Mathematics of Geothermal Energy
ebsco.com
ebsco.com
This is a very brief, high-level overview. It weirdly dives deep into some less-relevant topics and glosses over a LOT of things.
It is not irrelevant, but not terribly reliable either. The "Mathematics" in the title is self-evidently clickbait.
YMMV.
There are (at the very least) 2 reasonable places I can think of off the top of my head in which to look around for answers -- both are organizations that run annual meetings on the topic of geothermal energy.
One is the Geothermal Rising professional organization [1]. There is a claim on the website that the papers from the annual meeting (roughly a month back) are available for free download by anybody. I can't find the actual head-link for those papers. A search engine is your friend. (I would not trust an LLM for this particular job.)
A second one is the Stanford Geothermal Workshop [2]. That is also an annual meeting. Again, use a search engine.
Sorry to not be more helpful, but this is a pretty large topic.
[1] https://www.geothermal.org/2026-geothermal-rising-conference... [2] https://geothermal.stanford.edu/events/workshop/past-proceed...
* The well is sealed near the surface. Water is injected down the well and exits thousands of feet below ground level, directly into the hot rocks
* The rock itself is not a perfect heat exchanger; it often needs to be fractured to allow steam to escape quickly. There is a limit to how quickly you can inject water without overcooling the rock
* thermodynamic self-regulation - the temperature of geothermal steam is typically only ~240c, at approximately the point of max enthalpy for saturated steam. Gaseous steam alone does not draw heat from the rocks as efficiently as highly saturated vapor mix, and the hot porous rock acts like a heat pipe to quickly disperse hot spots.
* tyranny of temperature - like all heat engines you want higher temperature inputs for efficiency and to keep the hardware small/simple. 240c is a very low working temperature - so you need complex machinery and/or abundant cooling water to make it work
* modern plants separate the steam from the turbines - which operate on a low boiling point organic compound. they may be entirely air cooled
In areas like California, or anywhere along an ocean coast that also has geothermal activity, there should be geothermal desalination plants. Solves the issue of desalination being highly energy intensive. One of my favorite college papers I wrote was on using geothermal energy for desalination. After researching it, I could not believe it was not being utilized more.
https://github.com/NREL/GEOPHIRES-v2
https://www.nlr.gov/research/software/geophires-v2-0-geother...
Iceland has unlimited geothermal energy and a cold climate. Seems a lot easier than going to space for solar energy
Which might be true, though the second thing sounds promising as well...
My understanding:
- b/c of geothermal, huge amounts of electricity are available for low cost
- Iceland being an island makes it VERY expensive to build/transport goods back and forth
- The above combo means that aluminum smelting is the only industry where the electricity availability outweighed the costs of transport and being on an island.
We already have transatlantic fiber optic cables so I don’t see why “transportation” costs apply here though
For compute jobs that can be efficiently farmed out to individual racks, this is a nice way to stretch your PV manufacturing capacity to serve more chips (as long as launch costs aren't too high).
For LLM training and other jobs that need an entire datacenter of racks working in parallel, that wouldn't be feasible to do in space with today's technology.
There are other incentives driving this, I suspect more so. Pushback, land acquisition, grid hookup, legal concerns - many circumvented by going to space.
are you expecting us to not do have more compute in space every year?
the pace of space access is accelerating while the cost is decreasing
Like, clearly Earth's crust supports temperature gradients which are steep enough to make the juice worth the squeeze. Presumably you're not going to find gradients so steep in the case of a runaway greenhouse effect, but whatever gradients you do find, are there fundamental limits preventing them from being steep enough?
Arguably, more dangerous and harder to navigate than vacuum.
But there are so many more fundamental problems with the high altitude Venusian colony idea that you would never get to the "temperature gradients > power" pipeline implementation in any case.
I mean right off the bat, imagine building or navigating anything in hurricane Katrina. Then, since we're talking 50km, imagine winds that would make the forces you're dealing with an order of magnitude more problematic.
Yeah, in terms of knowledge and technology, mankind is just not there yet to be perfectly frank.
OTOH, because wind velocity is highly tied to altitude on Venus, wind farming could be an important source of energy generation (along with chemical generation for emergency demand). Drag a fan at a hotter, lower, higher-pressure altitude, and harvest the electricity. In fact, storing an excess of wind-farm energy as chemical energy could power the occasional need to steer away from vortexes.
If the problem of a chemically-inert package can be solved, floating inhabited stations could be feasible.
I expect that a more boring approach would prevail: solar panels. No need for impossibly tall airships to resist wind shear just so they could get at both sides of the hot/cold setup for operating a sterling engine.
Engineering sense aside, I still wanna know if nature would allow the geothermal approach. Something about the idea that a column of air at rest would settle down into such a disequilibrium that it could be harvested of energy in this way feels wrong to me, but I've been unable to muster the thermodynamics chops to align my head with my gut.
https://www.morningstarmissions.space/samplereturnmission
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/davinci/
Of course anything could happen with funding in the next 5 years that would derail these.
1) Scientific consensus is that the Earth is also finite.
2) Also, the heat generated in the Earth's interior is...nuclear power.
3) Nuclear waste disposal is a political problem, not a technical one; it is "controversial" and "costly" precisely because it's used for these sorts of unserious comparisons.
I love the idea of geothermal, but this sort of nonsense has to be called out and shamed.
1) Everything in the universe, including the sun's solar radiation, is finite. It's just a matter of scale. The heat in the earth's core is practically infinite for humanity's current and near-term needs.
2) The heat generated in the earth's core is a combination of fission decay and residual heat from the earth's initial formation. The fission reaction is locked away 5000 KM deep (as in 5 million meters), deep-enough that it poses no threat even if you drill down thousands of meters to tap into that. That is very much not true of man-made nuclear fission.
3) There is still no long term storage mechanism that is guaranteed to keep nuclear waste for the several million years it would take to decay to safe levels, considering possible things that could happen over that time scale.
Wow, quite the oversell there! Modern nuclear reactors are widely recognized as safe by nonpartisan sources. And why do we need to solve for millions of years of storage? In a couple centuries at most, we'll be able to blast the stuff into space if that's what makes us comfortable.
2) The "residual heat" is long gone, and my whole point here was that saying nuclear was limited when geothermal is a form of nuclear was disingenuous/misleading. Trying to turn that into a scare / safety issue is exactly the sort of nonsense I was objecting to.
3) There are lots of viable long-term storage options, including grinding it up, mixing it with the tailings and putting it back into the same hole we dug it out of. Or dropping it into a subduction zone, and letting it fuel future geothermal plants. But we won't do any of those, because it's far too valuable. If you are worried about things being "misleading and exaggerated" you probably shouldn't be bringing up the nuclear waste "problem".
https://microgridmedia.com/dangerous-volcano-in-oregon-could...
Does that mean everything in the site is bogus or low-effort? No, but it means I don’t want to potentially waste my time or be misled.