You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
treehugger.com
treehugger.com
GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.
The University of Minnesota was pushing electro-pulse boring in 2015.[3] Again, no deep holes.
There's something called ThermoDrilling, which, despite the name, is more like a water jet cutter.[4]
Successful projects are still using mechanical drilling.[5]
So there are a lot of deep hole drilling approaches being studied. Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270653673_Microwave...
[2] https://www.gadrilling.com/
[3] https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/electro-pulse-boring...
[4] https://www.geodrillinginternational.com/deep-geothermal/new...
It’s just a huge vertical drill with segments you add on as it goes deeper, like an oil well drill.
(although on rereading I didn’t mean to say ‘huge’ twice in my previous post)
As a kid, my cousin, my sister, and myself were able to dig a hole deep enough for me to be completely inside in an hour or two using a post hole digger. (Yes, this is a very stupid idea.)
More importantly, geothermal/ground source is rarely 1 well either, in our case it was 8.
I'm actually considering if it makes sense to push a lot more heat into it in the summer (Deliberately leaving curtains open, then moving this heat into the well; or even PVT panels), but I'm not sure if the well would retain heat long enough to make a difference towards the winter.
Your system should give a an overview of your yearly input/output and any drift of the well temperature right?
To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil fields on fire, or react them away, or irrevocably mix a combustion-inhibiting azeotropic solvent into them.
That is only one explanation to why a technology would be among the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches. There are many others, such as:
- It does not work at all.
- It is more expensive than traditional methods
- It is illegal in some way
- It is incompatible with the rest of oil&gas processing.
Whereas for geothermal, conventional drilling isn't useful enough for it.
Geothermal heating provides unlimited fuel for people in houses, staying still.
The technology is similar, and it's boring ;-) The market is different. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to hire expert drilling engineers out of the oil industry!
This sounds like the beginning of a great sci-fi novel.
A future where Earth's core has cooled because of excess draws to power humanity. Now, the planet is losing it's magnetic field.
To save humanity, humans need to re-heat the core, build biospheres, or leave the planet.
(it was not great)
Has anyone done the napkin math for how long that would take?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/04/28/the-center...
Core of earth: 6,000 ºC
https://www.space.com/why-sun-atmosphere-hotter-than-surface
Core of sun: 27 million ºC Surface of sun: 6,000 ºC
"The leading idea among experts is the sun's magnetic field is actually bringing energy from inside the sun up through its surface and into its atmosphere."
The "napkin math" will involve gathering some data about RF power harvesting, and some assumptions (e.g. cosmic rays)
https://news.mit.edu/2020/energy-harvesting-wi-fi-power-0327
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics
Do you believe in the 1st law of thermodynamics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
We could just balance the system:
core of Earth too hot -> use geothermal
core of Earth too cold -> use solar power
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30476002
It's even more interesting that you mention the magnetic field, could we use solar panels to draw more energy from the sun to power a tesla coil and microwave the core?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy
Regarding drilling operations that destroy value: you're forgetting that drilling is 1D while oil fields are 3D (technically quasi-2D with horizontal dimensions 100x to 1000x larger than vertical dimensions). If your drilling messes up everything in a 10 meter radius from the drill string, you don't care.
Likewise, everything that conceivably could be done with nuclear was tried or at least designed for a while there - lighting watches with radium, digging canals with nukes, space travel by continuously exploding nukes behind you... good times. (Horrifying times, but w/e;])
"The top secret plan to explode a nuclear bomb in Yorkshire", by Tom Scott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceWZslOfEjs
It would buy controlling interests in all the companies that make some critical, specialized and heavily patented piece of modern internal combustion engines or coal turbines. Then, it'd wreck the factories, and patent troll everyone else into not producing.
Money is speech, and that would be protected political speech, right? :-)
I've never actually thought about whether patent protection covered just the sale, or the manufacture, or exactly what, so thanks for bringing that nuance to my attention!
That's just not true. Misery and suffering is it's own reward, to some. This is arguably the main point of Orwell's 1984, when O'Brien explains to Winston Smith why they bother torturing people before killing them. O'Brien says that to knowingly cause suffering in someone is the ultimate expression of power, and it is axiomatic to him that power is good in-and-of-itself.
Why don't we drill to whatever is the termal limit, make a big cavity there, install radiators there and just heat the watter to that temperature and take it out to surface where we can heat homes.
I know this is done in Bucharest for a water park (to much lesser depths because apparently we have hot springs near Bucharest).
Do we need to reach magma?
You need a thermal gradient to move heat from the surrounding rock to the water your pumping in. The higher the initial temperature the larger the difference and therefore faster you can extract heat. Aka even if the working fluid is at a constant temperature you can simply pump it faster.
Also, Carnot efficiency limits means you want the hottest steam you can handle. Further, you have various inefficiencies such as losing heat as water moves back up a borehole.
And the temperature to destroy steel under the immense mechanical stress of a drill string is surprisingly modest. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, but softening them is enough.
This is why wooden sauna seats work well, aluminum seats in the sauna would not go over so well.
