The past 100 or so years have seen some revolutionary changes in the drilling industry. One thing we have not done is stand still. Our ability to explore, and exploit, ever more difficult horizons has kept pace partly because of the money involved (there’s a lot …) but mostly because brilliant minds take up the challenge. The drilling industry is different than any other industry in one regard. Of course there are plenty of very well educated engineers, but it is one place where a man’s ideas come before the diploma hanging on the wall. In the history of our industry, you will find most of the good ideas came from a hand, sitting on a bucket, solving a problem. He may not have much formal education, but he probably has spent a lot of time on “the sharp end of the stick.” Bosses and investors soon learned to listen because, if they didn’t, the company right down the road would.
Some of the more interesting developments have come in geothermal drilling and power production. I’m not talking about geo-loop systems, which use the earth as a heat sink, but the tapping of the internal heat of the earth. They are pretty well scattered out, but where available, hot rocks are a nearly inexhaustible supply of energy, provided we can produce it. For instance, Iceland generates most of its power from geothermal energy.