Drilling surprise opens door to volcano-powered electricity
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
"Magma serves as a heat source, replacing fuel in magma smelters, magma forges, magma glass furnaces, and magma kilns...Other uses for magma include obsidian farming, trap design, melting ice, igniting fires, and even garbage disposal." [1]
So if Iceland finds pockets of magma at 5km, it's only really a breakthrough if you can access magma at shallow depths in other regions.
Looking at per-capita energy utilization, you'll find that Nordic countries have markedly high consumption.
Another high per-capita energy-use country is Trinidad and Tobago, which puzzled me until I discovered it's a huge exporter of ammonia fertilizer -- the manufacturing process is hugely energy intensive.
Iceland doesn't have a large population (332,000), but it's relatively close to Europe (or at least Ireland), and there have been proposals to link it via undersea transmission cables to the European grid.
Other significant resources exist around much of the Pacific Rim, including in Hawaii (limited population and a long way from nowhere), Japan (high population and critical energy resource ocnstraints), the Philippines, New Zealand, and the Pacific coast of the US. One of the largest present geothermal installations is The Geysers in California, with just under 1 GW of installed capacity. The largest geothermal resource within the US would be the Yellowstone supercaldera, and though this is presently protected from development, it represents a vast energy potential, as much as 20% of present US electric generating potential under some estimates. The National Park Status means that research is highly limited, so take with a very strong dose of salt.
Other significant resources exist in Kenya (another rift zone, as is New Zealand). Given Africa's status as a developing region, this is potentially hugely useful.
Geothermal has been significantly developed in many of these areas. I did some digging and apparently the Philippines has developed as much as 50% of its potential, where it provides 16% of the nation's electricity needs. Japan and the US have also done considerable development, as, of course, has Iceland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_the_Philip...
Geothermal offers a number of very useful characteristics in a renewable / sustainable energy mix, including:
⚫ Base-load potential. Geothermal runs 24/7, is dispatchable (that is, you can throttle it up or down), and balances the nondispatchable nature of wind and solar energy.
⚫ Proven. Geothermal has been in active commercial production for decades. This is proven technology.
⚫ Relatively low local impacts. Plant footprints are small and local environmental disturbance fairly limited. Water needs and the possibility of locally-induced earthquakes (most minor) are possible concerns.
But it is still limited to specific locations for high yields. And if you're drawing sufficient amounts of thermal energy from even high-yield caldera, it can take a considerable period of time (decades) for a geothermal zone to recover. This is particularly a concern with "EGS" (enhanced geothermal systems) in which boreholes are drilled into otherwise only marginal zones. Often a single borehole's useful life is limited to a decade or two.
Africa is not a country.
A transmission cable is sometimes discussed, but so far Iceland has been taking advantage of the fact that aluminum smelting is a workable way to congeal cheap power into transportable money. Aluminum smelting is typically by electrolysis [1], and aluminum is light and compact relative to its value so easy to ship, so smelting aluminum and exporting it essentially allows you to "export electricity". Not at the same rates as you could sell actual electricity, but with easier transport/storage characteristics that makes it still attractive. The largest power plant in Iceland (a hydro one) is entirely purpose-built solely to power a smelter [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rahnj%C3%BAkar_Hydropow...
You'll typically find aluminium smelters where electricity is cheap. E.g., the Pacific Northwest / Western Canada, where ample hydroelectric resources exist.
There's only very little water in exported food, so as long as you're not using non-replenishable sources (like fossil water) or limited sources (like rivers) for food production, the amount of water that is actually exported is negligibly small.
That's not the point, really.
The point isn't how much water is physically in food exported, but how much was required to create it. From this Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/19/water-food-trade-tech-water...
We don’t realize it as we sit down to a meal, but most crops require huge volumes of water to grow: 65 gallons to grow a pound of potatoes; 650 gallons for a pound of rice.
Often, food supplies are only maintained at the expense of literally emptying some of the world’s great rivers, such as the Indus in Pakistan, the Yellow River in China and the Nile in Egypt. Elsewhere, underground reserves are being pumped dry.
But increasingly, countries are giving up on trying to feed their populations from their own resources and are switching to food imports. That means they are also importing the water embodied in the crops, or virtual water. Every ton of wheat arriving at a dockside carries with it, in virtual form, the thousand tons of water needed to grow it.
And if you're looking at meat, it's much higher -- about 2,500 gallons per pound of beef.