Lots to consider when solving thermal problems, it's not just about turning up the dial to be able to withstand more heat. Sometimes it's about the nuance of moving the heat efficiently and putting it where it's wanted, and not where it isnt.
My general rule is that everything is 1 J/g/K except water, which is 4.2. It's obviously not true, but almost always within a factor of 2, and 1 is an especially easy number to multiply and divide by.
Reading your second paragraph, I see you're familiar with the principle, and added a good heuristic to my stockpile, thank you.
ISWYDT.
Nooo --- don't dig the Well to Hell!
Nope. Over the last ~20 years the drilling industry has gotten good at: angle drilling (not slant drilling but turning the drill angle at the bottom) and fracking, or pumping fluid through rock to break it up. This means conventional methods can dig far down, turn the drill and make a reserve with fracking. The heat is much less but it's conventional technology.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_c_beard_the_untapped_energy_...
Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there?
In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it.
But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by the lithosphere, and it only slowly leaks out over time. If we start pulling that energy out at a faster rate to generate electricity, could that have a noticeable net increase on total energy under the atmosphere, or is it such an insignificant amount of energy relative to the sun's to not even bother worrying about?
Nuclear power plants, as nearly all power plants, work by heating water. That heat has to go somewhere eventually.
But the amounts you'd need to make any difference to the atmosphere (compared to solar radiation) would be truly humongous.
Then again, part of the Earth's core heat comes form radioactive decay. So in a way, geothermal is an indirect form of nuclear fission.
Though the precise mechanism doesn't matter too much for my comment. Just assume I'm talking about fusion plants.
We could rebase all of civilization on geothermal and the extra heat in the atmosphere would be a rounding error to the sun's energy.
Considering nuclear and fossil fuels directly release stored energy and solar increase albido this isn’t a 1:1 increase in energy. Further the earth radiates more energy from hot places than cool, still you can approximate it as something like:
Black body radiation is temperature in kelvin to the 4th power. (285 * (170,017^0.25 / 170,000^0.25) - 285) is an increase of ~0.007 C / (whatever our current percentage of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, or solar).
It looks like direct solar radiance is actually 173,000 TW plus or minus 6,000 TW.
That information also answers your question, our problem isn't with the amount heat we produce, it's with how much of that solar radiation we trap in our atmosphere due to the green house effect of CO2 and similar gases.
So yeah we introduce a little bit more heat by drawing from the Earth's core, but it's nothing compared to what trapping the sun's energy with CO2 is doing to the planet right now.
Conversely using that energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere might even cool the planet, but that's a question for the next generation.
The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed.
But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then it fundamentally changes how we think about it. Removing CO2 (insulation) is one option, but so are projects like solar reflection or some other forms of heat dissipation or heat sinking.
We own the fate of our civilization and the environment it relies on.
It's time to take ownership and stop cowering in the cave.
Look up carbonate compensation depth, your mind will be blown. Yes, researchers understand the effects of climate change because they have been looking at it for 40+ years. Being extra worried about climate change is a lot like climate denial, in that it doesn’t show trust in our scientists. There is no need to invent trouble — the challenges we know we will face are hard enough.
People who aren't interested in prolonging our use of fossil fuels are instead excited about the cheapest energy in history that renewables provide.
The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable.
Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the green movement wants and has always wanted is a conservative growth model, where the growth is not based on the depletion of finite resources. It is mostly the promoters of unsustainable growth that twist this into an anti-growth narrative.
Now, techno-optimists say we can solve the problems created by unsustainable growth with more technology, and this may be true. But it is asking everyone to take a pretty large gamble on technology that does not exist yet. The conservative strategy is sustainability, and that goes much wider than just solving climate change.
We had all the technology we needed to go carbon neutral back in the 1980's. Back then, even the American Petroleum Institute (yes, the planet burners) were raising alarms over CO2 and global warming.
We have many technological doublings ahead of us before technology fails to provide opportunities for growth. That's not the problem.
The problem is that our economic system is terrible at pricing in externalities.
Edit: Come to think of it, the American Petroleum Institute scientists said the exact same thing back then. Skip to the last page:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3483045-AQ-9-Task-Fo...
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965335352/from-electrifying-r...
Eventually, one day, sooner or later a very unsustainable chunk of high speed space rock will hit the planet and wipe us out, or some other completely natural and “green” disaster, like a supervolcanic eruption, as has happened repeatedly in history. The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology to a point to divert the problem or make ourselves sufficiently resilient from the problem. There is no “if” here, it’s statistically guaranteed.
As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth. More people with a higher standard of living means more teachers, scientists, artists, engineers, and leaders. We need those people because hiding in a cave is exactly the wrong thing to do.
This is your objective to meet your end which is survival. I don't agree with it, but I'll respond as if I took it for a given.
> As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth.
What you mean by growth here matters. More people with a higher standard of living is two types of growth. One is economic the other is population. But there are other dimensions to grow across.
For example, peacefulness has produced just outstanding yields in many valuable areas such as productivity, research, and ecological protection. But peacefulness did not arise out of nothing. It took lives to create our world which is peaceful for most people. Real people working on arms control agreements and diplomacy.
