As early as the 2nd century B.C., during the Han dynasty, the Chinese learned to drill wells several hundred meters deep to underground pools of salt solution. Salt was the most important resource in ancient times, used to store food long before refrigerators were invented. The Celestial people used bamboo stalks and an iron chisel to extract it, while the brine was brought to the surface through the same bamboo pipes and using a system of leather valves.
In the twelfth century the French drilled wells for water in the province of Artois in a similar way, which gave the name to the famous "artesian water". However, these historical examples are indirectly related to drilling in the modern sense of the word. With the help of multiple strikes on the ground of a metal bar, suspended on a rope or chain, it would be impossible to get any of today's superdeep (more than 12 thousand meters), or any of the sea wells. The technique began to improve by leaps and bounds only when drilling began to be used for mineral exploration.
In Russia drilling evolved, as many other things, quite originally: for a long time wells were called "pipes", drill bits were made of steel, and rods and casing pipes were made of wood. And although the first handwritten drilling manual was printed in the magazine "Letopis" in the year of abolition of serfdom, until the coming of Soviet power, which demanded a multiple increase in exploration, all the improvement of technological base was in the category of "creative thought". That is, at the level of personal aspirations of researchers.
In 1859 - steam engine for driving drilling machines was used for the first time, in 1876 - hand drill for drilling exploration wells of big diameter was created, in 1890 - original diamond drill bit and first fine-diamond bit, in 1892 - first turbodrill in the world, in 1898 - first submersible electric drill bit.
All of the above is the handiwork of Russian scientists, so the statements in the literature that the most advanced machines were purchased exclusively abroad are highly questionable and, as far as the oil industry is concerned, are not quite true. By the end of the 1920s the experience gained allowed the Geolkom's staff in cooperation with the Izhora Plant to make the first Russian mechanical diamond drilling machine-tool, the KA-300, which was later used on an extremely wide scale.
But to explore minerals in significant volumes, it was not enough to produce equipment and replace manual sets. It was necessary to have qualified personnel capable to implement and improve it. Where to get them, when even in the most prestigious mining universities there was no scientific school of this profile as such? Its founder at the Mining Institute, who developed the basics of theory and technology of exploratory drilling, was the young engineer Philip Shamshev.
Who was this ambitious scientist?
A native of Rostov region, after graduating from a secondary school in 1913 he entered the geological prospecting department of the Don Polytechnic Institute. As a student, he took a job at Donugol, where he quickly achieved considerable success. Biographers claim that in 1926 Shamshev drilled the deepest exploratory well for that time for coal. From 1922 to 1931 he managed to work in the organization of explorations of coal and other minerals in the Urals, Khibiny, near Moscow, Kuzbass and Donbass.
In 1929, a turning point came when the experienced production worker was invited to the central apparatus of the Geological Committee. At the same time Philip Aristarkhovich got a job as an assistant professor at the Leningrad Mining Institute. Having switched from practice to scientific and research work, he was among the first in the country who understood the exceptional importance of drilling for development of practical geology and directed all his attention to this field.
In 1931 Philip Aristarkhovich founded and headed mining drilling group of Central Research Geological Exploration Institute TSNIGRI and the first in the USSR laboratory of destruction of rocks while drilling exploration wells.
All subsequent activity of Shamshev was directly related to his work in LMI and TSNIGRI.
Among the first-priority tasks were development of the theory of the drilling process and fundamentals of technology. Since initially there was not even factual material for generalizations, experimental work boiled up in the laboratory. In particular, the scientist was interested in destroying rocks with a variety of rock-destroying tools and establishing mode parameters that affect the rate of penetration.
Shamshev paid special attention to development of fundamentals of carbide drilling technology (more than 50% of all exploration wells in Russia are drilled with carbide reinforced tools), issues of diamond and shot drilling.
