by Bennette Roach
The overseeing experts at the geothermal drill rig site in the Cork Hill/Weekes’ area are reporting progress in Montserrat’s quest to find geothermal energy that is hoped will be the ‘gold’ that will give the island the trust to get it out of the pits of economic disasters.
“It’s starting to look like a geothermal well; it’s starting to heat up little bit just like we want,” said one of the firm Capuano Engineering personnel with oversight of the drilling operations on behalf of Montserrat.
The two men on site said, ‘we didn’t want to see the heat until this stage here. Now we want to see it, we’ll see what it has,’ they both concurred.
He confirms that they have progressed more than half-way to the depth they think they should go by which time should hit the “mother-lode”.
“Yeah everything is good, that’s what I’m aiming for, it’s the mother lode,” he said cheerfully.
They reported that they have advised the PWD who enquired from the Premier how they were progressing, to tell the premier, “we’d be on to something maybe by this weekend to middle of the week, that’s what we’re hoping for,” they offered.
At the time of our visit, they pointed out that no drilling going on at the time, as testing was ongoing. “Yeah we haven’t started the drilling yet, we’re just waiting on them to finish up their testing and then we’ll go back to drilling,” explaining that every time you run this pipe go the stages you got to cement them back and put those cement bond on, so we have to clean up the cement bond and then…continue.
They noted that they had dropped in all the casings along with another set since we saw the last set. They referred to a set of what looked like huge steel screwdrivers, explaining that these were stabilizers. “They keep the hole form bending and twisting so you don’t have a hole like this, (pointing in a slant) . The rig must to be able to pull more of a straight hole,” noting that “the hole will not end up going somewhere else…we’re trying to keep it straight.”
It’s the stabilizer they keep the whole form bending and twisting so you don’t have a whole like this…rig to be able to pull more of a straight hole, I mean it may do this but once it’s not this big or going way up somewhere else, we’re trying to keep it straight.
END
You’re going to have to have more than two wells, you’re going to have to have a couple producers and then…..you got to have a minimum of three just to have a five …plan, if one chokes down you need to go to other one and then you clean this one out, if you only have one well and it goes down or plugs off you’re done.
Then you got to fire up the old diesel generators again.
…Wells.. producer but they die, they actually could, but what if you make allot of water you just can’t leave the water building and building and have a big whole pool, you got to do something with that well.
You don’t want to just run your water right all about in here you want to just pump it right back down into the source.
Regenerate the source.
Yes because we’re putting more mud in there, more cement, we’ve cleaned out the pit so it’s running different types of mud.
I mean even the formation we have got allot of clay that’ll change the color of your mud too.
Red clay, green clay, brown clay, yellow, that red clay is horrible its sticky stuff.
It was hard to drill through, red clay ….. it’s very tough, the clays.
So when we got into the lower clay it wasn’t like that it was easier to drill, it still sticks but not hard.
Now we’re through the clay where solid rock…loads.