Improving education is similar. You could argue that education requires resources, and that is true to a point, but we are well, well past that point. North Korea is capable of nuclear weapons and rocketry. Most elementary school programs can get by on $100 worth of reusable books a year and some paper and pens.
Now the green model has some fatal flaws, and there is a reason I'm a Canadian Liberal not a Green, but the core thrust of Green thinking is a good thing in my opinion because I've found that, in general, prevention is more efficient than cure because it's easier to align incentives with prevention.
One of the problems with incentive alignment is that the international system is anarchistic and individual choices are unpredictable and given over to passions that are often unethical. This leads to unavoidable arms races (literal and figurative) across multiple aspects of society and politics.
So, for example, China builds new coal power plants because they're in a power competition with the West and to build wind turbines instead would cost a non-trivial portion of their GDP and institutional focus.
Anyway, in summary, yes with what you outlined as your objective economic growth matters, but so do other forms of growth. I would even include spiritual growth (or decline) matter too. People are acting incredibly sanctimonious and paranoid right now and it isn't helping their more charitable instincts.
So far the best form of population control has been prosperity. Birth rates tend to fall as quality of life goes up (not always of course because there are many factors in that). The other option is outlawing reproduction much like China did for a long time. That seems questionable re: human rights also.
Its ok if we don't make it guys, there was species before us, and there will be some after us. The universe is vast. We are probably not even that special, but we can do our best and enjoy life and try to minimize the suffering that will certainly happen from our mistakes... to want to "win" anything beyond that will just cause more suffering.
Its ok to admit we messed up, we couldn't know at the time that a global capitalism predicated on an unlimited nature would not end up great, the timeline of scientific discovery was not in out favor there. On all accounts we are most likely too late, its not anyone in particulars fault, its ok.
Time is very vast, that can scare you or humble you.
We treat time as something we don't have enough of...(not surprising as routines tend to contract the perception of time ) We treat humans as disposable, when they have more knowledge, experiences, social contacts the older they get... We revere money more than empathy (moreso in Western Europe, some developed countries or among those "who have")
I'd suggest it's all a play by the politicians to remain in power, rather than let people decide (if they weren't working so much to sustain real-estate, rental, health care) We need to replace them by choosing them at random... I believe the term is Stochocracy
So not a great plan, but a great example of how some of the solutions can be a lot more complex than just "remove CO2". At the same time any plan that cools without removing CO2 (e.g. planetary sunshades[1]) have the downside that they don't solve ocean acidification.
The fixation on GHG reduction is, as a friend of mine puts it, a suicide pact, simply reducing the second derivative. Unfortunately it's easy to understand and discuss, so that's where all the attention goes.
The issue of climate repair (and long term curation, unfortunately) seems to frighten lots of people. There are people working on it, but they are a small community.
Human energy utilization is on the order of 20 terawatts, 0.02% of the power the sunlight that hits the atmosphere. Our energy utilization doesn't matter a lot.
An artificial ring system for earth made out of reflective satellites.
edit: i mean of the things in a plant that contain carbon and don't, 99... whatever percent of a plant is atmospheric carbon. all the soil amendments added are to replace stuff like fungus that normally forms a relationship with nearby plants and gives nutrients that plants use to modulate energy production and transpiration (or whatever), similar to how we need all of the "salts" to have a functioning brain. N-P-K lets plants more efficiently turn atmospheric carbon into food than without. Couple this with the fact that humans use nearly all of a plant now, to make cooking oil, fuel oil, and animal feed, there's nothing left after we harvest for the fungus to eat.
I normally would have launched into a diatribe against bayer/monsanto as a reply about stuff like this, but as it stands, i'm fine with careful and scientifically sound application of N-P-K for huge farms. I do, however, have a problem with pesticides and their "inactive" ingredients, not the least of which due to drinking water from an untreated well, myself.
Also i know it's not 99.9999%.
A properly managed and grown acre of land can provide a quarter ton to a ton of food in a year, but you can't use tractors or anything, it all has to be managed by hand or small machines.
The reason I think stopping use of fossil fuels is really the only reasonable solution, or is at least a necessary part of any solution, is that anything else is like trying to fix your car accelerating out of control by just driving around with one foot on the brake. Trying to balance the increased greenhouse effect by blocking sunlight might work a bit, but there are all sorts of ways it can go wrong -- it creates a moral hazard where everyone will have less incentive to stop using fossil fuels and thus continue making the root cause of the problem worse, and we have to keep doing it forever -- stopping means a sudden massive amount of climate change that people won't have time to adjust to. There are so many really easy ways that we can cut our emissions massively, with technology we have available today, with virtually no impact on our living standards. The rest will take some time and technological improvements, but it's all doable!
And I've not heard of any sort of heat dissipation geo-engineering ideas -- the only feasible way I know of to get the earth's heat dissipation back to normal is to take off this extra blanket of greenhouse gases we've put on it. Any sort of heat dissipation would have to transfer heat to the upper atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2, and I don't think there's any way we could do that at the scale required to have a noticeable effect.
