Fusion tech finds geothermal energy application
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
Some schemes fracture the rock between two boreholes, but this requires fiddly positioning of the wells as well as the fractures. Another interesting approach is to increase the thermal conductivity of the rock around a single well. Much of the thermal resistance is in the rock close to the well (as can be seen by examining the relevant integral), so this doesn't have to affect too far out to have a significant effect.
A company XGS Energy recently raised $20 M in series "A" funding for this. Their fluid (which is forced into fractures around the borehole) is proprietary, but is thought to contain graphite dust. Graphite can be three orders of magnitude more thermally conductive than rock, so incorporating it into even narrow fractures can have a major effect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434975
https://jpt.spe.org/hot-rock-slurry-developer-of-emerging-ge...
(the field tests mentioned there must have been successful, as they raised that $20 M subsequently.)
Because this technology involves a single well that remains sealed from the surrounding formation, it could be used in existing played-out oil or gas wells, some of which go quite deep (although that's in basins with low geothermal gradients or else the fossil fuels would have been destroyed.)
https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/21/special-mud-helps-xgs-ener...
Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.
AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best
That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.
No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you.
For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.
That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying.
My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor.
> I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave.
And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.
What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
You're still stuck with assumptions that are obsolete in this scenario.
In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment. Eventually the economy will realign towards certain kinds of B2B sales (e.g. electrical power) and vanity projects.
> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently). There might be a rump of exceptionally talented individuals who still could be employed like today, but that's just a tiny sliver of the population. There will also be some "entertainment" jobs, like prostitute that will remain as well, but given the vast decrease in individuals participating in the economy, the total numbers would likely be less than now.
Not everything is going to be a replay of the past. As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
What does this mean? By AGI do you mean "cleaning robots" or "entertaining bartenders" or "live music" or "person who owns this house I want to rent" or "mind I will pay to learn from"? None of those sounds like anything to do with AGI, unless the AGI is housed in a robot that can clean things (and then I don't need AGI).
Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing. ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
> Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
Sure, but they'll have increasingly less to exchange among themselves. They'll have nothing to sell that the AGI-powered economy wants to buy, except truly limited legacy resources like land that can be gobbled up in one-time purchases. Eventually the AGI-powered economy will monopolize the resources that are useful to it, in a way that likely conflicts with the needs of now-obsolete workers (e.g. converting vast amounts of farmland to solar power megaprojects).
That's the end-state of automation, in our current social system.
>>> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs.
>> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
> What does this mean? By AGI do you mean...
I mean intellectual automation that can do at least what a typical person can do as well as they can or better. Eventually it means the automation that can do all the jobs (or even just enough of the jobs). Eventually you won't have a new job to move into once your job is replaced.
AGI will eventually mean there will cease to be a practical necessity to using human to do labor to operate capital. The capital will be able to operate itself on behalf of its owners. Once that happens, under the current system, the owners of that automated capital will eventually accumulate all the wealth of the economy, because they'll be able to sell without paying wages. Eventually they'll pivot to vanity projects and B2B sales among themselves.
> Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing.
Probably, but I expect even those will eventually disappear too, at least on the mass scale needed to support billions of people, during the later stages of the economic transition.
> ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
I'm not talking about ChatGPT, I'm talking about the utopia the AI folks want to create.
More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn’t simply just disappear.
We’re nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)
Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2].
So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00382-023-06775-x
> the total radiative forcing (RF) by human activities of approximately 2.72 W m^−2 (Masson-Delmotte 2021)
(with the radius of the Earth of 6.4e6 meters and surface area = 4 pi r^2).
Here is chatgpt doing the math - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d... - it’s roughly correct.
It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.
(Unlike co2 ofc)
Here is gpt doing estimates - the numbers are similar to the ones I calculated by hand some time ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d...
Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited).
I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.
So we already have the short term solution, it’s really 25+ years out when things get more interesting. Existing nuclear power is going to get increasingly expensive to maintain and recent construction projects have been boondoggles. So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.
