In Utah, researchers are trying to make geothermal energy a reality | Hacker News Reader

In Utah, researchers are trying to make geothermal energy a reality

science.org

75 pointssohkamyung78 comments

The most recent Australian experience is that this demands more $ than you think, and invokes more engineering risks than you wanted, and in economic stress can wind up almost there, but a million miles away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_Australia#...

It's really sad. It should work, and it had massive upsides. I don't think the investment was a waste, where I do think CCS for sequestration is generally a giant boondoggle by the oil and gas extraction industries.

There is a lot of emotion around fracking. Given its almost exclusively used to enhance well extraction, and against local farmers wishes, its hardly surprising. Water tables are complex, and people visualise them as something different: I was told by a geologist sleeving a drill through the water table is normal and common and there should be no necessary pollution of one by the other (deep fracking) but there's a lot of nervousness about it. They use heinously wierd mixtures to force the fracking.

A lot of power investment decisions are basically linear optimisation: there are umpteen competing tensions, financial, political, energy cost/benefit, pollution, distance to consumer, longterm future, royalty, capex, opex, it's not that unusual for good science to be drowned out by politics (for instance). Right now, my sense is that Wind and Solar are in the ascendent, and that the politics of looking at other forms of energy involve most of the non-tech, political, layer 9 aspects of energy planning. I truly believe other forms of energy are worth exploring, but not if they interfere with deployment of low-carbon wind and solar and battery, and are just being used as a battering ram to preserve oil/coal energy income streams.

I feel like it's really common for people involved in energy extraction to tell the people living in a community "we promise it will all be fine". And then suddenly when things aren't fine, they'll pay the absolute legally enforced minimum (usually nothing) to those in the communities they've crippled.

People are right to be afraid, giving money to a few well owners in exchange for your entire water table potentially getting destroyed is a bad deal

Yes. It's an exceptionally bad deal. Especially when you consider fugitive gas release from gas extraction is a huge, under-reported problem. All this does is contribute to wild, uncontained methane release.

But fracking for heat, I think may still be worth arguing for, and discussing as risk issue. It's not unlike cancer treatments: anti cancer drugs are wildly toxic, and you would never, ever give them to a patient otherwise. None the less, until the newer anti-cancer vaccines came along, they were the gold standard for treatment: Arguing for testing demanded doctors justify giving people toxins. Was it worth it? Yes.

Earthquakes is the primary concern. Ask South Korea.

Strange that you're being downvoted. This is fracking and it's been associated with one of the largest earthquakes South Korea has ever experienced. https://www.science.org/content/article/second-largest-earth...

Don't know why you were downvoted. Induced seismicity is indeed a real issue with this form of geothermal energy, with prominent events in South Korea and Switzerland.

I've also been following the work of Supercritical, who are tackling the high costs of deep drilling needed (in most locations) for geothermal energy.

https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/disruptive-drilling-technolog...

Me too, though I think "supercritical" only refers to the water temperature they are targeting, >373 C [1]. The company name is Quaise Energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercritical_water_oxidation

This may be an even better article: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-millimete...

This is a pretty good video on the same thing. This is the "Undecided with Matt Ferrell" channel on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE

There are the usual adds, but nothing unusual in that respect. Seems like a pretty good summary.

Pretty cool startup. Digging 20km deep holes, and only in 3-4 months, this would be amazing.

The main issue with geothermal energy is that it needs cooling and that means water, a lot of water. I do not have the exact estimates for geothermal, but in the US the current numbers are 15 gallons to produce 1kWh of electricity. source: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/t...

Same issue with any kind of thermal power btw. This is already a problem with nuclear reactors that have to shut down because of droughts.

Thermal pollution is also an issue. Rivers (and coastal waters) temperatures going up is destructive for ecosystems.

So yes, geothermal is much better than coal. Not really a long term solution though.

Water doesn't vanish when you boil it. In some areas you can just use it for heating, in other areas condensers are possible (although will not be built if not enforced via regulation or water pricing).

There are also more exotic uses for low grade heat. Thermochemical storage, desalination, driving other endothermic reactions.

Still a good argument for using wind and solar wherever possible and just collectively calming the hell down for a few hours when it's cloudy.

> ... just collectively calming the hell down for a few hours when it's cloudy.

This is the exact argument people opposed to wind and solar make.

...and it's a very poor argument.

1) Energy can be transported and "averaged out" across very large areas, making local clouds or low winds irrelevant

2) Energy can be stored not only in reversible form, but also in form of stored heat to be released later on for building or water heating

3) There is no reason to believe that demand must always be satisfied fully. A lot of countries already have day/night tariffs since decades and making appliances smarter is not difficult at all. A lot of industrial uses can be made flexible.