So, only ones I can think of which don't add additional heat to the planed may be wind and hydro.
I wonder if solar energy is going to need to install high albedo surface area to offset it's low albedo energy absorption to satisfy some future version of ESG constraints.
And? Where did I say it doesn't?
>All of our electricity consumption and production is a rounding error to the earth.
Agree. But I'm talking to those who believe solar is the solution to global warming... when what solar does is capture more energy from the sun and turn it to heat.
Geothermal works pretty well anywhere from a technical point of view. The main issue is that drilling holes is expensive. There is a company called Eavor that is actually re-purposing former (failed) oil drilling attempts to get a head start on that. That is smart. Even so, they are on the expensive side of the spectrum. It's just a lot of capital expenses to get to warm enough temperatures that you can get steam to drive a turbine. And of course you need either a lot of holes or a very big one to scale it.
Eavor claims that they are going to be essential for baseload. IMHO they might be too expensive for that but we'll see if they can lower their cost over time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
[2] Other less spectacular examples: 160 TWh is equivalent of 5 to 6 times the energy released by the Mt. St. Helens erruption of 1980 (~28 TWh) or the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (~30.6 TWh), or half of the energy released by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa (~232 TWh), or 1/4 of all nuclear bomb explosions so far (628 TWh). For this an other examples see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
You have: earthmass 2000 K 1J/g/K
You want: J
* 1.1944337e+31
/ 8.3721685e-32
You have: earthmass 2000 K 1J/g/K/(circlearea (earthradius) 1000 W/m2)
You want: years
* 2968252.9
/ 3.3689851e-07By introducing greenhouse gasses, we are affecting earth's ability to radiate energy to space and thus the temperature at which we have our break-even point. Should all greenhouse gasses disappear, the earth would rapidly start cooling until it reaches its new break-even point.
I know, I'm oversimplifying a lot, and the orders of what humans can do may be dwarfed by any volcanic eruption, but it should be a safe margin at some point at which the scale and time of heat transfer with underground may start to affect global average temperature.
A town in Germany is devastated also due to geothermal power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau
Doesn't even have to be somewhere where there are no buildings. Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.
We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.
The burden of wealth.
What percentage of rural areas are situated in close proximity to large dams and bridges?
Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time. Earthquakes stronger than whatever a bit of geothermal energy production would produce.
Retrofitting an entire country for quake safety because you’ve decided to create artificial earthquakes is inane.
Of course, there's no clear border. Wobbles will be biggest at the epicentre and get smaller further out.
In any case, you just do the actuarial math, and figure out how much it would cost to wobble-prove buildings in the area in question, and stick that into your cost benefit analysis. It's not like other forms of energy generation are completely without downsides either.
Why would you think that? Because the peasants are all too stupid to notice an earthquake that damage their houses?
Sure, fewer people would be affected, than in a dense city, but the problem solution of: out of sight, out of mind, is fascinating.
Yes, exactly. I also don’t expect dense residential buildings prone to earthquakes to be prevalent in low density sparsely populated agricultural areas.
There is nothing “fascinating” except that stating facts about rural areas immediately brings out the worst kinds of trolls out of the woodwork.
Offer to do that plus a bit of extra money on top, and you'll find plenty of rural takers. Pick the cheapest bidder.
I do agree with the commenter who said that we don't need to earthquake proof agricultural land itself. Especially not against minor wobbles. Fields just lie there.
(Just to avoid confusion: any buildings close to agricultural land need to be considered, of course. I am talking purely about the fields.)
Keep in mind that Germany has plenty of open pit lignite mines. Like eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Schleenhain_coal_mine
The disruption from geothermal is minuscule by comparison.
So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?
And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ? Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?
What do you mean? A few really minor earthquakes are all that was reported by the comment I was replying to. So I'd assume more really minor earthquakes.
> And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ?
The usual way of paying an insurance company?
> Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?
Depends on the jurisdiction. But sure, you can make the plant operator responsible for that and responsible for having gigantic insurance coverage.
(Just look at whatever liability people who operate dams have today. A breakage of a major dam would also devastate entire regions. So whatever arrangements are good enough for that use case are probably good enough here.)
That said, it also seems like this proposed technique is very different and probably wouldn't have the same issues.
The US’ fracking experiments show ”well outside of any city” is nowhere near enough.
Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.
The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.
I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.
Seems all pretty manageable on the humongous scale of 'this could be our main source of energy'.
Eg burning coal or oil kills a lot more people directly and indirectly.
Basically, the idea I proposed would only work for generating electricity, not for using the heat directly.
We see this with everything: social policy, monetary policy, tax policy, etc.
I think a public online resource that documents instances like this, where the experts, or the government, told us X, but it ended up being Y, would be a really powerful tool to fight back against folks who treat science like an infallible religion.
The only tool needed for that is a really simple one: a bumper sticker that says "when you mix science and politics you get politics".
People who can't grok that are not going to come around.
No, it's not. In the past we did next to nothing and we now see the consequences. We may fail if we try, but we are guaranteed to fail if we don't.
And science is like democracy, it's not perfect sometimes even bad, but it's still the best we have. Everything else is worse.