Fission has gotten safer as we’ve learned from past mistakes, but each of those lessens directly results in increasing costs. Not just in obvious ways but getting better at foreign material exclusion means it takes longer to do the same tasks. Multiply that by every significant indecent at any power plant and it’s no wonder things keep getting more expensive.
They don't yet work out, and there's no evidence that they will. I would love it if they do, but I don't think past performance is evidence of future performance. We might run into a fundamental limitation at any moment, and that would be that.
Japan's median build time for fission is under 5 years[0]. If regulatory environments and engineering specialisms could be made to work, there's no reason (other than Greenpeace) that we couldn't massively curb CO2 production from power generation pretty soon; far sooner than we could do discovery and then build for fusion.
[0] https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/i/111356564/which-co...
What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption. We're not remotely talking about replacing the 80% of fossil fuels with electricity, even with fission + hydro, wind and solar.
Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
The reality is that we don't have a 90% solution to power. Not in the short term, not in the long term. Except if new technologies that do not exist yet appear. Have a look at all those huge boats that enable globalization: how do you propose we replace fossil fuels there? Or aviation.
The solution to the energy problem is to prepare to have (much) less energy. And a good way to prepare for that is to try to produce as much electricity as we can. And that quite obviously involves fission.
An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers. A heat pump uses 1 kWh of heat to produce 3 kWh or more worth of heat. A furnace needs over 3 kWh worth of gas to produce just 3 kWh worth of heat.
An ICE engine is more extreme as extraction, transportation, refining, takes 1/3 of the energy in oil before you even out it in the gas tank. Net result under 20% of the energy in oil ends up being used at the end of the process.
> Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation. A seasonal battery storing 1 MWh gets used once a season. A solar panel only used in the winter is still useful for ~4h * ~90 days. But worst case a ~3kW of solar is equivalent to that 1 MWh battery at less than 1/100th the cost, and whisk generally redundant the rest of the year it’s still reducing outages.
I don't see the relation with apples. If you take electricity where it works well, then it works well. But the fact that it accounts for 20% of our energy consumption today means that it does not work well everywhere. Try planes or merchant boats, for fun.
And that's not even mentioning that on those 20%, a good part is coming from coal.
> There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation.
You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
Replacing an ICE with a EV results in a drop in energy by your calculations even if they are doing the exact same trip. Thus showing your argument is based on nonsense.
When someone burns oil in a car you measure the energy before it’s burned and therefore before engine inefficiency. If you burn oil in an electrical generator you measuring energy after the engine inefficiency.
Thus the amount of useful energy IE what people want in electricity vs other sources is closer to 50/50 than 80/20.
> You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
People build grid infrastructure for the worst case. Nobody complains when a natural gas power plant is only turned on for 12 hours a year because without it you get a blackout. Hell dams build spillways that can sit unused for decades, you still need them.
Thus no the panels aren’t wasted, they are doing exactly the job someone built that infrastructure for.
My argument is that there is a lot more than just cars in the world. Even if Americans may not understand the concept. It's easy to say "replace oil with electricity, look, I have this one example where it works well". Then try to scale that one example, and then start looking at the rest. Again... planes and merchant boats for instance.
Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues. Really aircraft are the odd man out, but remove bio fuels from other applications and you can largely replace aviation fuel.
After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
Then you completely misunderstand the scale of the problem.
> Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues.
Say they can if they have the hydrogen, then you have to produce a whole lot of hydrogen and transport it for them. Do you know how inefficient that is?
Because you make it work for one does not mean that you make it work for the whole world. Your reasoning seems very naive.
> After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
Except that the only way we drop CO2 emissions by a lot is with a ton of sobriety.
Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument. The only question is if we have the technology, and yes we do.
For scale, 350 gigawatts of PV was installed in 2023 that’s enough to meet ~3% of the words 25,000 TWh annual electricity demand (after accounting for capacity factor) and the rate of PV installed per year has been accelerating. Battery manufacturing capacity is already at weeks of global electricity demand per year. Utilities haven’t been building grid scale energy storage because they don’t need it, but it’s ready when they want it.
Over the next 20+ years a great deal of current infrastructure will need to be replaced simply because of age. What replaces it could be very green without significant issue.
