Quaise Energy – Unlocking the true power of clean geothermal energy
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Full steam ahead!
EDIT: tbh I did also think that this concept sounds like the opening plot for a b-grade disaster movie - "The Day The Earth Cracked Open".
If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.
Iceland sits on a big magma chamber, so they would need to proceed differently. Still, they have a lot of practical experience with utility-scale geothermal energy extraction the rest of us ought to learn from.
could it work in 50 years? maybe. probably not.
it's not working in 7 years, which is the climate change timeline.
it's time to stop trying to chase new inventions, and just build 1970s nuclear.
A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally, and has been for decades without mishap. What is new here is a drilling method. Power extraction from a hot borehole is mature tech.
which produce 778 billion kwh in the united states
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> A very respectable amount of utility power is generated geothermally
16 billion kwh
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> and has been for decades without mishap.
More deaths have occurred from geothermal, total, than nuclear, despite that nuclear delivers 48x the power.
Guatemala City: 33.
Dieng: 41.
Fenton Hill: 12.
Sorik Marapi: 5.
Soultz-sous-Foretz: 19.
Calpine: three times. 1, 5, 4.
El Salvador: 12.
Sumatera: 6.
Leyte: two incidents: 5, 17.
Sarulla: 18.
Brisbane: 14.
Reykavik: 2.
It'll get worse. AltaRock had to be stopped twice for causing earthquakes. Strasbourg was permanently stopped. So was dover. Pohang's earthquakes put a city under lockdown and killed two people.
There exists no decade since the launch of geothermal power where at least 25 people didn't die. Nuclear has only had that count once.
Oh, you haven't? My mistake.
Just as insane is convincing anyone that your drilling activities aren’t causing earthquakes, screwing up water tables, or leaking gas and other chemicals out of the ground.
I still hope it works lol!
12.2 km - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
The technology is real, and the required power density is surprisingly low.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286571247_Penetrati...
A 20km borehole with a 10cm diameter is only ~157m3 of rock. If the dig takes four weeks (which would be unprecedentedly fast), you only need to purge ~64cm3/s, which is pretty trivial.
They'll need to do something like mix the dust into concrete. Silicate dust is a respiratory hazard. But that doesn't strike me as a significant hurdle.
Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.[1] Ticker symbol changed from GYTI to GYTIE, indicating failure to file financial statements, and the stock price went to zero. They were talking about this as a precision heat source, like a laser cutter. That would be useful. But apparently it didn't work out.
It seems a big stretch to take that technology from nowhere to something you can push down a drill hole. That's close to the toughest application. You'd expect industrial applications first.
Now, if you could make that technology work, there's a cool application. This August, NASA is sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche, which supposedly has large amounts of heavy metals, possibly including gold.[2] If NASA finds valuable metals, there will be serious interest in asteroid mining. If you want to mine an asteroid, you need cutting tools. But you don't have any useful gravity to hold them to the surface. So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble. Might be the killer app for gyrotron drilling.
do you believe lasers have thrust?
you could cut through a planet with a laser and still not lift a one ounce weight off the ground with the "push back"
laser ablation is the result of heat, not force
Absolutely. How do you think solar sails work? Light has inertia. If you emit large amounts of energy with any form of light, you'll get a thrust.
By accumulating tiny pressure over decades in zero gravity where they face no friction.
It is not coincidental that you had to go to this extreme of an example.
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"Light has inertia."
I see you missed the part where I gave a factual accounting of how much inertia is dispensed.
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"If you emit large amounts of energy with any form of light, you'll get a thrust."
At the entire output of the Sun, you do not produce enough thrust to lift an average adult male human being in the gravity of the Earth.
Go do the math.
yes, many times. as you would expect, it obviously doesn't work.
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> Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.
that's correct. they weren't able to cut two inches of well controlled non-porous dry material.
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> You'd expect industrial applications first.
honestly, you wouldn't. it's technical nonsense. lasers are more efficient and easy to build.
the reason we use microwaves to cook is they pass through most material harmlessly, and mostly interact with the water.
which is kind of a dealbreaker here.
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> So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble.
no, it's really not. it's just science fiction bs.
if we want to save the planet, just build regular 1970s nuclear power, and quit it with the "i'll invent something new with less than ten years on the clock" stuff.
Their timeline is pretty tight with first rig in 2 years and commercial level first power plant in another 2. They should have demonstrated at least a couple of holes deeper than a few km by now you'd assume.
There isn't one.
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> Is it a scam?
It won't work.
I do not have the ability to tell if it's a scam. They might really believe it. A scam would require them to know they were wrong.
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> Are they bringing anything new to the table?
No.
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> Their timeline is pretty tight with first rig in 2 years and commercial level first power plant in another 2.
You can't even build a bog standard coal plant that fast.
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> They should have demonstrated at least a couple of holes deeper than a few km by now you'd assume.
If you believed in them, yes, I'd agree.
You seem to be describing fracking which is a completely different technology.
That is, the water/steam cycle is extracting heat from the surrounding rock. That can only be extracted at a rate that matches the heat inflow, or ideally, ever so slightly less, so as to maintain equilibrium over decades over cubic miles of rock.
Yes, I understand that larger temperature differences increase thermodynamic efficiency. But if the energy produced is constant, efficiency may not matter as much as ease of construction etc.
'AltaRock Energy,” in partnership with Quaise Energy, is developing millimeter wave (mmWave) technology...'
