Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation: Volcanic Energy on National Scale | Hacker News Reader

Yellowstone Caldera Volcanic Power Generation: Volcanic Energy on National Scale

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69 pointsmhb39 comments

I briefly worked for a guy who made millions a few years out of college speculating his entire net worth on corn fields in Iowa when the Obama admin was looking to buy up land for ethanol production facilities.

At the time, he was working on a relatively interesting crypto backed prediction market intended to mine data from skilled professionals. It worked, but unfortunately the idea and the bespoke math behind it never really took off.

However, with his background as a construction engineer he created this:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9121393B2/en?assignee=ma...

A novel means to extract geothermal energy without needing both water AND mineral rights on a piece of land AND the ability to vary how much energy you'd like to extract. This patent also explicitly references that you could power the entire western US with a few of these wells placed near Yellowstone. Granted, each well at that scale would near a cost of $1B.

Hope you're doing well Matt!

I’m skeptical of their material choices. Gold plated copper 8km underground? If the gold gets damaged, it seems like they may have a problem. What’s wrong with stainless steel? And pumping 90000 gpm of demineralized water through hot copper doesn’t sound like a very nice thing to do with the copper, although I have no actual experience with this. (Certainly, various water compositions are quite corrosive to copper at room temperature, and I’ve seen copper damaged by corrosive water.)

Also, this thing is 8km deep, and it will have water going down one way and steam going back up the other way. The fluids are moving, which complicates things, but the hydrostatic pressure of 8km of water is 11k psi, and the hydrostatic pressure of 8km of steam is much much less, and there will be some gnarly dynamics involved. (As a relevant example, a tube of water that’s sealed and hot at the bottom makes a geyser!). And any residual solids in the water going down will stay down the hole as scale.

If I were designing this thing, I would seriously consider a working fluid that is liquid over the entire operating range.

My understanding is that they're talking about solid copper 8 m wide

It's a very clever idea and a really cool proposal. The paper's abstract does a great job summarizing it:

"The USA is confronted with three epic-size problems: (1) the need for production of energy on a scale that meets the current and future needs of the nation, (2) the need to confront the climate crisis head-on by only producing renewable, green energy, that is 100% emission-free, and (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano. This paper offers both a provable practical, novel solution, and a thought experiment, to simultaneously solve all of the above stated problems. Through a new copper-based engineering approach on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a safe means to draw up the mighty energy reserve of the Yellowstone Supervolcano from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed and on a sufficient scale, in order to power the entire USA. The proposed, single, multi-redundant facility utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern to accomplish this. Over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy could potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. With obvious importance to our planet and the research community alike, COMSOL simulation demonstrates and proves the solution proposed herein, to bring vast amounts of green, emission-free energy to the planet’s surface for utilization. Well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy generated over the course of one full year, to meet the current and future needs of the USA is shown to be practical. Going beyond other current and past research efforts, this methodology offers tremendous benefits, potentially on a planetary scale."

The obvious questions have to do with political feasibility and cost. Is this realistically possible? Is there enough citizen, business, and government support to move forward with it? Do we have the resources to pull it off? Can we afford it? Deep inside the paper I found this tidbit, suggesting the authors don't know:

"There is no question that this entire project, including facility construction, as well as the upgrade for the power distribution network, would cost trillions of dollars. This paper was not, however, written to discuss the wisdom of such a costly investment. Even if spending these many trillions of dollars is not practical, it does not mean that any of the proposed ideas is not doable and should not be contemplated. This paper was thus written with the intent to propose these ideas and analysis within the realm of a thought experiment. The ideas presented here are entirely implementable with enough national will, and a large enough pocket book to do so."

> Is there enough citizen, business, and government support to move forward with it?

We can’t even agree collectively that climate change is happening, let alone is a problem, let alone needs vast resources to fix. In some localities, you cannot have solar and be grid connected.

So no, we can’t have nice things.

I completely agree.