Again, you don't understand. I am not just saying that we don't have the infrastructure. I am saying that the size of the infrastructure we would need is a whole lot bigger than what you must imagine if you think that renewables can produce 99% of the world's energy.
You just vastly underestimate the problem. Saying "look, I went from selling 10 devices last year to 100 this year, so this proves that in 10 years I will be selling 1000000000000 devices per year" is the kind of reasoning you use in a startup when talking to a VC. But when you're being serious about solving a problem, it doesn't work like that.
Let me repeat it one last time: we will go away from fossil fuels, it's not a choice (they are limited in nature). We will need as much fission and renewables as we can get to compensate for as much as we can, but that won't remotely be enough (again, think about a real big merchant boat and tell me how it travels around the world without fossil fuels - not the startup way, but with a real solution).
So on top of fission and renewables, we need sobriety. A ton of it. And it means clever engineering across the board. So instead of wasting talents doing AI or polluting more with SpaceX, they should work on solving the actual problems we have for tomorrow.
We’re past the crazy exponentials. Global demand is still increasing every year by ~2.2% but that already includes the EV and Heat pump transition.
350GW last year, 356GW in 2024, 362GW in 2025 etc and before you know it we are done. Except 2024 is on pace to massively exceed that estimate, ~500GW looks more likely.
And you still haven't answered my question: how do you power a big merchant boat with electricity? Do you realize it doesn't work with batteries, or not? And do you realize that the merchant boats ARE globalization? We don't have a technical solution for that, not even as a proof of concept. And most certainly not with renewables.
99% of the energy used by mankind is sunlight, but obviously we aren’t aiming for accuracy here.
Your 80% as fossil fuels is half (coal, natural gas) which are mostly used to make electricity and therefore goes away on a renewable grid on its own. In essence you are double counting the inefficiency of fossil fuels as if it was somehow a positive. People do use some natural gas for heating and cooking, but there’s direct swap in replacements that use electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum....
“40%” is oil though again that’s what’s pumped out of the ground not what’s actually used as fuel. Subtract EV’s and year really talk about 10% “of the worlds energy” used in boats and aircraft.
> big merchant boat with electricity.
New boats can run 100% hydrogen out of the gate.
Container ships don’t actually last that long, but you can also retrofit existing engines to run 85% on hydrogen fairly easily.
(ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)
that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
But the way the EU handled the COVID vaccine procurement, I think we’re still a long way.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global-mi...
Maybe next time they actually make it work?
If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...
Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).
Through an assortment of vehicles and mechanisms, that money does indeed get shifted, moved and invested in all sorts of sophisticated and fully diverse ways, just like assets that were legitimately declared. I mean, what do you think they keep it in? Giant vaults as stacks of cash, like Scrooge McDuck? Absurd, the kinds of childish ideas about tax evasion that appear here.
You suggest that hidden capital is always put to good use. But let’s be real, the majority of it ends up in the average urban Joe's much beloved real estate speculation, yachts, and financial instruments that do little to spur genuine economic growth or innovation. It’s like hiding your vegetables under the mashed potatoes and claiming you’ve eaten them. It’s still there, but it’s not nourishing anyone. Or, while it's lovely to think that the hidden wealth of the ultra-rich is busily working away like Santa's elves to create a better future, the reality is starkly different.
And about that Jetsons future: it’s not about just having the funds. It’s about allocating them efficiently and equitably. When capital returns far outstrip labor returns because the wealthy can hide their money and avoid taxes, we create an unbalanced system where innovation and societal progress are stunted. It’s not just about waste, it’s about skewed incentives.
Effective tax policy isn’t about bleeding the rich dry; it’s about ensuring that those who benefit the most from the system contribute proportionately to its upkeep and progress. And governments aren’t perfect, but they’re the only game in town for large-scale investments in public goods—think infrastructure, education, healthcare, and yes, tech innovation and green transition. So, before we go all in on the "government waste" narrative, let’s remember that the (current) alternative is a plutocracy where the rich get richer and the rest of us get crumbs. No Jetsons future in that, rather much more like the Flintstones.