Similarly, it's not that you're going to get zapped by electricity when touching aluminum, but the amount of electricity required to extract that aluminum is vast.
And the "65 gallons of water per pound of potatoes" is utter bullshit. Whether rain falls on untouched grass land or on potato plants does not matter to the water ecosystem.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2269517/The-picture-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/business/energy-environmen...
Gas is, well, a gas. It doesn't stay put, and it takes considerable infrastructure to convert it to a more manageable form (compressed or liquified). Both of which are states it doesn't particularly seem inclined to remain in.
There've been enough issues transporting oil from new drilling zones. Transporting gas (by truck, rail, or pipeline) is even more complex.
That's among the reasons oil (and coal) are so useful as fuels sources: they're very convenient. Oil most especially, though even coal can be moved in pipelines (as slurry).
Mind: for both environmental (AGW) and resource limitations (peak oil/gas) reasons we'll have to shift off of them. But the practicality of both coal and oil means that that transition will carry with it immense costs.
Worried about cost? Sell carbon credits for the destruction of the greenhouse gas, and use the funds to pay for the generation equipment.
Want someone to manage this huge distributed system of generators? Call SolarCity. They already manage an enormous fleet for distributed solar generation installations.
The reason for high-voltage lines is that it reduces the total current transmitted, which reduces transmission losses.
Building out T&D infrastructure is expensive and a concern for distributed generation methods (solar, wind).
North Dakota's leadership (which is generally from the eastern part of the state) is too busy counting money and patting themselves on the back for all the economic activity they 'created' to be concerned about the welfare of anybody who actually lives in or around the patch.
http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_22382285/north-dakota-...
and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.
Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.
There seems to be no learning in the American midwest. Every other time some novel way of destroying the environment comes along, disenfranchised states quickly clear out all regulatory law to make place for the new boom, and when it's over they are left with unemployed single men with a bunch of new trucks and a wrecked environment while the companies made off with the profit.
If it were burned for productive reasons, some of the thermal energy released would be stored in chemical bonds formed by the manufacturing of any number of things, but most of it would ultimately still be released into the atmosphere as waste heat during some stage of its use.
There is the angle that if more natural gas were used to generate electricity, then less coal burning would be required. That certainly is an argument for getting and burning more natural gas in power plants, but barring that possibility in the present due to poor logistics, we will still be burning that coal whether the natural gas is burned off as waste, or whether it is never pumped up in the first place.
We could also spend money taking the gas and shoving it back where it came from, but that really is not practical.
The bigoted attitude towards the mid-west is uncalled for, even if you don't like what is going on in North Dakota.
> Burning the gas as waste contributes CO2 to the
> atmosphere, but burning the gas for productive
> reasons still produces that same CO2.
There are time-scales over which releasing CO2 is more or less harmful; I don't pretend to know the critical ones. However, it seems self evident that if that rate of release can be slowed, then its consequences will be less harmful, even if the total amount of CO2 released by T_{infinity} is exactly the same.
I assume that either way, we are going to eventually burn it until depletion. We can't keep it up forever, we will need to switch to renewable energy at some point and that renewable energy will be carbon neutral.
It's a shame that it is being wasted instead of used for something productive, but I am just not convinced that it is some sort of environmental disaster.
As a pinko commie treehugger (aka realist), I'm unenthusiastic about adding any more CO2 to our atmosphere.
I don't get this. Wouldn't single women also want to move to North Dakota to get a good job?
It's not just about the technology, above-ground risk is in many ways the bigger problem.
But sure, it's a risk inherent in this sort of project. Cheniere Energy was building its Sabine Pass LNG facility in Louisiana to import gas until advances in fracking and horizontal drilling led to a glut of gas in the US market and importing ceased to make sense. Cheniere had to pull off a multi-billion dollar pivot to export instead, scrambling to raise billions and get approval to build the liquefaction trains required to export gas.
(OT: if anyone in Silicon Valley thinks theirs is the only industry ripe with crazy schemes, insane pivots and huge disruptions, read up on energy. The Prize by Daniel Yergin, Private Empire by Steve Coll and The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman are the places to start)
Autonomous planetary settlement bots; colonizers of planets. Harnessing the energy trapped within the planet to refine minerals on the surface or terraform the surface.
