The exploration and development of new hydrocarbon deposits face increasing challenges, primarily driven by the shift away from hydrocarbons towards renewable energy sources like shallow geothermal deposits, wind farms, and photovoltaics. This shift necessitates finding solutions that minimize environmental impact and enable increased energy extraction from existing or decommissioned fields and wells. This paper explores the possibility of excavating from potentially depleted fields, where a significant portion (up to 85%) of the reservoir’s resources remain unrecoverable due to low reservoir energy. To address this, secondary and tertiary exploitation methods are proposed involving the supply of external energy to increase the pressure in the reservoir layer, thereby enhancing resource exploitation. One of the suggested tertiary methods involves reaming the deposit with multiple small-diameter radial holes using a hydraulic drilling nozzle. The entire process comprises several key components, including the coiled tubing unit (CTU), high-pressure flexible hose, window drilling kit for casing pipe, kit for positioning the exit of the hydraulic drilling head from the casing pipe, anchor, and hydraulic drilling head attached to the end of the high-pressure flexible hose. This method aims to increase the contact between the reservoir layer and the wellbore, potentially leading to an increase in or initiation of exploitation in certain deposit scenarios. The described method presents an environmentally friendly approach, eliminating the need for drilling new boreholes and offering cost-effective access to resources in decommissioned deposits with insufficient reservoir energy for self-exploitation. The applicability of this method to extract methane from coalbed seams is also mentioned in this article. In a separate article, the authors detail the design of a hydraulic drilling nozzle specifically for reaming the reservoir layer.

The global climate crisis forces the search for new ecological sources of energy and mining methods. Space mining can solve those problems, but, first, wide geological surveying space missions using drilling methods are necessary. Additionally, drilling methods will be important in geological, life searching, geoengineering, and many other studies of extraterrestrial objects. Space is becoming a new area of possible drilling applications. Designing future space drilling missions requires adapting drilling technologies, not only to the conditions of the space environment, but also to the economic and technological realities of the space industry. The possibility of constructing low mass coring devices with energy consumption below 100 W was investigated in this paper. Minimization of energy consumption and mass of a coring is essential for the device to be used in space missions, when lander instruments supplied by low power electric battery are expected to work reliably and the launch cost (depending of mass) at an economically acceptable level. Some similar devices investigated for the future space missions are known from papers listed in the references. To answer whether or not it is possible to build such devices, the authors performed initial drillability tests. The obtained results are presented in this paper.

In light of the European Union’s zero-emissions policy and the growing demand for energy associated with technological advances, it is necessary to consider adopting technologies and innovative solutions that simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing potential extraction from existing hydrocarbon deposits, for example. This can result in increased production from deposits with low reservoir energy values or those in which the energy value does not allow the resource to be exploited on its own. By using a hydraulic drilling nozzle that harnesses the hydraulic energy of the fluid stream for workover, the possibility of increasing the contact between the reservoir layer and the producing well increases in direct proportion to the number of small-diameter radial wells drilled with a hydraulic rotary head from a horizontal well toward the reservoir layer. The main aspect of this paper is to outline an algorithm for the design of rotary drilling heads to maximize the use of the hydraulic energy from fluid streams flowing from the face of innovative drilling tools. The presented design algorithm allows changing the mutual position between the holes in the face section and the angle of the holes with respect to the longitudinal axis of the designed hydraulic rotary nozzle, simplifying the design work. The use of the rotary head developed using this algorithm enables seamless drilling in rocks with compressive strength R_c = 50 MPa, considering the drilling progress at ROP = 4 mm/s.

A dusty thermal vacuum chamber (DTVAC) equipped with a regolith simulant bin is a key infrastructure to validate space equipment planned to operate in the future lunar missions. The proper setup of such infrastructure is challenging since the regolith simulant needs to be outgassed; otherwise, it might affect the validation process. This paper presents the results of experiments conducted in a dusty thermal vacuum chamber. The experiment was designed to verify if lunar regolith simulants prepared and placed in the bin may preserve atmospheric gases after the chamber depressurization process. Such hypotheses were defined after testing a drill in vacuum conditions, the performance of which was higher than expected. The obtained results show that the preparation and placement of regolith in the bin should be performed under vacuum conditions regardless of the external temperature.