There are times when new technologies are proposed as being better ways of drilling for oil and natural gas. However, to understand how these are better (or more likely not) than existing technologies, you have to know how the industry commonly drills through rock. There are two basic ways of doing so, depending on how hard the rock is. The first is the one that made the Hughes family very rich (if you ever saw the film The Aviator, Howard Hughes extravaganzas were paid for because his father had invented an effective way of drilling oil wells). The other, somewhat slower, was developed the last time that we had an energy crisis, and uses artificial diamonds, in the main, to gouge into and scrape off thin layers of rock.

Before I describe the diamond bit, let me borrow a bit from a post I did four years ago, and describe the idea behind the Hughes bit, which for reasons that I will explain, is usually referred to as a tri-cone bit.

I have put together a number of tech talks in the past. This is the first in a series of updates.