On the other hand using the word "neoliberal" reveals little more than a cheap, all too human love of simplistic, idiotic ideological labels with little substance. Go ahead and define whatever the hell a neoliberal is. Name a few examples and exactly how their administrations were in any marked way different from any other modern western state. Here's a hint of the silliness inherent in that, via example: Under the Bush years, the fundamental structure of government and its obligatory spending was little different from how it was under any number of leaders previous to or following that time. Let's look beyond cheap labels and at the actual structure of how governments, markets, taxes and social systems work.
As for my main point: It's simply this (and related to what I just mentioned above) in the modern world, speaking particularly in the context of the developed countries, government budgets and tax receipts from economic activity are so enormous as they stand that losses from tax evasion are far more of a boogeyman than a reality as a meaningful hindrance to resources. The average budget of the average western developed country has so many avenues for allocating funds that using lost tax revenue from evasion as an excuse for why it doesn't do so for a better future is absurd.
The numbers simply don't back it up. To take the U.S. as an example, it's estimated that losses due to illegal tax dodging were something over 600 billion in 2021. Those are losses to both state and federal tax revenues. In the same year, the federal budget alone was over 6.8 trillion. If you add in state budgets, the number gets an extra 3.8 trillion added to it. That makes the total over 10 trillion in government spending. 680 billion is a lot, no doubt, but as an excuse for why government "doesn't have enough money" for better things, it's a pallid excuse.
The US could be safe spending 1% of its GDP on defense and largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing. There’s clearly a lower limit, but half of current spending is perfectly reasonable starting point before decisions get tricky.
I'm pretty sure they legally can't "largely import foreign weapon designs". The Berry and Kissel amendments, not to mention ITAR and a few other regulations, put a strong incentive on in-sourcing when at all possible. The only exceptions are for things that are really hard to get domestically.
I can’t tell if you’re unsure of basic civics, or if you’re implying something deeper.
You need to have local know-how from the ground up.
(I wish Thermal and Night Vision was cheaper)
I was just looking it up the other day and the first wireless time system was implemented by US and French defensive systems.
GPS, the Internet, etc... DARPA projects alone are impressive. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA#Projects
I do miss those private research groups like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC though.
NASA does a lot of good work too, and there are some really cool space projects there that need more funding.
Packet switching saw first implementation outside the US including some key ideas like a router. We ended up with the ARPANET > Internet story everyone is familiar with more as an accident of history and a dash of propaganda rather than something that required US military participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPL_network
Teflon is another one people bring up as coming from the military but was invented accidentally outside the military long before its use in the Manhattan Project.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locat... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?locat... [3] https://federalbudgetinpictures.com/where-does-all-the-money...
R&D: ???
https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function
Defense: $813 billion
https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg...
R&D: $205 billion
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ap_18_...
I'm clearly missing something. I assume some of that Defense budget is R&D?
at least the retcon sketches where they showed what the ground level was like
If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.
(src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)
It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy.
But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.
If he were throwing himself into any of his impressive companies, sure, I'd be singing a different tune. But that's not what he's doing, he's either ignoring or actively sabotaging those, so that he has more time to be a social media influencer. He can do what he wants, but it's not admirable.
Which is why you need government subsidy if you want something to happen: but the you are also betting that you've picked either the right technology (it works at all) or at least you're accepting you're probably going to overpay.
It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors.
Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years.
This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains.
When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest".
And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays.
Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead.
Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here:
https://www.power-eng.com/renewables/fervo-energy-claims-70-...
Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022.
Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.
Though maybe the tunnel liner part is too much of a stretch. It sounds like the vaporized rock wants to turn to ash. I don't know if there's a way of concentrating the once-solid parts and keeping it hot enough while routing it to the tunnel wall. It just seems like a cool set of problems to solve, resulting in a self-contained (minus the energy source) burrowing drill that can create arbitrarily long stone tunnels underneath (non-volcanic) land.
DIY lava tubes!
Infamously stated as "if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, but I have a straw that reaches your milkshake, then I have all the milkshake".
Of course not everyone lives where law is caught up to this, but it is a big deal and so most places where it matters the courts know what is up.
