at either end of the pipe to pass the signal.

    With a little rework, existing pipes could be make to be "intelligent" like this too. You could, for instance, drop a small inductive "washer" at each of the joints and drop the cable in through the pipe. You'd only need to drill a small hole at each end of the pipe to make the connection between the washer and cable inside. I know that this is over-simplifying the situation, but my guess is that existing pipes could be reworked for perhaps $200 per segment in quantity.

  • Now that the bandwidth is available, these same engineers are now working on porn and MP3 players for the drill bits to suck that up.
  • .. my friends and I play quake that is networking through my septic's leech field.

    So what if it smells like shit and it's outside, it's still better than routing all those pesky cat 5 cables.

    I'll admit that sometimes we get some bad throughput so we have to feed Big Joe some beans to get the system going again.
  • first they are the source of oil, and now, I reckon they have more mud than any of us, and could hold the world to ransom[1]![2]

    [1] insert evil cackle
    [2] i have not researched this, but i know for a fact my house isnt made of much mud

  • Elbonia (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I bet this was discovered at the university of elbonia. They know mud.
  • You think that's impressive, wait until they figure out how to send mud over the Internet.
  • Well, well, well. That's a very deep subject. [rimshot-cymbal]

  • Cool (Score:1)

    by bmacy ( 40101 )
    I'm probably one of the few people who find this interesting since I was working on such devices as a software engineer up to 3 years ago. I think we were doing 1-2bits per second mud pulsing and 7-10bits per second with EMF pulsing (this is in the field). You know... the kind of place where the tools still use 8051's because you can get military grade components and need to operate at 175degC. I wonder what kind of bandwidth they get at what depths.

    Kind of interesting when you are dealing with trying to decode data where you get 10-50psi pulses (maybe lasting around .5 seconds) but your baseline can change 300psi a second. Anyways, it was a fun project.

    Brian Macy

  • It's not just about oil (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rhinoX ( 7448 )
    Directional and horizontal drilling have been in development for the better part of 20 years. This will be a godsend to them. As it is, the equipment required to transfer control and status data back and forth to the motors is bulky, expensive, and prone to failure.

    Most of you don't realize it, but this type of drilling is used all over the place now for all kinds of things. The largest use other than the oil industry is for drilling underneath things (anything, roads, buildings, ship channels, etc) so that cabling, or really damn near anything requiring a hole in the ground can be laid without destruction to the overlying structure. In the early 90's, my dad participated in a project to raise a half-sunken ship from the bottom of a Danish port. They drilled horizontally under the ground beneath the ship, and ran metal cabling underneath it. The cabling was attached to barges on either side of the ship. They pulled apart and raised it off the ocean floor.
  • for the people working at the sharp end of the oil business, this is great news. We routinely lower tools on more or less standard (far from it) cables to "log" the entire hole, and more importantly the oil/gas reservoir section. This ability to send broader band data should be able to free up a lot of costly time when we start running imaging tools that give us a detailed image of the rock formation properties, allowing us to produce more oil & gas from a single well - thus allowing all you ex-colonials to run your overheating processors and your gaz guzzlers (me I have 3 pairs of roller blades - how many wheels ??) ;-)
    Current downhole technology (LWD - logging while drilling - allows us to see directional information, formeation resisitivity - a function of porosity and pore fluid properties - ie oil & gas not conductive - brine conductive, we routinely use Gamma ray radioactivity for correlation purposes - stratigraphy, and when the drillers let us we run nuclear tools that read directly formation density and porosity - of course these numbers are messed up by the thing (hydrocarbons) we are looking for - lots of computers required to sort out the nuances. Newer technology is allowing us to see Array sonic (like seismic data), CMR technology - a great way to see fluid properties. With all this band width we would be able to evaluate a hole sooner, better (less drilling fluid invasion into the reservoir), and improve reservoir and field development starting from the exploration wells, something that many companies are trying to do right now, as expenses for drilling in hostile environments can be huge - just go and hire a deepwater semi-submersible drilling rig for a month or two, then add all the other essential services for finding and producing the black stuff. As time goes on, it just gets more expensive and more challenging to find - and also a lot more interesting, thats why I love my job! - well mostly :)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This technology does NOT use mud. The OLD tech did (Score:3, Informative)

    by thebigmacd ( 545973 ) on Sunday October 06, 2002 @10:47PM (#4400437)
    From what I read in the article, the heading for this article is inaccurate. The new technology uses a high speed digital cable embedded in the pipe wall to send data to the surface.
    To quote from the article:
    The key to the new system is a unique non-contacting coupler embedded in connections between 30-foot long sections of drill pipe. The coupler permits data to be sent across the connection and on through a high-speed cable attached to the inner pipe wall.

    For more than 60 years, engineers have struggled with the problem of a drill pipe connection, or "tool joint," that would stand up to the wear and tear of increasingly hostile downhole drilling conditions, yet provide reliable electrical connections every 30 feet over thousands of feet of pipe penetrating deep into some of nature's harshest environments.

    Largely because of the stumbling block, in the mid 1970s developers turned to a technology called "mud pulse telemetry." Mud pulse telemetry foregoes electrical connections and transmits data as pressure pulses through fluid circulated to clean the cuttings out of the wellbore.

    But the excruciatingly slow pace of mud pulse telemetry - 3 to 10 bits per second - often meant that data resolution was so poor that the driller could not make crucial decisions in real time. Often, time-consuming operations would be required to retrieve the downhole data or drilling would have to stop while other procedures were employed to confirm the low-resolution data pulsed to the surface
    Thanx, thebigmacd
  • Hopefully it will help speed up the logging process so it doesn't take him so long. I remember many long stretches of time sitting in a shlumberger truck watching the data from the tool slowly coming back to us. :\
  • This from my brother who works on an offshore rig. Ho hummmm. We're already using the MWD .A more expensive Tool is LWD (Log While Drilling) used in conjunction with MWD and that saves running Schlumberger Logs after. Although the gazbillion bytes/sec seems interesting, so far for us an antiquated 56000 bps seems adequate and gets us where we need to be. We read pulses in the Mud Pump Pressure created by a tool in the MWD that is sent Bar Code lingo. I'm trying to put my head around how faster transmission time would benefit us, but no. I am thinking though that at some deep water drilling, which is generally say 5 times the cost our operations are, and normally just doing Exploration ahead of guys like us, getting some real time data while drilling to read Reservoir Data would be a boon.
  • Keep me informed on the behaviour of this kernel.. As the "BugFree(tm)"
    series didn't turn out too well, I'm starting a new series called the
    "ItWorksForMe(tm)" series, of which this new kernel is yet another
    shining example.
    -- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.29

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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