Abstract
For decades, drilling in extreme heat has been viewed as a mission impossible. The oil and gas industry has repeatedly encountered a hard ceiling at 200 °C, beyond which conventional electronics, actuation, and packaging methods fail. While multiple efforts have approached this limit, sustained and commercial operation above it has remained out of reach. However, like most barriers, it can be broken. A radically different approach to design and packaging of electronics and actuation has been demonstrated to work at temperatures significantly above 200°C. This step change enables advanced drilling technologies, originally developed for the unconventional shale boom in the United States and typically limited to ~175 °C, to be applied in the significantly hotter wells required for next-generation geothermal development.
This presentation will explore why higher temperature drilling capability delivers such high value to a rapidly growing geothermal industry. It will describe how these temperature limits have been overcome, outline the pathway to even higher operating thresholds, and examine what is required to build reliable electronics and sensors for the deeper, hotter wells that will be drilled in the coming years.
Bio
John Clegg has over four decades of experience in engineering and operations across upstream technologies, including drill bits, drilling motors, rotary steerable tools, measurement-while-drilling, and logging-while-drilling. He holds a Master’s in Engineering Science and a Diploma in Global Business from Oxford University, has 14 patents, and has authored numerous technical papers. John has served on Programme Committees and Technical Section Boards for SPE and is an SPE Distinguished Lecturer. He is currently Chief Technology Officer of Hephae Energy Technology, a company founded to develop solutions for drilling high temperature wells.