I'm no longer convinced of the transportability of electrical power. At least here in America, NIMBY politics makes it nigh impossible to build new transmission. And here in California our regulators have created an environment where we pay excessively high energy prices, have poor uptime, and regularly set ourselves alight.

For any kilowatt hour I pull off the grid I pay at least thrice the national average, and in this month I'll have uninterrupted power 87% of days with 28 hours of total downtime.

The future is distributed microgrids even if it isn't the theoretically optimal future.

That's an US problem: some grid operator are also owners of power plants. Of course they don't want to make the grid friendly towards distributed solar power generation and microgrids because it would eat away from profits from their power plants.

And they are allowed to lobby politicians yadda yadda... This is a political problem, not technological. And should be solved at a political level.

> The future is distributed microgrids even if it isn't the theoretically optimal future.

Distributed microgrids does not imply that they are not connected to each other, but you are right: democratizing energy production is much more important than nitpicking at efficiency.

I didn't claim those microgrids wouldn't interconnect to the larger grid. ;)

Low reliability and high per-unit-energy costs are driving me to be self-sufficient but to maintain my grid connection to reduce likelihood of correlated failure. I suspect the regulators will dramatically drive up grid connection fees at some point in the future. When we get there, I'll simply disconnect entirely and get my backup from gasoline.

California is not a good example to use as an example of American energy capability, just Californian energy

As always in recent past, USA can't even think of going outside of it's local maximum.

"... just collectively calming the hell down for a few hours when it's cloudy" sounds like it is quite different than existing demand response. To me it sounds like residential users included should curtail energy using activities in response to cloudy or non-windy times, which will be extremely unpopular.

Incidentally, I am signed up for a demand response program with my utility. During summer they pay me for the ability to curtail my AC during times of grid stress.

>A lot of industrial uses can be made flexible.

...which will move to country with stable power after looking at cost of making this happen.

The reason people have been doing this for decades is because it is cheaper for some industries (plus some consumer applications).

And when those industries do it, it makes power both cheaper and more stable for everyone else. A win-win.

...so that they can avoid paying lower energy rates during the night?

So that they can have stable processes without tons of capital investment required to do something flexibly.

That's because they treat our habits and systems of organisation as immutable constants and the laws of physics as guidelines.

You'll have to define what you mean by "... collectively calming the hell down when its cloudy". To me this implies pretty drastic demand response behavior changes but perhaps that's not what you mean.

As a mere spectator, I am aware that a lot of work may be required to make this work at scale and it’s possible that this research/approach stalls due to unknowns or some long pole. But readings like this give us all a hope that there is a better world possible!

How do you know it would be a better world? How should we evaluate energy systems? How should we evaluate possible futures?

Given that you've stepped so far outside of the norm (which is the understanding that the world is going to shit), perhaps you could start with why you think these questions are interesting and what your own ground state is. As it stands, this reads as being contrarian for no reason.

I didn't make any claims about the state of the world. I asked how energy systems, at issue here, and possible futures, raised in the grandparent comment, should be evaluated. I do think it's a good idea to be a bit explicit when constructing hypothetical future states of the entire world and passing judgement on them.

Ah yes, the really really hard-to-get-to nuclear power. Always good to make things sporting.

How is geothermal considered renewable?

New heat is generated by nuclear decay inside the earth. Eventually it will run out, but so will everything.

It’s renewable by human timescale standards, just like solar energy.

A geothermal plant running on full capacity may deplete its geothermal well in 50 years. It may take 1000 years before the geothermal system becomes a resource again [1]. Is that human timescale?

[1] https://www.savingiceland.org/2010/10/geothermal-energy-runn...

Find some scientific papers and then we can talk. Two comments without any context on a website called "savingiceland" aren't very convincing.

That’s not bad actually. Any power plant is gonna be decommissioned after 50 years anyway.

How is solar considered renewable?

Well that's an interesting question, the short answer is it's shining anyway and hitting the surface regardless, might as well use it. The long answer is only so much is hitting the surface and you have to raze living areas that need it to use it so you still have to be cautious and selective.

Geothermal is radiating into space from the center and is residual energy from formation and from the decay of radioactive material inside. If it is used that increases the rate at which it radiates, and too much of that has terrible potential implications, such as slowing of tectonics and lowering of the magnetic field. It may be hard to see humans using enough to do this, but someone could've said the same about fossil fuels when they began being used. This is not so with the sun, which is radiating the same regardless.