What's the alternative? Trust big oil companies instead?
But apart from that, you seem to have misinterpreted the Quaise technology, mixing apples and oranges. This is not conventional drilling which can cause water to flow into adjacent rock (not to mention fracking which deliberately cracks the bedrock to allow water to flow through).
This technology is vaporizing the rock and at the same time creating a sealed shaft which funnels the water directly to the great depths where the water can reach supercritical steam state, and so avoiding the issues that caused the Staufen im Breisgau mishap.
Another town near Strasbourg is devastated like staufen Im breigsbau: Lochwiller. With the same issue as staufen, except that in this case it was a family who drilled to heat their home.
(I can't claim that this is always the case with my question marks, so I'm in no position to complain if they are not taken at face value)
Wildfires are the clear analogue. I wonder if it actually works that way. I would guess not. The size and strength of a massive earthquake is just so hard to understand. That the Richter scale is logarithmic is just incredible. A few small quakes here and there seem unlikely to meaningfully detract from its power.
To put it into context, geothermal energy that taps underground water reservoirs near heat sources has been shown to cause earthquakes and other not good side effects. All of those effects are associated with water being released from aquifers that were previously sealed, or ground changes due to water incursion into previously dry structures (which happened in the reference German town). These guys however are digging below all of that. In fact finding water that near the surface would likely cause them to determine the location unsuitable.
Modern geothermal plants are "binary" in that they have their own water loop which goes down, gets heated, and then comes back as steam. A good explainer is here: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-po...
What these guys propose doing is essentially drilling into rock 6+ miles down. That is about 5 to 10 times deeper than current plants. Using the heat from the rock which is near 1000 degrees to heat water that they pump through it into steam and recover through the turbines. The whole "pipe" from well head to return is nominally sealed with the vitrified walls created by the microwaving process.
Let's assume (and I don't know since I don't work for these guys but we need numbers if we're going to guess at things) that their "drilling" with microwaves technology leaves behind a 12" diameter hole that is > 6 miles deep. And we can drill two of those holes in such a way that they meet at their maximum depth. I'm imagining holes that start on the surface 100+ yards (or meters) apart drilled with a slight angle to meet when they are 6+ miles deep. How much power could we expect to get out of that?
So let's do a little math, water weighs about .03621 lbs/cubic inch. And a 1ft tall, 1ft diameter cylinder of water would way about 49 lbs. A mile is 5280 feet so a mile high column of water, 12" in diameter, would weigh 258,851 lbs, and a 6 mile high column would weigh 1,553,283 lbs (a bit under 777 tons) so the force at the bottom of the column would be about 13,734 psi. At 935F it would pretty much instantly convert to 'dry' steam, and could likely be recovered at about 10,000psi on the other side of the well.
It has been a long time since I had to figure out from a steam table how much energy was extractable from super heated steam, but it is a lot. It goes through the turbine, piped through a cooling tower to condense it back into water, and then dropped back into the source hole.
The risk of earthquakes and other geo-technical disturbances is minimized by what is essentially a closed loop system.
Now it is true that you're going to cool the crust (energy is conserved after all and if you're running turbines it means the crust is cooling) the question then is how quickly is that heat returned by other actions. And of course if you were to pull "all" the energy out fast enough this way you could presumably "freeze" the core of the Earth and that would be a bad thing, but we're talking about way more energy than the entire world consumes in a centuries and I'm not sure how to judge that risk compared to the heat generation mechanisms inside the planet. An actual geologist probably has an idea.
I'm doubtful that any drilling process can be that straight and accurate unless straight lines are inherent in the drilling process (e.g. lasers somehow). Just think of how much trouble they had drilling to those stranded Chilean miners to rescue them, only 700m down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiap%C3%B3_mining_accid...
That said, microwaves (like lasers) do tend to go straight. So from the point they start using them going forward, I would expect it to be possible (not easy, but possible) to keep them in a straight path.
Actually, none of them do. Cutting equipment (even after adapted to drilling) is heavily focused on the near region, usually a few cm away. On distances larger than a few cm, they are no more self-aligning than any mechanical drill.
This means that a closed loop system needs many many many miles of boreholes in order to last long enough to pay off.
At the end of this article, there's a bit about the "tech won't save us" crowd. Not saying you're in it, just that it surprises me that such a thing could exist at all. At this point, what the hell else could save us? God, positivity, bans on plastic straws?
Because it makes me realize-- or remember-- that the most life-hostile & technology-defying environments aren't in far off geographic locations or far out in space, they're a constant presence just under my feet. A shorter distance from me right now than I travel in my daily commute.
That as space enthusiasts (rightfully) speculate or plan the future above our heads, there are incredible things going on beneath our feet at forces and temperatures that also produce very exotic materials and even the prospect of untapped clean energy just a short distance away from every single place in the planet. (Assuming that drilling down for geothermal power isn't horrible for the environment?)
Just another example of how very little in the natural world is truly mundane and there are incredible things everywhere.
