Wonder if one day we find out that thermal energy is cooling down earth too much. Reducing magnetic field around the earth which causes a huge reduction of our ozone layer and eventually even the entire atmosphere.
You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
181–190 of 314 posts
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#182The comments on the article make me lose faith in humanity. Amazing technology though, this coupled with solar could really make people independent of centralised energy systems
Independence is a pipe-dream. You always depend on others and physical resources. If you install a solar panel to "become independent from centralized energy systems", you're moving from a dependence to established energy networks to another type of dependence. You now depend on people making, delivering, maintaining panels for you. As well as the batteries to store the energy.
No-one can make or repair this take themselves. You just moved the dependence from one system to another. The current system is also battle-tested and mutualized. Outage see lots of people on deck to fix things. If your solar installation panel breaks it's your individual problem and it will quickly reveal just how dependent you actually are.
The only way to be independent of other humans would be to live a lifestyle which requires only rudimentary knowledge, and the muscles of your body. Probably only hunter-gatherer. Anything beyond that means you rely on knowledge, skills, and muscles of other, and dependent on them for your life.
Maybe you knew all this, but it may still be useful for other readers to realize since these days we hear a lot of prophets telling us how we should increase our independence by installing solar panels or wind turbines. And people don't think twice about where these come from, and who will maintain them.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conventional “mechanical” drilling isn’t very heat tolerant because heat softens metal. For oil and even gas drilling it doesn’t need to be; they’re located in cooler rock. For supercritical steam EGS heat tolerance is a sine qua non. Conventional approaches might still work best, but it’s also plausible that what’s best for gas isn’t best for EGS.
But if we get to temperatures that destory metals, isn't it enough? Why don't we drill to whatever is the termal limit, make a big cavity there, install radiators there and just heat the watter to that temperature and take it out to surface where we can heat homes. I know this is done in Bucharest for a water park (to much lesser depths because apparently we have hot springs near Bucharest). Do we need to reach magma…
Metals start to get weaker at relatively low temperatures. https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/metal-temperature-strengt... We want to extract 100’s of MW of heat which presents several issues.
You need a thermal gradient to move heat from the surrounding rock to the water your pumping in. The higher the initial temperature the larger the difference and therefore faster you can extract heat. Aka even if the working fluid is at a constant temperature you can simply pump it faster.
Also, Carnot efficiency limits means you want the hottest steam you can handle. Further, you have various inefficiencies such as losing heat as water moves back up a borehole.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city? The US’ fracking experiments show ”well outside of any city” is nowhere near enough.
Why? How much damage has been done?
In every state where fracking got authorised, earthquakes above 3.0 have increased by an order of magnitude (or even appeared where they were considered essentially inexistent).
Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.
The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.
I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Huh? Read my comment. I did not suggest there are no building in non-urban areas. Just fewer, and thus it would be less expensive to make them earthquake proof. Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time. Earthquakes stronger than whatever a bit of geothermal energy production would produce.
Because Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time, japan has quake-safety standards. They were written in blood, and don’t exist in places which don’t routinely have earthquakes, because quake safety is constraining and expensive.
Retrofitting an entire country for quake safety because you’ve decided to create artificial earthquakes is inane.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long wanted to put some money into an eco terror fund. It would buy controlling interests in all the companies that make some critical, specialized and heavily patented piece of modern internal combustion engines or coal turbines. Then, it'd wreck the factories, and patent troll everyone else into not producing. Money is speech, and that would be protected political speech, right? :-)
Once it had demonstrated enough success to instill fear in the hearts of wall street bankers, I think it could start turning a profit. It would announce targets ahead of time, tanking the stock. On the way down, the companies would reinvest the money they make selling themselves for parts back into the fund.
You're not going to tank a stock by publicly telling people you're going to buy a bunch of it. A bunch of people will try to get in front of you and bid you up.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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. What percentage of rural areas are situated in close proximity to large dams and bridges?
Your statement is unclear, are you saying it doesn’t matter if dams and bridges get destroyed, or that it doesn’t matter if rural habitations get destroyed as long as they’re not destroyed near infrastructure?
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#188If we converted all energy production to geothermal, would it be possible to significantly increase the cooling of the Earth's core? The flow from the Earth's core to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts[0] The total energy supply for 2017 was 162,494 TWh[1] World energy demand is expected to grow 27% by 2040 Currently, heat escaping from the Earth accounts for only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the s…
I can be wrong but that number sounds so low that it might mean the energy at the literal surface, in the same vein as how much solar heat energy reaches the planet’s surface.
I assume that the number is vastly greater if you measure the heat 1km below sea level for example.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#189If we converted all energy production to geothermal, would it be possible to significantly increase the cooling of the Earth's core? The flow from the Earth's core to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts[0] The total energy supply for 2017 was 162,494 TWh[1] World energy demand is expected to grow 27% by 2040 Currently, heat escaping from the Earth accounts for only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the s…
The bigger question is whether we will heat up the surface top much, given that the energy would be produced by a heat engine.
(I suppose you could build a heat engine by using the temperature differentials of different underground layers, although I've never seen that proposed)
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no such thing as sustainable growth. Eventually, one day, sooner or later a very unsustainable chunk of high speed space rock will hit the planet and wipe us out, or some other completely natural and “green” disaster, like a supervolcanic eruption, as has happened repeatedly in history. The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology to a point to divert the problem or make ourselves sufficie…
From this point of view, which I certainly share, the responsible thing to do is to grow as fast as humanly possible until we are spread far and wide across the solar system, while also hedging our bets and making an effort to grow in the cleanest way that doesn’t slow us down.
Grow fast, but sustainable enough that we don't collapse society before we have self-sustaining colonies beyond earth. Then rinse and repeat.