First tunnel to a magma chamber could supercharge geothermal power
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Fuel made from atmospheric CO2 using clean energy is essentially a disposable battery for storing that clean energy that automatically recycles itself when it is used.
The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.
An incongruence in the West vs. the East's strategy is that we in the West have avoided nuclear - which generates zero CO2 - whereas the East's CO2 production (via building new coal power plants weekly) - has been skyrocketing:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. And in this scenario as well the "polluter" or generator of the most CO2 is being rewarded for their behaviour by producing the cheapest energy possible, which allows their cost of production to be lower than the West, which allows their profits to be higher - for us to buy cheaper products to not only perpetuate but accelerate these current conditions.
The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions.
There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.
Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next?
"The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions."
So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact?
Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.
Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?
[0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad).
[1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?
I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking?
The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false).
A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.
No, modern decomposes are more effective than ancient ones. Rare events like landslides might bury carbon effectively, but for the most part it will be returned to the biosphere long before it ends up resembling oil.
For instance, here in Colorado we're seeing a lot of our wood turn into CO2 due to an invasive beetle. I can't say for sure if the warming climate is what catalyzed the invasion, but it's plausible.
My point is just that it's uncharted territory, which is inherently more dangerous than charted territory. The system will surely find a new equilibrium eventually but there's no guarantee that we're going to like the path it takes.
> CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.
Yeah, unless they can't synthesize it because it's too hot and they didn't had a chance to adjust to new temperatures yet. It takes some time and will happen, but we pump CO2 a little too fast.
> In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production.
Oh yeah, someone litters on the street, let's all litter and get rid of the trash cans. Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2.
And yes, there will be a delay as part of evolutionary process for when plants and wildlife can adapt - for plants that are better adapted or capable of adapting to hotter temperatures-different climate will adjust - so indeed at minimum reducing the pace at minimum can be useful; and deploying technologies to slow down the increase we have arguably bumped up at least a little bit [remember the distance that Earth to the sun we are is the biggest factor of temperatures, and where are we in that 1000s of year cycle at the moment?] will help, but we could also prepare to pollinate and manage new growth areas with plants/life we know can adapt; the US policy makers on the side of believing climate change is a life-or-death urgent consideration want to spend $40+ trillion "fighting" it - so getting simply helping the Earth adapt, which is what we should be doing because it's unknown exactly how much our changing CO2 levels will actually impact things, is a no-brainer to do regardless - to create more life, to maximize it; and I also believe Elon is correct that Earth can sustain another 10x the current human population - however that will require succeeding in battle against industrial complexes and authoritarian wannabes who're involved in regulatory capture.
"Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2."
Absolutely a good strategy to stop rewarding that behaviour, if that's the best course of action to not destabilize the world too much - which may not be a good idea to potentially force the CCP-China's hand into highly aggressive or bad-harmful behaviour.
But do you think the inflationary policy, money borrowing, $34 trillion in debt, and people currently struggling in the US and West in general will be able to handle the massive increase in costs of goods that will happen if that happens?
We will have more life, but less humans and probably our civilisation will not survive. Apart from that, earth will be fine, so we should do as we please and put as much pollution as we want to?
We may survive as a species. But our civilization will not survive the destabilization it causes.
E.g. folks depend on fish for a large part of the planet, from coastal waters. Kill the reefs (which we've made a good start on), the coastal ecosystem collpases (california crab anyone?) and not thousands, not millions but hundreds of millions of people starve.
Then what? Some kind of global rescue effort? Not hardly. Look at the last wave of 10,000 refugees, how every European country was winging about 'we can't accept a thousand! It's too much!'
Now add four zeroes to that number. Get the picture?
This is a straw man argument. I didn't say it costs too much, I was stating options for how and where money may be better spent.
And if you haven't observed yet that the free market - save for regulatory capture - is far more efficient than government at most efficiently distributing resources where needed, then "you" aren't paying enough attention.
Solving problems like this are precisely where government, with all its flaws, is essential to doing it at all.
It starts with industrial complexes forming an unfair advantage, leading to regulatory capture that selfishly sets up rules to benefit the industry's profits at the cost of people, society, the environment. As part of that regulatory capture the industries lobby to get politicians of their choosing into positions of decision making, those politicians progressively are more clever-deceptive and more authoritarian. These two sides of the same coin is fascism.