However, over here in Japan, we have a similar problem with Mount Fuji, which could possibly erupt in the next 100 years, with catastrophic consequences. Perhaps this project could be done here instead. And unlike America, this country has little trouble summoning the political will to do big things, which is why it's building a mostly-underground maglev line between two major cities (Tokyo and Nagoya) right now.

150 megatons of copper seems like a lot. That's a decade of global production. This paper, while novel, does not seem compelling when compared to traditional water injection geothermal, as practiced at the Long Valley or Clear Lake volcanic fields in California.

What a strange paper.

It seems to fixate on seemingly irrelevant details, like a lot of ink is devoted to saying "copper" (surely some alloy is more suitable or cost-effective) or particular models of a steam turbine. It presents the price of copper, in $/pound, and states it is abundant on that basis. Doesn't mention annual production as far as I can tell. It asserts, without justification, that water can be demineralized, pumped through copper pipes and returned to a lake with no damage to the environment, again providing vague and comparatively minor details about e.g. mineral buildup in the pipes.

On the other hand, it seems to ignore massive issues. For example, it specifies that the copper elements should be manufactured nearby, be 8m in diameter, made in 10m long segments... But what about how to drill them into the ground? Into hot magma no less?

> The details of the tunneling process, from a geology, volcanology, as well as a mining and drilling standpoint, is beyond the scope of this paper.

Furthermore, volcanoes have complex dynamics. It's not merely a soup of hot magma sitting in one place. It rises and falls, for example, presumably flows around too.

Cooling the upper parts of the magma chamber is not exactly without risk, either. Cooler, thus harder crust on top of the volcano keeps the pressure fro erupting, but also allows it to rise further. It's like bolting on the pan cover instead of letting it rattle in the steam.

It's like reading an experiment design for cooking an egg on Mars, which is all concerned about cooking times and temperatures, and what colour the egg holder should be, and getting to Mars in the first place is an implementation detail.

This would be interesting and would like to see it.

I wonder if this will cause a lot of people to migrate to an area that could be risky to live near. But, I guess if yellowstone blows, it would not matter where you live in North America.

Generally, one would want to be more than 1000km from the eruption site. Ash would cover crops and so on, but you're not going to be obliterated. Yes, the crop failures and cascading effects would render much of the world food source inoperable for some time, but also would replenish the midwest topsoil.

How long ash would remain airborne would also have an impact on crops elsewhere and could result in mini ice-age conditions.

Still not the end of the current civilization.

Also, Yellowstone is not the only supervolcano around.

I thought if yellowstone had a mega eruption that all civilization in North America would be toast and it would cause havoc with weather over the entire planet?

I guess it depend on what you mean. Will it kill all people in NA? No. Will it severely and catastrophically affect the US and Canada? Yes. But the people who remain should be able to recover if we have enough food to take us though some years of lost crops and bad crops. Would adversaries take advantage? Most likely but we do have allies and most adversaries would also be affected by the following mini ice-age conditions if ash remains airborne for years.

Or the world.

Ice age I believe.

* (3) the need to forever forestall the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano.*

What a project...

How feasible is transmitting power from a central point to everywhere on the continent? Wouldn't the losses make this a nonstarter?

A single power plant is a single source of failure. Handing over the nation's power needs to a prototype is insane.

Finally, if power could be effectively transmitted cross-continent, why not choose other proven ideas? A huge solar array in the desert? An enormous offshore wind farm? A hydro dam that doesn't exist to grow alfalfa (hey-o!)?

IDK how much energy would be lost, but if it's all free energy the volcano was going to release anyways then it doesn't matter if it's wasteful.

Not sure if there are any limits to how far you can send power over cables though. I only have a hobbyist understanding of electronics, and I'd imagine that at that scale a lot of the abstractions that make things simple (like 0-impedance from cables) don't apply.

I live near Yellowstone. This is a sad joke.

No one wants the pristine nature of our first National Park soiled and the logistics of building infrastructure in such intensely mountainous terrain would be wildly impractical.

The billionaires already have a hard enough time getting their “cabins” built at the Yellowstone Club.

Couldn't you drill from outside the park? I hope no one would really want to build something like that in the park, but the area around it has enough land that's currently used for crops (no nature destroyed drilling there) and is still close to the park.

