Business Idea: Kola Superdeep Borehole – for power

If you had a hole in the ground that was twelve kilometers deep, could you use it to power a plant?

Business ideas are exciting. Sometimes you have far too many of them, and sometimes none at all. That’s why, with this article, we’re starting a series where we share some of our best or most entertaining business ideas. The point isn’t just that they should come from us here at Brath.se, but also that you as a reader are welcome to contribute (and yes, there will be some guest contributions later too). Now it’s time for us to dive into the first one.

Kola Superdeep Borehole

When I first heard about the extremely deep hole drilled on the Kola Peninsula, I was instantly fascinated by it. After installing and improving geothermal heating in my own house, I have a sense of just how much smart and sustainable energy the ground contains. Roughly speaking – if I remember correctly – you can get about three to four times as much energy out of the electricity you put in when using a heat exchanger with a typical drilling depth of maybe 200 meters (please correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m quoting these numbers from memory without checking them).

If you then think about how a turbine in a power plant works, for example in a nuclear power plant, it’s basically nothing more complicated than boiling water and letting the steam flow through a turbine. And just like that, you have electricity.

A borehole of 200 meters only produces a few extra degrees, and that’s good enough to heat a house with the help of electricity. But if you were to drill a hole twelve kilometers deep – what would happen then?

The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Soviet prestige project, where they drilled the world’s deepest hole on the Kola Peninsula, thereby “winning” against the Americans, who had long held the record. The main reason was, of course, scientific research – they wanted to obtain samples from beneath the Earth’s upper crust. One surprising discovery they made was that it was much hotter than previously thought: at twelve kilometers down, the temperature reached 180 degrees.

The Idea

Of course, the project of drilling an enormous hole was highly unprofitable – extremely so, in fact – but the technology already exists, since it has been done before. Materials have also advanced significantly since the Soviet era, which should make drilling easier (at least there is one well-known drilling company active today).

With such a large temperature difference, it should be possible to develop some kind of turbine solution and thereby deliver almost unlimited clean power. That should be a business idea!

Do you like the article?

If you found it interesting to read, or if you have an idea you’d like to share, please feel free to leave a comment. The goal here isn’t to present fully functioning businesses but rather to spark thoughts, so don’t feel that you need to have a fully developed idea.