The namecalling and villain-choosing is pointless. It's a system that must be designed, one that works with rules and forces in a useful direction.
You seem to be assuming, and wrongly assuming who I'm including in my referencing bad actors.
Where did I name call? Saying bad actors isn't name calling, firstly, and where the terminology to differentiate who exactly I'm referencing isn't clear enough - and you want to just jump to designing a system, but you need to base that design on who is either forced to into certain behaviour to maintain competing vs. those who are doing far more than just forced into certain behaviours, let's say a scenario where politicians are assassinated in worst case scenario - or where prior to that the bad actors fund politicians who will do exactly as they say if/when elected.
If you're willing to implement policy that increases the cost of energy then you're also in support of killing off the poorest, right? Jordan Peterson has regularly brought this up in this argument points against the current strategy of CO2 taxes, etc - which are actually worse for the environment because then people can't afford the less polluting energy sources, and then they burn wood - worse for environment for pollution, worse for their own health, and it destroys forests.
There also is legitimate research showing that once people earn "$5,000" per year minimum then they are able to actually start caring about non-selfish, holistic-society wide problems - otherwise survival rightly has them concentrating on themselves; which I hope logically makes sense to you, and you don't require me to dig up the link(s)?
Second, what source(s) are acceptable-authoritative to you, e.g. what source(s) will you actually believe?
Do you also think those people are properly or correctly accounted for?
It's why we should work from first principles of logic, and where zero or very near zero people (and I don't mean millions of lives being an acceptable number) are ; do no harm.
You're right, provided you're willing to wait a few million years for everybody to adjust to the new norms. That might be quite an uncomfortable transition though, it's not clear what would survive.
Biodiversity holds secrets which we have a much better shot at discovering than we do at inventing (e.g. novel protein structure and function). Committing to a large scale terraforming project means clobbering the unknown with the known and shutting the door on those secrets forever. It may be one day necessary but it's an outcome that we should avoid at all costs.
The best solution, most efficient, and most harmless solution appears to be driving for abundance so more and more people have more money to pay for what's minimally necessary for products-services that follow minimally acceptable processes; raise the floor for everyone, but not while opening up major cracks hurting or killing off millions or potentially billions if a societal-economic systems collapse and ensuing chaos/disorder - virtue signalling it's for "the greater good" while killing off those who are out of sight and out of mind of the constituents voting them into power [assuming democratic-fair election process - even if gamed unethically to win, still needing to keep up appearances to their ideological mob voter base].
Otherwise currently, for example, Canadians are suffering with the increasing CO2 tax - while the East is skyrocketing their CO2 emissions - where arguably the majority of Canadian products bought come from; making Canadian produced goods more expensive due to the CO2 tax, making Chinese goods cheaper to produce - and therefore not only ceding power to China but also destroying more ethical production-manufacturing of goods here in Canada.
If economically significant markets implement this then it can have a real global effect. Implementing a local tax only makes the local markets only less competitive and will favor imports from countries that do not implement proper measures.
0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220119121411.htm
1: https://carbon.xprize.org/prizes/carbonEssentially it's either going to be so cheap that trying to use it as currency is impractical, like carrying around pennies, or so overvalued that you'd surely destroy the economy? You'd have to use paper currency backed by tonnes of carbon - which is just a roundabout way to arrive at carbon credits!
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sca_esv=595707...
I would bet that lots of very smart people have looked at the problem and thought it was viable if they’re moving forward. Also, the people in Iceland are very adept at geothermal (but maybe not this type).
I can't speak to the receding magma or facilities damage, but "proportional to the cross-section of the borehole" is just like first year thermodynamics. If someone has more familiarity with electricity (I guess common on HN?), here's a reasonable introduction to the comparison to circuitry: https://lpsa.swarthmore.edu/Systems/Thermal/SysThermalElem.h...
To me, it seems like the magma would could enough/create enough friction in a small borehole to prevent catastrophic failure. However, that’s just a feeling & I’d love to read more about this.
I mean we thought oil the same way until we developed fracking. While it's not likely a 1:1 relationship with fracking, I'm sure some clever geologists/drilling experts could massively increase the surface area available for heating given the right incentives.
