One thing that video left me wondering is what happens to the vaporized rock; how are we collecting or transporting it so it doesen't immediately re-solidify, stringify and block the hole?

That's a valid question. As the vaporized rock cools it needs to be directed to the annular walls of the borehole being drilled. If it flutters chaotically up the along the drillstring and sticks itself to the drillstring then you are effectively blocking the borehole as you drill. Even if you rotate the drillstring the cumulative effect is that the drillstring becomes a long length of sandpaper or a vertical grinder, grinding the fused rock from the annulus above where you are currently drilling.

You can see in that very video that it's not even an unsolved problem, it's an unaddressed problem. They currently handwave it away as "vent the molten rock" as if that is a solved problem.

At 6:34 in the video, they very briefly show a running test drill, and then cut immediately to the ceiling of the test chamber with a large specimen of rock wool.

That rock wool will completely clog any mechanism they could come up with. How do you reliably transport rock wool from 20 miles underground to the surface?

This project/company is a dead end unless they could magic away that problem.

It's true that it's not entirely clear but it seems there's a nitrogen gas that pushes the gasses back up ? It's also not clear how much of the rock mass actually resolididy instead going away as gas but for the part that does, it seems to be do so in a fashion that resembles mineral wool.

It is only shortly mentionned in the video but it seems like one of the main issues is what happens when water starts infiltrating your hole (it's unclear how much the glassified walls of the holes are a protection against that) and then you waste a lot of energy vaporizing liters and liters of water.

Unless... you close the hole at the top to collect the steam and have it turn a turbine to recoup electricity expenditures ?

If the hole is 2 miles long, I assume the steam would condense before reaching the top. And I guess lowering the pressure again, so I don’t know if that’s possible. But I’m not a physics expert.

At depth, natural gas is in the liquid phase in the reservoir due to high temperatures and overburden pressure. Once the drillbit penetrates the seal of the formation containing natural gas or other liquids then the gas will begin to be carried up the annulus of the well in the drilling mud to the surface. As it moves closer to the surface it expands and crosses into the bubble point into the gas phase which is the dangerous condition that leads to blowouts and the loss of the well and potentially lives at the surface.

It is important to be able to detect the formation boundaries and to have the mud weight tailored to the expected pressures within the target zones so that blowouts can be avoided. Pre-drill predictions of downhole pressures are made from seismic data and can be extremely accurate, especially when correlated with borehole data from regions with similar geologic history.

I did pre-drill pressure predictions as a geophysicist. Very interesting stuff.

Here is a little info about well control and gas kicks.[0]

[0]https://www.drillingmanual.com/gas-kick-behavior-expansion-m...