The flow from the Earth's core to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts[0]
The total energy supply for 2017 was 162,494 TWh[1]
World energy demand is expected to grow 27% by 2040
Currently, heat escaping from the Earth accounts for only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface which is dominated by the 173,000 TW contributed by solar radiation[0] What effect would it have if the vented heat were equal to the amount contributed by the sun?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
Ultimately if heat isn't radiating from the atmosphere, it isn't leaving the planet.
I assume that the number is vastly greater if you measure the heat 1km below sea level for example.
(I suppose you could build a heat engine by using the temperature differentials of different underground layers, although I've never seen that proposed)
Is it suggesting that covering the entire surface of earth with 100% efficient solar panels would just barely cover 2017's power supply?
Edit: ah I see, world energy is in terawatt hours for an entire year, wheras planetary solar energy is terawatts in a single hour
Of course, it all depends on how expensive the drilling process is vs. the existing capital asset in the turbines, but maybe you could hit a price point where the repurposed geothermal plant is way cheaper than new solar / gas builds in the 2030s? This would be a transitional tailwind, just when we need it. Down the road, these plants would become more expensive because you'd also need to build new turbines/transmission lines. And at that time maybe solar or fusion is a cheaper solution (or not, who knows). But this could really help with the transition away from fossil fuels, if it was delivered next decade or two.
A question - does deep drilling like this have any downsides, as fracking does? I'm guessing it's less bad since you're not pushing pressurized fluid into the bedrock, instead you're just making a pipe that contains the water.
> “What we intend to do is go to existing power plants—it could be a coal power plant, it could be a gas power plant, any of the thousands of fossil-fired power plants that exists in the United States and around the world—and we will propose to them to create a small geothermal field around them, which is matched to the turbine specification of the power plant. What comes out of the ground is steam that feeds into the turbine, and the rest is what they’ve always done. The turbine creates electricity. The plant is already connected to the grid,”
https://www.powermag.com/a-game-changing-vision-for-geotherm...
Could just be marketing fluff; I'm not an expert here. But don't coal plants exclusively use steam turbines?
Edit: Seems that lots of energy in the US comes from steam turbines: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/how-electric....
It's possible to directly trigger small faults with while fracturing the rock, or to do something stupid like fracture into a freshwater zone other people are using, but that's not what's driving quakes in e.g. Oklahoma.
So they ended up making 6.4km deep holes where they got 121 degree (celcius) water. Once pumped up to ground level it cools down to 110 degrees but it is more then hot enough for district heating.
The original plan was to got 9km deep but it was already hot enough at 6.4km so they stopped there to save money.
I think this is pretty essential and maybe even more important than the depth. Until now it was not economically feasible because the porous rock did swallow a lot of the circulated water in such a drilling. But this technique seems to solve that problem pretty effectively.
Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape.
I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity. We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up. I wish I'd get rich enough one day to devote my life to this.
Could you please explain what you mean?
In conventional hydroelectricity, gravity causes the motion through the energy differential of the waters' height.
In a steam turbine, the potential energy is from the high temperature of the water, and the energy input to rotate the turbine comes from the temperature differential of the steam cooling.
In theory you could capture the hydroelectric energy of the water on its way down a 12 mile hole, but that gravitic potential energy is negligable compared to the energy difference between superheated steam and water.
Any peak over about 2000ft should be sufficient for an atmospheric water generation plant to produce enough water for a down hill hydroelectric plant to power the atmospheric water generation plant with single digit ambient RH, and much lower elevations can be used in high RH climes.
I would recommend orienting collectors to the windward side to exploit the local humidity gain, in lower RH climes.
One of my projects is actually a water condensation, hydroelectric and gas liquefaction combined cycle plant.
That said, bores in areas with deep ground water do present an interesting opportunity for pumped storage, with the caveat that the turbomachinery is back in the bore hole and that's a really inconvenient place to fix it when it breaks.
I think coal and most other mineral extraction industries would love to have the relatively good environmental record of oil and gas companies. One small opening at the surface, no need to send hundreds of people in. Pretty small and quiet facility above ground where all the work gets done, etc. As terrible as an oil spill is, they're not very common.
Once we get enough solar capacity to start thinking about carbon capture, maybe methane capture is the most interesting problem to start with.
I hope you are aware that hydro also has a reputation for destroying natural environments at a pretty huge scale
In fact it's using a heat pump, and liquid circulating in pipes burried a few feet underground to act as a thermal sink, to either heat or cool down a house. This works well because the temperature in the ground doesn't fluctuate much past 3ft. Pretty neat, and does not require to go down miles (though it's moving energy to/from ground rather than harvesting it and you still need an energy source for the pump)
https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/the-interchange-recharg...
Were you expecting a massive meteor impact in the near future that the rest of us are unaware of?
If not, exactly how were you planning to get enough heat at the surface of the Earth to warm-up the core?
While the core is 5000 degrees celcius, the point we dig to is more like 150. Concentrated solar power can generate 1000 degree celcius. If we pump this down when we have excess, the area remains hotter than it would otherwise be... letting us use it when the sun sets. This can also work through much longer timescales, like you could dump energy heat down in the summer and harvest it in the winter.
The post I was replying to was worried about gradual loss of core heat. This will be minimized if we pump heat in.