Yes, the quote chosen did lead the meaning to stealing as that's how it was used in the movie. I have just always liked that quote. It didn't occur to me until your post how it changes the intent of the entire comment.
I imagine walls are an easier problem--just advance fast-enough compared to the deposition rate, and the thickening is controlled. Not sure about gradual buildup on the wave-guide, but some periodic cleaning mechanism (further back, away from rock-condensation) might be possible.
____________
> Even though the rocks are being vaporized, it does not mean that there is no material to be taken care of. “The gas will quickly recondense back to a very fine ash, which will then be taken up to surface by a purge gas. In our case, we will use nitrogen”, Matt [Houde] explains.
https://geoexpro.com/an-order-of-magnitude-more-energy-for-d...
> MIT’s Paul Woskov, whose research is the bedrock of Quaise’s approach, spent a decade proving out the physics involved. The system will use a beam of millimeter-wave energy—an electromagnetic frequency in the territory of microwaves—generated by a gyrotron on the surface. The microwave beam shoots down the drill hole alongside a gas—nitrogen, air, or argon—and evaporates layers of rock deep in the Earth. Then the gas binds and carries the vaporized rock back up to the surface like a plume of volcanic ash.
https://singularityhub.com/2022/02/14/startup-aims-to-drill-...
The Earth itself is a giant fission reactor and molten metal thermal battery, but for some reason nobody thinks about it.
This would be far easier than fusion or even next generation full cycle fission but it’s barely funded.
For instance sodium can be used in its metal form directly to produce electricity in a fuel cell e.g. as described in US3730776A (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3730776A/en). The fuel cell does not require any special materials, however it still is a challenge to construct from the engineering point of view. Also, the proposed design can be greatly improved with additional knowledge about the reactions occurring. The resulting sodium hydroxide solution can be recycled using the well known Castner process, the "waste" hydrogen resulting from both reactions can be used as fuel or for other industrial processes.
Btw. the energy density of sodium metal is 3694 Wh/kg and 3555 Wh/litre - so an order of magnitude more than a typical Li-Ion battery. Also, the advantage of decoupling capacity from power is dramatic. Of course, you can also split the process of storing and releasing of energy which can be an advantage. Last but not least, sodium in its metal form is not hard to store or to transport. At ~100°C it becomes liquid and therefore even easier to transfer using regular steel pipes.
That sodium battery sounds great for grid scale storage and maybe aviation. The major problem with lithium there is weight per kWh. Wouldn’t use it in anything consumer because liquid sodium loves to party.
Liquid sodium is totally fine unless you pour water over it. You have problems with other substances too and it depends what use case and limits you have whether you are willing to go with sodium. For example, filling a big tank with normal gasoline is dangerous without protective atmosphere and other precautions like good grounding because it tends to produce flammable vapors that catch fire easily. Not a problem with sodium. Also, if you happen to spill sodium into water, it neutralizes quickly doing damage only for a short period of time. That cannot be said about any kind of mineral oil, gasoline that has a tendency to destroy ecosystems etc. Last but not least, you can produce sodium metal without begging mostly totalitarian/ authoritarian regimes for natural resources which is the case with the majority of fossil fuels today.
Because of electronics and fine machines we learned a lot about how to make stuff water tight. Sodium is in my opinion mostly much easier to handle than hydrogen, which leaks even through steel, which you have to keep under high pressure to have any kind of decent volumetric energy density or cool to very low temperatures if liquid.
If you used sodium for grid scale storage than you would more or less solve the electricity storage problem and most likely quite cheaply. The great thing about it is, you can store and transport sodium metal easily. Storing power for the winter becomes practical. For stationary stuff in homes or businesses you could probably use sodium too. You could replace old central furnaces with it and instead use the fuel cell and a heat pump perhaps with a small battery and PV to smooth out the peaks. That way you probably wouldn't need to upgrade the last mile of the grid in many places. You could power boats with it. For aviation it doesn't seem that great as you would still have to handle the resulting sodium hydroxide.
Now, such a device would probably seem a little bit far fetched...
