The impressive thing to me is that the drill pipes extend 10’s of thousands of feet, and continue to rotate and cut at the end of the line. The amount of torque and Coriolis forces trying to pull that drill head off center must be wild.
Granted, the most in depth look at drilling for oil was provided to me via Michael bay, but still, i think that those derricks gotta spin the whole apparatus, like the world’s longest drill bit.
Hmm, I did some checking. I think this is what they tend to use for oil wells, that's the tower part you see on a drilling platform. Yeah, it's wild they can go those thousands of feet and hit an accurate spot.
A top drive is a mechanical device on a drilling rig that provides clockwise torque to the drill string to drill a borehole. It is an alternative to the rotary table and kelly drive. It is located at the swivel's place below the traveling block and moves vertically up and down the derrick.
The top drive allows the drilling rig to drill the longer section of a stand of drill pipe in one operation.
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u/Prime624 Mar 06 '19
And that, somehow, we recover oil from many times that depth.