No, never with current technology.
That would be very, very bad, but if you look at the numbers, like others pointed out - this is not an issue with our current tech.
I would be more worried about earthquakes and co. because deep plate tectonic is not understood well.
And when you cool one area significantly, that creates tension in the rock, because of the heat difference to other hotter areas.
Is this part harder than it sounds? Do you need to keep it as hot vapor until it gets to the surface? What do you do with it then? Presumably a 12 mile column of rock turns into a whole lot of vapor. Is it toxic? When vaporized rock cools, does it become just sand, or are there interesting/concerning chemicals left over?
As a lay person, I'm never sure when I read about new tech to address environmental issues whether we're creating a new problem. We've spent generations aggressively pumping carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Would a move towards rock-vaporizing drilling just mean aggressively pumping a bunch of silicon, iron, etc out of the ground and into the atmosphere?
* Typically vaporized solids a fine powder they cools down in air, or otherwise deposit on cool surfaces
* Fine rock powder could be hazard to lungs, but it shouldn't be too hard filter it out of the air that leaves the hole
* Some rock materials contain sulfates or phosphates; letting those escape into the atmosphere in large quantities would be bad; but you could always let it recombine with the rest of the evaporated rock, rendering it inert. Such a process wouldn't be 100%, so this is something worth looking out for.
Most wealthy countries require an environmental impact assessment before any such operation, so there's hope such things would be caught before they become a big problem.
Amazing technology though, this coupled with solar could really make people independent of centralised energy systems
No-one can make or repair this take themselves. You just moved the dependence from one system to another. The current system is also battle-tested and mutualized. Outage see lots of people on deck to fix things. If your solar installation panel breaks it's your individual problem and it will quickly reveal just how dependent you actually are.
The only way to be independent of other humans would be to live a lifestyle which requires only rudimentary knowledge, and the muscles of your body. Probably only hunter-gatherer. Anything beyond that means you rely on knowledge, skills, and muscles of other, and dependent on them for your life.
Maybe you knew all this, but it may still be useful for other readers to realize since these days we hear a lot of prophets telling us how we should increase our independence by installing solar panels or wind turbines. And people don't think twice about where these come from, and who will maintain them.
Thank you. People claim they are independent because they are off-grid and using solar panels. But are they really? Solar panels last about 10 years and then what? Of course they are dependent on the grid that provides them the solar panels and batteries.
Nowadays, there seems to be an epidemic of engineering neglect in terms of capital allocation. A lot of wealthy individuals who have the capital to invest in such projects do not seem to have the engineering mindset (or no longer do) to see through greenwashing BS.
"It's all about the people" is BS. These days, there are charlatans everywhere and they seem to have monopolized all the billionaires.
Hmm. Are magnetrons and gyrotrons the same thing? Probably not. So we can't rip apart an old microwave oven and start drilling holes out back just yet. Damn.
Nowhere in the article did I see them mention temp differential and where they are going to dump the waste heat? Nuclear plants get crapped on because they dump heat into adjacent water bodies, how is this different?
There were some people seriously proposing big convection tubes that'd bootstrap columns of hot air, then passively pull surface air into the upper atmosphere. I can't find a link, but those wouldn't get to low earth orbit, so not a "space" technology.
That'd have the same net effect as the giant heat sink (energy production from a heat engine, net negative flow of energy to the surface).
Wasn't there a city builder that'd let you build such a thing, where it would sometimes lose calibration and burn a swath of the city to the ground?
If you can get it anywhere, you go get it near the sea, and dump your heat there.
None of this is rocket science, it is all well known to anyone who actually wants to do some research. Unfortunately, it seems like the people most vocal about energy are generally the least informed.
It also doesn't involve rocket science.
QED.
Let me guess, you have no formal engineering training, do you?
EDIT: to make this comment more constructive, here is a link to an excellent book on energy processes: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Renewable-Energy-Process...
I took a class with da Rosa and at the time this book was still in draft form, but nonetheless, excellent and easy to read. There appear to be new editions, don't know the differences.
However, my previous comment is technically correct. You still haven't raised any valid technical concerns with my solution.
If Mike Hughes (1) were still alive, I'm sure he'd be willing to be hired to prove me correct.
(1) The steam powered rocket guy that coincidentally became a flat earther after running out of money. The flat earthers ended up funding his (mostly) successful steam rocket.
Everyone knows the footage from NASA and the rest of the aerospace-round-earth-industrial-military-complex is all faked. Helium and Hydrogen are the devil's gas, so weather balloons also won't work.
I hope the flat earthers find some other mad scientist to replace him soon.
(Edit: I enjoyed the textbook "energy", but I've forgotten the author's name. Sadly, it's not really findable with search engines. It took a whole systems approach (including raw material extraction and maintenance)
I lived a long time before I figured this out. It is important
The Altarock energy site is currently showing a 503. Altarock from Seattle won the arpa grant and were noted as an “affiliate” of Quais in the ieee article.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/altarock-energy-melts-rock-with-mi...
Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo.
Ecosystems are still being obliterated for cattle and mining.