Hopefully those 30 years of technology will be of service
But this effect is orders of magnitude smaller than the greenhouse effect.
Geothermal will not be as cheap as solar, so if we use a lot more power, it will mostly be solar. (Geothermal would be used mainly for baseline, at night.)
Solar intercepts energy already arriving, to use before it is then re-radiated to space. It arrives regardless.
So, no problem. What we have now is a catastrophically big unfolding climate crisis. Even if there were a problem, any small problem is a wonderful substitute for a catastrophically big problem.
https://www.saurenergy.com/solar-energy-news/arriving-soon-s...
https://twitter.com/anderssandberg/status/145528744318439424...
So we have room to ~20x our energy consumption before we start having to worry about climate change from direct heating, so long as we draw down the excess CO2 we've emitted.
Wind doesn't contribute to that total, as it's harvesting energy already in the system. Solar mostly doesn't contribute to that total, but it does increase surface albedo.
The present trumps the future. The past kicks us in the arse
A very simple reality left in the footnotes of newspapers at the time, and then tabled to giant research papers and committees as this was the only consensus that was able to be reached by fossil fuel addicted committees. "lets plan to form a commission in a few years, to do a study in a few years and look at the results in a few years for re-evaluation".
What matters is the magnitude of the effect: how much difference does it make?
There will be no secondary effect of geothermal energy extraction even noticeable compared to the present unfolding global climate catastrophe. The latter is what deserves attention. Anything else is a petty distraction. Raising petty distractions from it is a fundamentally evil activity.
Wow, I hadn't even thought of that. How much heat does this produce, roughly? For context, the total heat lost from the earth's interior is about 47 TW according to another comment, so in order for the earth to not heat up I assume that moon friction heat + nuclear decay heat < 47 TW?
(1) - The geothermal heat flow from the Earth's interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts
(2) - Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019. This corresponds to an average continuous heat flow of about 18 TW
[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth'...
Likewise for solar and wind.
That being said, it doesn't look like we'll get to a significant magnitude of effect for a long time.
The wiki says that its about .08W/m^2. That means it an area of 2-3 football fields only puts out as much heat as a single space heater.
Once you have that, the rest is easy. But drilling deep is hard. When I say hard, think expensive. The problem with geothermal so far has been not that it is impossible but that it is expensive to drill holes. Also pumping water in and out holes requires pumps and pipes and machinery that needs maintaining. So, there's a cost associated with that as well. And of course the amount of energy you can get out is proportional to the diameter of the hole. To scale you need to drill more holes. Which is expensive.
That's why geothermal is mainly used in places where you don't have to drill very deep.
So, technically feasible, maybe. But the real question is whether it will be economically feasible.
I hope it's more than that.
That's just a tall order. Should this be a legitimate research topic? Absolutely. Would I put my money down as an investor on this being a win? No. Should we be throwing public money at this? Hell no, we should be building more turbines with that money. Start on the weird stuff only once we've picked the low hanging fruit.
Geothermal that you can sink pretty much anywhere would be a gamechanger - it doesn't create local pollution, and it does produce waste heat: built in or neat town areas, you can make electricity and completely clean town heating that works all year round.
Boring this deep does have significant risks, especially when we are pumping fluids in and out.
It shouldn't have to work on either of those things, because neither of those things take any account of externalities.
This attitude that no energy project is worth doing if it's not profitable is how we're going to kill our entire civilization in a few decades. We need to be thinking longer term than "is it cheaper than coal right now?" when the cost of co2 emitting energy sources is literal death and destruction down the line.
Because if you habe finite resources, you better invest them in something that works than waste a considerable part to do something that probably maybe should work.
In terms of actual physical and labour resources, they're not fungible. People working on nuclear power or geothermal are not going to be terribly useful to advance the state of the art on wind power, which is already a largely mature technology that needs money and effort put into deployment not research. They also use largely different materials, technology, and equipment.
Likewise, you can't just take "money spent on geothermal" and throw it at "building windmills" because there are other bottlenecks involved in windmills that aren't just magically solved with money. And, of course, likewise.
Anyways, every advance in materials science all of these things engage in helps all of them advance.
This has the same vibe as hydrogen cars. Don't buy battery EVs, wait a decade and buy hydrogen cars that will be just as good as ICE!
Or, I can just buy an EV today that's already better than ICE.
Don't take the Bill Gates route of talking down existing, proven solutions to talk up your speculative investment in some unproven tech or the fossil fuel approach of funding weird future research aa an excuse to spend lots of time talking about how amazing fossil fuels are.
Plus, isn't it a bit shortsighted to suck up the planet's heat? Eventually something is gonna give. But that could be centuries from now so who cares, huh?
Here in New Zealand we found that geothermal is not "non polluting". There are a lot of unforeseen consequences with bringing deep water to the surface.
Still much better than nuclear that makes our children pay for current consumption or coal that means we are paying for our ancestors consumption....
In Taupo, if my memory serves, the geothermal fluid was found to have high concentrations of arsenic (?) that was seriously polluting rivers.
The subsidence of surrounding land was a problem too
They developed ways of re-injecting the fluid into the well which they hoped would fix both problems, and time will tell.
2024: First full-scale hybrid drilling rig -> 2026: First Super Hot Enhanced Geothermal System rated to 100 MW... -> 2028: First powerplant.
This false prophet reminds me of Theranos/Elizabeth Holmes. Always skeptical when hearing about such unicorns hunting for idiots' money.