Site update

Well, at long last, after all the preparation and hard work over many years, at 9:00am local time on Monday 10th Dec, right on schedule, we started up the hot water drill system. First was the boiler.

This was not as straightforward as we would have liked – the main burner unit blew a circuit board, the boiler kept over?pressurising when it fired and we then found that it was not burning as cleanly as we had been expecting. Eventually though, Andy and Andy pulled a rabbit out of the hat and got everything working.

Once the boiler was finally going, we needed water, and lots of it! Around 60,000 litres. This is equivalent to around 180,000 litres in volume of snow. So we started digging, and digging, and digging… for three days and three nights in shifts.

The first tank was filled and the heat?coil in the base of the tank slowly melted the snow. As soon as we had a full tank of water, the valve which connected to the second tank was opened and the water allowed to flow freely between them. We then carried on digging snow until both tanks were full. Finally, at around midnight on Wednesday, we were able to sit back and admire our work – 60,000 litres of water at approximately 5°C. Magnificent!

Now we had enough water to start circulating it through the filters and heat exchanger. We are using a four-stage filtration process to keep the drilling water clean. The filter resolutions are set at 20, 5, 1 and 0.1 microns. A 0.1 micron filter will be very effective at cleaning the water, however, just to be certain, the water is also passed through an Ultra Violet (UV) light chamber which is another common method for sterilising water. The end result is that the water used for the drilling process will be extremely clean, even before it is heated to over 90°C through a heat exchanger attached to the boiler.

So that’s about where we are at 1:30am on Thursday 13th December. The next stage will be to test the high pressure pumps and then to begin drilling down to form the cavity about 300m below the surface.

We are now committed, having gone past the point of no return. If anything stops working now, water could freeze in the pipes and the whole programme could come to a halt. So please keep us in your thoughts as we work round the clock for the next seven to ten days.

As always, many thanks to Pete Bucktrout, our cameraman, for all the outstanding images and video clips on this blog. Stunning!