But the first step in making such a device, if it could ever be engineered, would be to melt the inserted raw earth into a hot liquid state. (From this hot liquid state further chemical refinement processes could be completed, such as scooping out heavier elements from the bottom and lighter elements from the top of the liquid. Any emitted gasses could be captured and cooled down, liquified, etc. From there further chemical refinement processes of the liquids could take place, ultimately resulting in refined Elements being output...)
This technology -- the ability to "melt rocks" (aka, the ability to melt raw earth, any raw earth notwithstanding its chemical composition) might just enable the taking of that first step to creating such a machine...
Such a machine, should it ever exist, would find great application on Mars in the future, should it ever be able to get there...
Anyway, I wish this company a lot of luck in their endeavors!
From how such progressive temperature change (extraction) would affect the dynamics of the Earth's core, among other things, to how it would affect such temperature to the nature chemical processes on the surface, how it would affect vegetal life (cultives), and so on.
The planet is big, but we are talking about, lets say, a century of use or more. Has anyone calculated were would be the limit of holes (on geothermal a new hole each XX years due area cold down) before the "we never guessed that X could happen"?
Add to that, Earth is heated by deep radioactive elements. A fission furnace. Not gonna burn out for a billion years, maybe not ever.
- how much is debated, but this alone probably dwarfs humans energy needs (the core of the earth is really, really BIG)
The real danger is in creating local earth quakes, because that already happened.
Geothermal can be better described as heat mining than it would be exploiting a steady state heat flow.
- fusion - power of the Sun
- fission - power of the Earth
Fissile elements were created by massive star Supernovae elsewhere. Fusion is still the precursor. Except it's very quick catastrophic fusion :)
- Fusion - powers the Sun
- Fission - powers the Earth
If the thermal diffusivity can not feed a tinny surface hole more than 20-30 years after extracting just around 3-10 MW, where the sun is supposed to replenish the heat on summer also, what makes the scientific community to have faith the slowness in such thermal diffusivity will not bring consequences? Did anyone study it?
( EDIT: we are talking about more than several centuries, I guess, so my interest decreased proportionally. )
Second, Earth is big. Like, really big. I once did a napkin calculation of the proportional depth of the ocean. How much of a "water world" are we, really? What would it be like for some cosmic being to grab onto the Earth and throw it?
Assuming I did it right, the Earth is basically a bowling ball that someone heavily misted with a spray bottle, resulting in an average of 0.4mm of water resting on the ball's surface. (Marianas trench is 6.8 miles deep, diameter of Earth is about 8000 miles, bowling ball is 8.6 inches in diameter. To be fair, that's like 10 squirts of spray.)
Said cosmic being would just have to wipe it off with a rag to avoid it slipping out of its hands and accidentally clobbering Alpha Centauri in several years.
However, one issue with geothermal that I didn't see addressed is that iirc, geothermal systems start out great, but as water/fluid is pumped down and back up hot, minerals rapidly deposit themselves on the plumbing and decrease the system efficiency and ultimately kill it. Could this system be used to more quickly, cheaply, and regularly perform maintenance, or is this just one good step to get broad geothermal applications, and that remains a problem to be solved?
It's be great to hear from any experts in the field - thx!
Is there any existing +3km deep geothermal well energy system in use?
But FORGE is mostly based around research, from what I understand, rather than rolling out broad-based commercial geothermal.
https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/5704/
https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-breaks-ground-on-the-wo...
Globally viable geothermal power generation would be an absolute game changer for fighting climate change. It doesn’t have to be better than nuclear. If it’s even close to being as good, the benefits of getting ex oil/gas people/companies on board would more than outweigh the difference. The growth rate could potentially hit levels that make a substantial impact on climate change within a decade of the initial ramp.
It's counter intuitive but if we did move that way we need a LOT more petro infrastructure going forward. And without irony it would be better for us.
Capturing all the wasted natural gas (that gets flared off) as a reorient to maintain existing wells lowers carbon foot print and makes the use of gas less attractive due to cost.
Petrochemical products aren't going away any time soon. Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like lubricants. Having useful plastics (because there are tons of medical uses). And we're not getting rid of fertilizer (cause feeding 8 billion people is hard).