All ghg free electricity will do is buy a few decades to end (and in the west, reverse) growth. Possibly the only thing that will give civilisation a chance to find a solution, but not a solution.
We should be finding ways for people in the west to live more like developing nations and still thrive, not trying to turn developing nations into the west.
What makes you think so? What growth rates are you assuming? How long is your time horizon?
The only thing you can do with true waste heat on the scale of earth is to radiate it into space.
You might want to look into eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
Do you know how the Carnot cycle works, and more importantly, why no process to generate electricity from heat can be more efficient?
> If you’re generating energy at a rate greater than you have a use for,
Huh? Why would anyone do this? Just turn off the excess capacity.
(Do keep in mind that when we produce electricity, we necessarily have waste heat. That waste heat has energy, but it's not energy we can use.)
Any kind of heat engine essentially works like a water wheel: you take heat from a high temperature source (water from a source at big height), you send it through your apparatus, and out comes heat at a lower temperature (water at a lower height) on one side, and some electricity on the other.
> ... then you want to radiate it back into space, yes. Neutron beams would be a cool, perhaps fanciful yet potentially practical way of doing that in a concentrated manner.
Huh? If you can concentrate the waste energy, it's not waste heat. You'd want to use it instead of just bleeding it into space. Do you understand that?
You'd use that concentrated form to run another engine.
Our psychic and material conditions are poised to get worse as we rapaciously exploit the natural resources of the planet and destroy the fabric of life across it (not just the casual culprits like extinction, but the general accruing debt of pollution and degradation across the biosphere). Further,our global civilization and the supply lines that enable it (gas, water + sewage, electricity, connectivity) exist in an equilibrium we're actively disrupting.
Another thing to consider is that our biology has adapted for a vastly different experience of environment and society than those we inhabit.
The patterns of human civilization need to change drastically for it to be extant and thriving in 100 years.
Equally interesting:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/can-economic-growth-last/
That's a big if. In fact things like deforestation increase albedo. And when we get closer to that point, we can start requiring actively increasing albedo of all human structures.
Projecting out our current habits along a trend line all the way to our doom is utterly naive... It's a bit like a lumberjack hundreds of years ago complaining that if we keep building log cabins, we'll run out of lumber. What actually happens is, when resources start to become constraints, THEN we suddenly start finding ways to conserve them, NOT before. And before it happens, it's not obvious to those looking ahead just how it can and will be dealt with.
> We should be finding ways for people in the west to live more like developing nations and still thrive, not trying to turn developing nations into the west.
"Developing nations" are among the worst polluters. That's probably not what you mean. Poor, underdeveloped nations have relatively small global environmental impacts, but very intense local impacts... Local deforestation and other resource exhaustion, for example. That's not a good model to copy, either.
There are possible technological solutions to deal with our impact, and on the time-scales we're talking about, possibilities like colonization of other worlds, and gradually towing the Earth out to a wider (and cooler) orbit.
Incredibly, California has managed to kill its geysers. Apparently when Geyserville was settled there were puffs of steam coming out all over the place. Now the geothermal plant there injects wastewater into the rock and then drives its turbine with the steam that comes back.
(Make of that what you will.)
Shared ground loops connected to heat pumps are a more boring tech with more potential to have a global scale impact.
I had assumed they would need to transfer the heat rather than pipe geothermal steam directly into the turbine, but either way, solar and wind is very cheap and hard to compete with. Even magical free energy connected to a steam turbine struggles when you do the sums, which is the baseline before you start including cost and risk from super deep drilling.
So geothermal will mainly compete with nuclear and storage, not wind and solar.
It is pollution of ground water, risk of earth quakes, transportation of the heat, local cool down and having to drill new wholes.
In Europe we have tried, and tested with wholes up to 1km depth but it is not as ideal as one might think. Otherwise it would have been used on a large scale already.
Generally Eastern European cities with centralised heating are very suited for geothermal. Except they’ll loose all that sweet sweet kickback from Russian oil dealer.
Bore first, build later, otherwise you may be the unlucky winner of a fluid formation trapped under a rigid formation in the local geology.
https://theconversation.com/a-mud-volcano-has-been-erupting-...
We might all be dead by then but hey... not renewable!
Reminder: few energy sources do not add heating to the atmosphere during the whole energy lifecycle!
It's the ones that *subtract* energy from the environment in the first place: solar, wind, dams, tidal energy.
Other sources (including geothermal, nuclear, oil ...), even if we could produce a 100% efficient power plant, are still extracting energy that would otherwise stayed "locked-in" somewhere.
Keep in mind that virtually all electrical energy produced turns into heat released in the atmosphere.
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
>A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use.
So even if we get all of our current energy needs from these sources, that is less than 0.01% of the energy earth gets from the sun. Is that going to have a significant effect on the temperature of the earth?
sorry, I couldn't read the article without solving the question of energy cycle in my mind. renewable sources like solar, wind are kind of taking energy from outside, so in case of geo-thermal, if we keep using that, there is nothing thats balancing the equation.
Energy produced in the way up (heated water) and on the way down (gravity-Fed turbines)