So how is geothermal considered renewable?

Also in Utah, the NSA has a huge data store of mass surveillance data

Its like 100 degrees all week in Utah. Maybe you can generate electricity but surely geothermal is best for heating in the cold?

Is the molten core of the Earth so hot that its inexhaustable? I'm wondering if it cools if that could potentially cause any issue. At least I'd think a warming planet doesn't need that extra heat on the surface.

> Is the molten core of the Earth so hot that its inexhaustable?

AIUI it's effectively inexhaustible. Earth's core is gradually cooling but we're talking something like 100C per billion years, for something presently at like 5,400C.

So as far as human activity is concerned, it's an infinite source of heat.

Edit: it's worth keeping in mind the Sun has something like 5B years before it turns into a red giant which is game over for Earth regardless of how much energy remains in its core.

Wouldn't the pressure of all the weight of the planet itself trying to press down on a single point eventually lead to a heat equilibrium?

This isn't my area of expertise, but my high-level lay understanding is the core is spinning at a rate faster than the crust.

I suppose when it all slows down and the spin rates from core to crust converge, it will all settle down and cool. But I think that's also when you lose the magnetic field...

Would love for someone better versed in earth's geophysics to chime in!

You don't even need gravity. Basic thermal dynamics says that a closed system should reach thermal equilibrium. It is (in my opinion) actually a bit surprising that a massive body in thermodynamic equilibrium has a uniform temperature. Assume the planet is an ideal gas. Applying P=VT, you might intuitively expect temperature to rise as you approach the center, since pressure rises as you do so. However, this analysis ignore the V portion of the equation. Consider a cylindrical cross section going up from the center of the body. Define a series of slices of this cylinder, such that each slice has N particles. Assume that N is sufficiently small that the gravitational and pressure gradient is negligible within each slice. As you descend along the cylinder, you will find that while pressure increases, it is the volume of each slice that decreases, leaving temperature as a constant.

All of this assumes Newtonian gravity. I believe if you consider relativistic effects, you find a slight temperature gradiant where temperature decreases as gravitational potential increases.

A simpler explanation: if the center of the earth-gas was hottest, it would heat up the area around it, which would heat up the area around it, etc. eventually there would be no temperature gradients left!

In addition to that taking a couple billion years, earth is also heated by fission to a fairly substantial degree which slows down equilibrium further.

> Edit: it's worth keeping in mind the Sun has something like 5B years before it turns into a red giant

AIUI we have about 1 billion years before the sun's output has increased enough that liquid water will not be able to exist on the surface of the planet, which means it's pretty much game over for life on earth at that point too.

not only is it very hot, it's also very big, and so whatever we pipe down there is negligible in size and thus not going to cool the very big hot thing very quickly.

earth's magnetic field is created by electric currents that are created by convection currents in the iron of the earth's core. As the earth's core cools, it will decrease the strength of its magnetic field and allow increasing amounts of solar wind (charged particles from the sun) that will destroy the ozone layer and lead to the eventual dissipation of the atmosphere. This is probably what happened to mars.

Heat probably comes from Natural Nuclear reactions. When a planet forms the heaviest elements go to the center - so it intuitively makes sense that Uranium will be concentrated enough for fission reactions to start and continue.

> At least I'd think a warming planet doesn't need that extra heat on the surface.

Despite the downvotes, this is correct. All electricity ultimately end up as heat in the atmosphere.

Ideally we would need a power source that EXTRACTS energy from the atmosphere. So that the electricity lifecycle would be thermally neutral.

We are already heating the planet by burning fossil fuels, and that has the double-heating effect of emitting gases which further trap heat, mostly from the sun.

The heat emitted by burning fossil fuels is completely irrelevant compared to the greenhouse impact. We burn about 11.7 gigatons of oil equivalent a year, which over 200 years would be 2.7 * 10^16 kWh. The greenhouse effect increase over the last 20 years leads to over 2.2 * 10^15 kWh/yr added to the planet, over 20x as much.

> By one recent estimate, more than 5000 gigawatts of electricity could be extracted from heat in rock beneath the United States alone. That’s nearly five times the total currently generated by all U.S. power plants.

So it could provide all the US' energy needs for five years? In some ways that sounds...unimpressive? Or more like, "okay that would be cool for a little while, but then it runs out and you're at square one", as opposed to solar/wind which are renewable, or nuclear where there's tons of uranium that could be used.

Nothing in that sentence suggests it's only for five years.

Watts are power, not energy.

Ah, good point.

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