The result of his research was the country's first production instructions for rapid rotary core drilling, which destroys rock along the ring, rather than the entire area of the bottomhole. This makes it possible to obtain the inner part of the rock in the form of a core for further research.
Nowadays this variety is one of the main technical means of exploration of all deposits of solid minerals, but before Shamshev no one was engaged in the preparation of its theoretical basis and writing of training literature.
Philipp Aristarkhovich's instructions allowed mining engineers to study objective factors influencing the productivity and quality of sampling (for example, rock properties), to establish the efficiency of transition of quantitative parameters of technological drilling regimes into qualitative ones: mechanical drilling speed, core recovery and others.
In addition, the scientist proposed a new principle of determining the drillability of rocks, on the basis of which the now famous "ВИТР-ОТ" device for use in geological exploration was developed.
Considering the whole range of tasks faced by specialists, he did not limit himself to the study of any one type of work. Along with the study of core drilling, it was Shamshev who proved the expediency of using the coreless method in cases where the section is sufficiently studied or can be unambiguously established with the help of geophysical or other methods. The scientist was the first in the country to show its technical and economic advantage over the coreless method, outlined ways of implementation and developed ways of obtaining geological information in the absence of core. For the 40's this theory was revolutionary, and already a few decades later it became an effective way to improve the efficiency of exploration.
Shamshev combined the talent of a researcher, engineer and teacher. During pre-war years Philip Aristarkhovich wrote the first in the USSR textbook for students of mining technical institutes "Course of exploratory drilling" (1933). In 1943 he went to work permanently in Mining Institute and after returning from evacuation to Leningrad he worked as a head of educational department, as well as a dean of geological prospecting and oil faculty. In 1946 he became Head of Exploration Department and from 1948 to 1977 he was a permanent chairman of Exploration Technology Department (later - Well Drilling Technology and Technique).
The outstanding geologist initiated creation of a new specialty in Soviet institutions - "Technology and Technique of Exploration of Mineral Deposits".
Shamshev was constantly interested in new ideas - application of non-metallic fastening of wells, vibratory drilling, borehole drifting with compressed air blowing and many others. During the years of work at the institute he assembled a strong scientific team, capable of developing progressive technologies of high-performance drilling methods at the world level. And the main example of this success is truly Antarctica.
In 1957, under the leadership of Philipp Shamshev, research in drilling wells in complicated conditions began successfully in the Mining Institute. The year of the start was by no means accidental, because it was then, during the second Soviet Antarctic expedition, that the legendary Vostok scientific station was founded on the plateau of a huge glacier. The scientists were tasked to assess drinking water reserves on the continent, to carry out geophysical and glaciological investigations. Development of technology for drilling wells in the ice and creation of efficient equipment on their basis was entrusted to specialists of the Mining Institute. Subsequent achievements of the university in Antarctica - drilling the world's deepest well in the ice cover, penetration to the continent's largest subglacial Lake Vostok (more than 3700 meters deep), which for millions of years was isolated from the Earth's atmosphere, and getting water samples from its upper horizon, would have been simply impossible without the basis laid by Philip Shamshev.
In 1979, the outstanding scientist, whose research formed the basis of the modern theory of mechanical rotary and percussion drilling, passed away. But he left behind no less talented pupils - Boris Kudryashov and Nikolay Vasilyev.
The first one led a scientific team at the university that was developing technology for drilling wells in difficult conditions. Today a drilling complex at Vostok station is named after him, which allowed to keep the scientist's name in the memory of descendants. The second one is a multiple participant of Antarctic expeditions, under whose direct supervision on February 5, 2012 the specialists of the glacial drill team of the 57th Russian Antarctic Expedition (RAE) carried out environmentally friendly penetration to the relic waters of Lake Vostok.
Currently, the young polar explorers of the Mining University continue the "work of the first" - on the sixth continent they extract new scientific knowledge about the influence of deep phenomena occurring in the depths of Antarctica on the Earth's magnetosphere and climate changes.