As for facilities, the volcano eruption rate is rather low on human timescales, especially for effusive eruptions that don't tend to blow the entire area to bits. Getting 50-100 years between eruptions that could possibly total the facility is likely worth it as you don't have a direct fuel cost.
But this is neither here nor there. The energy you extract from a geothermal well is heat, which then needs to be converted to electricity. The BTUs in a good oil or gas well exceed those of a geothermal well. You have the same issues of the well becoming less productive. The remediation strategies for this are similar, i.e. pumping fluid back into the ground.
This sounds like an energy storage solution as well? Where would the low carbon mass come for such a fuel production scheme? Haven’t heard this idea for energy storage/transport before.
From CO2 in air.
We know that the oceans are a sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide (oceanic acidification is a direct consequence of this), and that it's energetically less costly (~30%--60% of atmospheric capture) and probably technically simpler to recover CO2 from seawater than the atmosphere.
The concept's been studied for decades at M.I.T. and the US Naval Research Laboratory, the latter of which released a flurry of research articles in the 2010s on the concept. I'd written of those a ways back at Reddit:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20230604174145/https://old.reddi...>
Three are three key points:
1. Both atmospheric and oceanic CO2 are biospheric reserves, that is, already present within the biologically-active portion of the carbon cycle, as opposed to fossil carbon, which had been sequestered over hundreds of millions of years and represents a vast store which humans have been re-introducing to the biosphere at rates millions of times greater than which it was originally sequestered. That is, it's the reintroduction of this vast bolus of carbon to the atmosphere and oceans which is problematic.
2. The atmosphere and oceans are in rough equilibrium, with as I'd said above the oceans acting as a sink for atmospheric carbon. Removal of carbon from the oceans means that further excess atmospheric carbon can enter into solution. A key current concern is how much carbon can be absorbed into the oceans, and any net removal should increase the rate at which atmospheric carbon is dissolved. Given my first point this is something of a net flush, but it means that the net effect still remains carbon neutral.
3. Ocean acidification by way of CO2 absorption is already problematic, so any incidental reduction is advantageous of itself, though I suspect net effects would be small. What impacts localised reduction might be (as in the immediate neighbourhood of Iceland) I don't know.
There are futher considerations, notably that extracted carbon might itself be sequestered or stored (we know that petroleum analogues are stable over exstremely long terms --- tens to hundreds of millions of years), and that there are current applications for which there are few reasonable alternatives to petroleum analogues, notably in marine, air, and rocket transportation.
Making low carbon synthetic fuels is talked about a lot here and elsewhere. The main problem is that it is more expensive than hydrogen. But lets you use existing vehicles but with much larger fuel costs.
Not sure how scientifically sound that was lol
Some of the synopsis:
> In the early 21st century, the progress of human civilization was accelerated by ground-breaking discoveries in mining technology, allowing the extraction of magma energy for a new low-cost, all-encompassing energy source.
Yes, Earth is deep. So is our species' hunger for more. This scenario has played so many times but surely this is different! It's "limitless" energy. Eat the hype and ignore (well, downvote) all concerns.
Climate changing v.2.0 due to Earth loosing its magnetic field ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget?useski...
And by all practical means, savely tapping into the earths heat, would indeed mean unlimited energy for our needs (there is a LOT of heat down there). We also say solar is renewable, even though the sun does not last forever. But within our frame of reference - it does.
I am just sceptical, that we can indeed use that energy savely on a global scale, without causing massive side effects like earth quakes, as the core of the earth is hardly understood. But this is, what this research is about, so I think it is exciting and about time, someone makes that experiment.
Photovoltaic cells surely dont last as long as the sun...
So no one meant literally indefinite energy here, it was meant, "potentially way more energy, than we currently need". And this is correct.
Likewise while PV has non-zero impact, the impact is sufficiently small and of a nature that basically doesn't matter.
Fossil fuels are about a hundred times more polluting than volcanoes[0][1], so a factor of about one hundred in reduced emissions per unit of useful output compared to setting things on fire takes you down to the environmental impact of one part of geology.
[0] at least the CO2 is, but what matters for PV is everything else except the CO2 because in a world powered by renewables all the energy used in production doesn't produce CO2 in the first place; volcanoes do also release sulphur compounds etc.
[1] there is a certain degree of irony that one of the memes used by climate change deniers is to precisely invert this ratio.