Neither the article nor the comments here (so far) address the implication that this project would turn one of our most beautiful national parks into an industrial site.

It proposes 100 sites over a 1200 square mile area. Each site would be at least 3 miles away from any other site. Energy generation, except nuclear, either uses a fair bit physical space or causes pollution, and doing energy generation in Yellowstone means other areas of the country don't have to.

So where would the 35x35 mile cube of industry be, within the park? What about the electrical transmission lines? What about the roads needed to access each site? What about the support infrastructure? A super-volcanic eruption is not a certainty, just as another ice-age is not.

Nature is beautiful. But if this were a possibility, to create clean energy to power a nation, wouldn't you think that's more beautiful? I mean, is it any worse than hydroelectric dams?

Mount St. Helens wasn't very beautiful when it erupted....

All the more reason to attempt to harness this insane amount of power if we can also alleviate potential devastation by sort of venting that natural build up of energy resulting in eruptions.

Exactly. Huge natural disasters happen with regularity, and kill large numbers of people. Why shouldn't we look for ways of avoiding them, especially if we can also derive electrical power from them (and thereby avoid burning fossil fuels)?

Of course, they're also a huge technical challenge, and their feasibility is questionable, but that shouldn't stop us from at least investigating and researching the issues.

This is fair, but also if the supervolcano goes up, you have also lost the national park.

I wonder if this would be a good case to try various concepts for including nature in our engineering design. How much could we ensure is zero emission, mostly underground, and reducing impact to plants and animals.

"The Yellowstone magma chamber is sitting there like an enormous angry zit. What's our plan ?"

"We're going to stick a very big pin in it"

the size of the pin wouldn't be very big relative to the size of the zit and would not "pop" it, it would simply siphon off some of the angry infection heat.

They're proposing drilling into the caldera. I'm not sure releasing the pressure on the magma chamber is going to forestall the eruption...

As someone that lives close to Yellowstone I am personally fine with either outcome. Less than 5% of the upper lava chamber is molten and less than 2% of the lower magma chamber is molten. There are differing numbers by different scientists on the next major eruption but they are all well beyond 10,000 years. This is why we do not get the regular eruptions seen in Hawaii. Hawaii's lava chambers are over 50% molten.

It's an interesting idea, but it would mean that a single attack could cripple the entire country.

It will never happen.

Yellowstone is extremely far inland, on the west side of the country. A hypothetical attacker would have to cross the entire pacific ocean and somehow sneak across a third of the continent just to get to Yellowstone.

It's all but impossible to land a first strike in the center of a continent surrounded by oceans on two sides and very physically large allies on the others.

About the only options are ICBM or some type of orbital strike. We can detect pretty much any missile and nobody has orbital weapons (that we know of).

Going through the effort of attacking something in the center of the US just to take out a power station is pretty ridiculous.

At current prices, PV and many wind installations will still be cheaper than this project + transport cost. So while it could be critical for the grid, you would never rely 100% on it. The US already stores nuclear missiles not too far away from it, so I guess the military is confident they can keep that area from being attacked.

Anyone have a short summary? I got lost reading that paper.

A crank with a tenuous grasp of thermodynamics proposes a planet-scale megaproject to extract energy from the Yellowstone, and all he needs is several trillion dollars and all the world's known copper.

What could go wrong?

TL;DR: Only read sentences that have "copper" or "8".

The benefits described sound contradictory to me. If you're removing enough heat to reduce the likelihood of Yellowstone erupting, you're removing enough to reduce the power output of the plant. Perhaps there's way to balance those two outcomes, but I know that other geothermal plants have sucked their heat reservoirs dry over decades of use. I suppose you could do a better job of matching the rate of heat extraction of the rate of natural regeneration, but I imagine that would enormously reduce the potential output of the plant, and that's not an issue this paper addresses.

On the other hand, preventing Yellowstone from erupting would be a pretty good outcome by itself, and getting a few decades (centuries?) of free power in the exchange is just a bonus…

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