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You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

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Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#71

Post by axiolite »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #7

Assuming this works, tech still won't save us alone. Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo. Ecosystems are still being obliterated for cattle and mining. All ghg free electricity will do is buy a few decades to end (and in the west, reverse) growth. Possibly the only thing that will give civilisat…

> right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo.

That's a big if. In fact things like deforestation increase albedo. And when we get closer to that point, we can start requiring actively increasing albedo of all human structures.

Projecting out our current habits along a trend line all the way to our doom is utterly naive... It's a bit like a lumberjack hundreds of years ago complaining that if we keep building log cabins, we'll run out of lumber. What actually happens is, when resources start to become constraints, THEN we suddenly start finding ways to conserve them, NOT before. And before it happens, it's not obvious to those looking ahead just how it can and will be dealt with.

> We should be finding ways for people in the west to live more like developing nations and still thrive, not trying to turn developing nations into the west.

"Developing nations" are among the worst polluters. That's probably not what you mean. Poor, underdeveloped nations have relatively small global environmental impacts, but very intense local impacts... Local deforestation and other resource exhaustion, for example. That's not a good model to copy, either.

There are possible technological solutions to deal with our impact, and on the time-scales we're talking about, possibilities like colonization of other worlds, and gradually towing the Earth out to a wider (and cooler) orbit.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#72

Post by visarga »

anonporridge wrote: post #9

Something I've always wondered. Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there? In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it. But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by…

How is that different from nuclear?

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#74

Post by ZeroGravitas »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #69
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #54

This sounds like cool tech, and the re-use of the existing generation assets is clever, but just running costs of the steam part of an existing plant struggles to compete on a financial basis with wind turbines and solar PV so it'll probably only ever be a niche thing. Shared ground loops connected to heat pumps are a more boring tech with more potential to have a global scale impact.

You cut out the combustion stack and boiler here so it has to be much cheaper than fossil fuel turbine?

I wasn't even counting the combustion part, just the heat to steam to electricity part (common to coal and nuclear plants).

I had assumed they would need to transfer the heat rather than pipe geothermal steam directly into the turbine, but either way, solar and wind is very cheap and hard to compete with. Even magical free energy connected to a steam turbine struggles when you do the sums, which is the baseline before you start including cost and risk from super deep drilling.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#75

Post by erosenbe0 »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #7

Assuming this works, tech still won't save us alone. Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo. Ecosystems are still being obliterated for cattle and mining. All ghg free electricity will do is buy a few decades to end (and in the west, reverse) growth. Possibly the only thing that will give civilisat…

Pure thermal caused by non fossil fuel human energy use? I've never heard that as a thing. But ghg climate change causing ice and snow melt, thereby reducing albedo and causing thermal effects, yes scary.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#77

Post by re6fae5Wied5tha »

topspin wrote: post #53
pm90 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seismic disturbances are generally a concern for dense urban areas. It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much.

Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate? We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.

> Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate?

The burden of wealth.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#78

Post by visarga »

coolso wrote: post #38
Glawen wrote: post #10

Yeah right. They drilled in Strasbourg, France, to get this "free" energy. When they entered production, the city was experiencing an earthquake every month, waking the city at night. After a magnitude 4 earthquake, they finally shut down the plant. A town in Germany is devastated also due to geothermal power: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staufen_im_Breisgau

This is why pushback against climate change policies is, I believe, a healthy thing. Yes, protecting the environment is super important, but time and time again we are told to trust the science, trust the experts, everything is going to go exactly as planned. And time and time again, it turns out the experts didn't account for this, or for that, or were just flat out wrong, and then everyone pays for the "oops". We s…

You can't have discovery without taking risks, and you can't generalize one problem to the other problems. Keeping the status quo has its own cost.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#79

Post by jillesvangurp »

anonporridge wrote: post #9

Something I've always wondered. Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there? In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it. But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by…

It's not significant indeed. Imagine a balloon the size of the earth and pricking a tiny hole in it. Does it 1) rapidly deflate, or 2) does not change measurably in size at all for millions/billions of years? Replace your mental model of a balloon with that of a massive amount of hot stuff surrounded by a thin crust and you have your answer.

Geothermal works pretty well anywhere from a technical point of view. The main issue is that drilling holes is expensive. There is a company called Eavor that is actually re-purposing former (failed) oil drilling attempts to get a head start on that. That is smart. Even so, they are on the expensive side of the spectrum. It's just a lot of capital expenses to get to warm enough temperatures that you can get steam to drive a turbine. And of course you need either a lot of holes or a very big one to scale it.

Eavor claims that they are going to be essential for baseload. IMHO they might be too expensive for that but we'll see if they can lower their cost over time.

Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough

#80

Post by Joeri »

anonporridge wrote: post #23
tinco wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct in that the earth core is really well insulated from the surface. So well that the light of the sun delivers an order of magnitude more energy per M2 to the Earth's surface. That information also answers your question, our problem isn't with the amount heat we produce, it's with how much of that solar radiation we trap in our atmosphere due to the green house effect of CO2 and similar gases. So yeah w…

I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction. The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed. But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then i…

Alright, I’ll try to pitch the counter argument.

The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable.

Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the green movement wants and has always wanted is a conservative growth model, where the growth is not based on the depletion of finite resources. It is mostly the promoters of unsustainable growth that twist this into an anti-growth narrative.

Now, techno-optimists say we can solve the problems created by unsustainable growth with more technology, and this may be true. But it is asking everyone to take a pretty large gamble on technology that does not exist yet. The conservative strategy is sustainability, and that goes much wider than just solving climate change.

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