I think we understand the broad numbers pretty well. We're looking to exploit energy and maybe chemistry at a tiny part of the top of many, many deep miles of ever-moving magma. (and all of that thousands of miles from the core).
Compared to our atmosphere - which is frighteningly thin, complex and highly evolved/sensitive - the mantle is primal and utterly massive.
Burning some coal?
Not a problem. But allmost every human burning coal on a massive scale? That is bad. Same principle could apply with taking energy from the crust. There are forces at play, we simply do not understand yet.
"The team will also measure the temperature gradient as the solid rock transitions into magma. One of the big surprises of the earlier, unexpected encounter between drill and magma chamber at the site was how rapidly that occurs. “The theory was that you would go through solid rock and into what is called the brittle-ductile boundary, where the rock would be starting to get a little bit softer and more elastic because of the heat,” says Ingólfsson. That was expected to occur over hundreds of metres, but, with Krafla, it was just a few."
Yes but based on what you write, you don't know much about geophysics. Sorry to be so blunt but that's just the sort of audience these articles are aimed at. They don't even explain how it would be done, it's like writing an article about how scientists plan to go to Mars in two years. Complete fantasy but the problem is people never do follow-up research on all the bs articles they read on a daily basis, and thus never realize how many lies and exaggerations they're being fed.
Never claimed I did. But you apparently claim you know more and that this article and the scientists are BS, but I just read a generic rant from you and nothing concrete.
"it's like writing an article about how scientists plan to go to Mars in two years"
I am not aware of any scientists who did that. If you are talking about Mars One and co., there were no scientists involved.
And this is what I read in the article about what they are planning - and yes to me it sounds like solid basic research. No promise about clean and easy energy in 5 years for everyone, but reason to do basic research that has not been done before:
"“I and some other scientists who deal with volcanoes were just amazed that somebody had actually drilled in the magma, and got samples of magma,” says Eichelberger. It later transpired that similar accidental encounters had happened twice before, once in the Menengai caldera in Kenya and also at a volcano called Kīlauea in Hawaii. This was proof that it was both possible and safe to drill into magma without causing an eruption."
"The first goal of KMT is to drill into the magma and make scientific discoveries. Starting in 2026, the project will break ground close to the original borehole and drill towards the chamber. It will take around two months to get there, progressing laboriously through the volcanic rocks until the drill hits pay dirt. First and foremost, the researchers want to build their fundamental understanding of magma and the chambers that hold it. “We don’t have any direct knowledge of what magma chambers look like, which is crucial in understanding volcanoes of course,” says Paolo Papale at Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Pisa. The little we do know largely comes from studying lava. But lava and magma aren’t the same. A lot of gas is released as molten rock comes to the surface and is then exposed to the atmosphere as lava, both of which change its chemical composition. “Being able to go into the crust and sample magma would give us huge knowledge,” says Ingólfsson."
They say they don't know much, but that they want to find out.
"and thus never realize how many lies and exaggerations they're being fed."
So where are the "lies and exaggerations"?
"Do back-to-back disasters show first climate tipping point is upon us?"
"Did monkeys really sail the oceans on floating rafts of vegetation?"
"Can any idiot publish articles with NewScientist?"
The main problem is you'd have to wait until the end of 2026 to find out it never happened as predicted, but by that time you'll already have forgotten about it. The average attention span isn't that long and like I mentioned most people do not save these articles and blacklist publications with a bad track record. There are thousands of nonsense articles from mainstream news orgs like the BBC as well as pop-science magazines that promised all sorts of nonsense to happen by year x, which unsurprisingly didn't end up happening.
At what point would it be fair to say they're publishing misinformation?
Are you intentionally missreading me? I never claimed that the author of the article is a scientist. I said the article is quite ok compared to the average pop science article, which is indeed often clickbait. But here there were no promises, just the very correct claim, that there is great potential.
And the scientist the article is talking about, John Eichelberger, for sure has publications:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=XtohsgUAAAAJ
So, I am asking again, can you point out one single lie or exaggeration in this concrete article? Because I cannot find one, but like I said, I am not an expert. So if you know more, please share that knowledge.
Thoroughly disappointing. Sensationalist and shallow.
Does not seem to be written for people with actual curiosity. I do not know who it is written for, although I presume they have their demographic figured out. That might be the most disappointing part.