There are reasons to keep the drilling side and the current matinence side around doing what they do today while lowering carbon foot print.
Synthetic lubricants (like Mobil-1) are a thing.
https://www.cpchem.com/what-we-do/solutions/polyalphaolefins...
Mobile-1 is happy to tell you that they dont use natural gas.
But that doesn't mean that they dont use hydrocarbons pumped from the ground to make it. Synthetic is just a marketing term: http://xtremerevolution.net/a-defining-moment-for-synthetics...
We know how to make both from many other process. PLA plastic (commonly used for 3d printing) is commercially made from plant sources as well (I wasn't able to find a source for if it all is or just some). There are plant based oils that are biodegradable that you could put into any transmission today (meet OEM requirements) - they cost about 6x what regular oil costs though. If that isn't good enough the process to make synthetic oil just need carbon (ideally in the form of CO, but we could use CO2), water, and energy and from there we can engineer any hydrocarbon you want - again at much high cost.
Pumping oil from the ground is cheap though, so it is hard to compete with something else. We know how to do it though. If you are a chemical engineer there is a lot of money in reducing costs (though I'm not making any claim this is possible, only if you can there is money)
We dump fertilizer made from petrochemical on the plants to grow them.
And that's the rub. I have to wonder how much oil we use, to grow corn, to make ethanol, to save oil...
EDIT: I Had to do the math I needed to know!
173.3 Bushels of corn per acre: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Iowa/Publicati...
140 gallons of fossil fuel per acre of corn: https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Iowa/Publicati...
A bushel of field corn can produce 2.77 gallons of ethanol:
Assuming these numbers are right, it isnt so bad...
Does anyone know how much of the atmosphere's heat comes from geothermal energy as opposed to solar radiation? By extracting geothermal energy we'd be increasing that effect in the short term, but would it even be significant?
[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth'...
This is true. Neither the article nor the CEO of the microwave drill company say why.
At that depth, rock isn't a solid. It behaves plastically. The traditional tri-cone bit used could make progress, but it kind of just started "massaging" the rock. The bit (as all bits do) wore out. They pulled the drill string out of the hole to put a new bit on. The borehole would close back in during the multiple days it took to pull 40kft of drill string out, change the bit, and put it back in. Progress was not possible.
Unless the microwave drill includes some enormous cooling system (that works 40kft down hole even when the drillstring is removed!), they will face the same issues.
Also, separately, I saw pictures of the resulting lab-drilled hole on LinkedIn the other day. The hole shows a high rugosity (qualitative description of the roughness of a borehole wall). Similar photo here - https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image-of-a-rock-surf.... That's a ugly hole, and would be very difficult to run casing into it.
Further - traditional well drillers' #1 focus is controlling pressure downhole (typically done by varying the density of the drilling mud). If the pressure becomes too great, a blowout can happen, which is bad news for everyone involved (see the BP Deepwater Horizon incident). For geothermal wells, they presumably will try to avoid hydrocarbons. However, rock far above water boiling point can cause a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion), which is also undesirable. Super curious to see how they intend to control bottomhole pressure with statements like this - "Instead of pumping fluid and turning a drill, we’ll be burning and vaporizing rock and extracting gas, which is much easier to pump than mud."
Sometimes this false-intuition comes out in sci-fi settings, when some terrible force scars a planet or moon with a big gash/puncture/fragmentation which appears semi-permanent, rather than being (relatively) quickly erased as the thing--a liquid on that scale--reflows back into a spheroid.
I’m not sure they would need cooling down there? They’re continuously blasting gas down inside the waveguide, and the gas can only escape on the outside around the waveguide.
Maybe it’ll be like blowing air down a straw into honey.
I don’t know the temperature of the gas they’re pumping down, but maybe it’s colder than the rock at deeper depths which will help keep the rock around the waveguide cool expect for at the tip where the rock is being blasted.
Do they need a casing? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the process of blasting the rock will harden the walls of the hole. Though I’m curious how that would work at extreme depths.
If you get a technology capable of creating cheap holes, you will be capable of getting lots of cheap natural gas and hydrogen reservoirs.