Sufficiently large planets are dual gravitational + fission plants. There's pretty good reason to believe there may be active natural sustained chain reaction fission reactors within the Earth's inner mantel / outer core (for reasons the geologists / geophysicists are better able to explain, apparently not in the core itself). There's also considerable latent heat from formation -- even after 4.5 billion years (rock is a good insulator).
But not all planets have molten interiors (Mars doesn't). And many aren't particularly accessible: Venus has that little atmosphere problem, Mercury's a tad toasty, and gas giants don't give your legs a leg to stand on. Plus gravity.
Visions of spacefaring humans are, I suspect, mostly strongly fantastical:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...
Oceans are capable of being crossed by little more than someone clinging to or sitting on a log (not with a particularly high survival rate, mind). Or bundles of papyrus reeds or balsawood rafts, as Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated. I personally know several people who've rowed across oceans. Some of them multiple times and/or multiple oceans.
The odds of rowing to Ceres or Alpha Centauri, let alone the Andromeda Galaxy, on a log raft, are rather slim.
Given the absurd amounts of power available from stars when you start thinking about building such a ship, a lot of other options start to make more sense.
Antimatter synthesis isn't so unreasonable then you can magnetically divert the solar window to setup the brightest luminosity particle accelerator ever to make anti-hydrogen.
If not, isn't the question of whether you can effectively harness the energy or not moot?
(As well as several other interesting tests/uses)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Nati...
Two reasons, as the article states, it has been found, twice in fact. Once in Hawaii and now in Iceland. The Icelandic team is drilling another hole near the existing hole to investigate further. Maybe the same can be done in Hawaii.
The other reason we care is that perhaps technology doesn't exist yet to easily find these near surface reservoirs, but maybe it will in the future. If they determine this hole can be utilized, it will drive research into finding these reservoirs.
http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/matt/vol...
If there's money in finding magma, research will follow. 36 - 50 MW of non-carbon energy is good news. Geothermal is already competitive with coal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#U...) and with recent improvements in drilling technology, magma is within reach. The borehole mentioned above had a depth of 2,100 m. Deepwater Horizon drilled to more than 10,000 m (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon).
Correct.
> intentionally find magma near the surface to exploit in this manner?
They're not at the exploiting point yet.
The odds are low, but a supervolcanic detonation in Yellowstone would be one of the most serious threats to the United States (or even the planet), so if we can mitigate it slightly while actually profiting from the process that seems worth pursuing.
I doubt they said that.
The original report does indeed, the article misquoted (and possibly misunderstood) it. Here is the exact quote and its surrounding paragraph:
> In 2005, there were 8,933 MW of installed power capacity in 24 countries, generating 55,709 GWh per year of green power, according to the International Geothermal Association. IGA reports in 2010 that 10,715 MW is on line generating 67,246 GWh. This represents a 20% increase in geothermal power on line between 2005 and 2010. IGA projects this will grow to 18,500 MW by 2015, which based upon the large number of projects under consideration appears reasonable if not conservative.
> Regardless, that's about 0.3 quadrillion BTUs per year, which is a blip compared to the world's energy consumption.
note that the quote is about electricity generation, not power consumption in general.
Still a blip though, in 2008 global electricity generation was estimated at 20261 TWh, geothermal production thus accounting for ~0.3% of global production.
A few select countries have fairly high geo ratios though: Iceland's at 30% geothermal, the Philippines at 27%, El Salvador 25%, Costa Rica at 14% and Kenya at 11.2% (2010 numbers).
The US are the biggest producer of geothermal electricity (29% of global production, #2 is the philippines at 18%) but the ratio matches global, geothermal is 0.3% of the US's electricity production.
> IGA reports in 2010 that 10,715 MW is on line generating 67,246 GWh.
http://www.geo-energy.org/pdf/reports/GEA_International_Mark... page 4, 2nd paragraph of the section "Overview/Results"
More importantly are the subtle differences to ground water temperature when wells are drilled close together in densely populated areas. This is a bit off-topic for the OP, but I went to an alt-energy talk where someone was all jazzed about geo-thermal. I asked if anyone's done any research about what the cold water pumped into the well does to the water table, or whether you could trigger fungal blooms underground and render otherwise potable water undrinkable. They, as you can guess, didn't have an answer.
Alt-energy is all exciting and holds such potential until you realize that bituminous coal was once the miracle solution to having everyone burn wood.
Sounds like somebody's hit the Happy Fun Stuff. Everybody watch out, FPS is about to hit the floor.