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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

#201

Post by eru »

masklinn wrote: post #184
eru wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Thanks!

Seems all pretty manageable on the humongous scale of 'this could be our main source of energy'.

Eg burning coal or oil kills a lot more people directly and indirectly.

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

#202

Post by marcosdumay »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #82
mkl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's assume (and I don't know since I don't work for these guys but we need numbers if we're going to guess at things) that their "drilling" with microwaves technology leaves behind a 12" diameter hole that is > 6 miles deep. And we can drill two of those holes in such a way that they meet at their maximum depth. I'm imagining holes that start on the surface 100+ yards (or meters) apart drilled with a slight angle…

That is entirely fair. And per @animats comment it isn't clear they have managed to do anything "new" yet. That said, microwaves (like lasers) do tend to go straight. So from the point they start using them going forward, I would expect it to be possible (not easy, but possible) to keep them in a straight path.

> That said, microwaves (like lasers) do tend to go straight.

Actually, none of them do. Cutting equipment (even after adapted to drilling) is heavily focused on the near region, usually a few cm away. On distances larger than a few cm, they are no more self-aligning than any mechanical drill.

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

#203

Post by tomatotomato37 »

throwaway9870 wrote: post #170

You just don't "use" heat to make electricity. You need some sort of heat engine running a cycle. All those require temperature differential. This is basic thermodynamics and isn't going to change with new technology. This temp differential is what is required to extract useful energy. So I don't understand why they talk about material at a certain temp having energy compared to oil. If we lived on a planet that is u…

I believe this is also the Achilles heel of nuclear too. It's an amazing, cheap, and sustainable way of creating concentrated heat, but an absolute pill of complexity and labor needed to turn that heat into spinning turbines. Nuclear's future should be in town heat & high temperature industry, not electricity.

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

#204

Post by hedora »

throwaway9870 wrote: post #198
hedora wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting the heat exchanger on a tethered weather balloon and floating it into low earth order addresses all those concerns. It also doesn't involve rocket science. QED.

I think you just proved my point better than I could have ever done: Those most vocal about energy are generally the least informed. Let me guess, you have no formal engineering training, do you? EDIT: to make this comment more constructive, here is a link to an excellent book on energy processes: https://www.amazon.com/Fundamentals-Renewable-Energy-Process... I took a class with da Rosa and at the time this book was…

I was being sarcastic.

However, my previous comment is technically correct. You still haven't raised any valid technical concerns with my solution.

If Mike Hughes (1) were still alive, I'm sure he'd be willing to be hired to prove me correct.

(1) The steam powered rocket guy that coincidentally became a flat earther after running out of money. The flat earthers ended up funding his (mostly) successful steam rocket.

Everyone knows the footage from NASA and the rest of the aerospace-round-earth-industrial-military-complex is all faked. Helium and Hydrogen are the devil's gas, so weather balloons also won't work.

I hope the flat earthers find some other mad scientist to replace him soon.

(Edit: I enjoyed the textbook "energy", but I've forgotten the author's name. Sadly, it's not really findable with search engines. It took a whole systems approach (including raw material extraction and maintenance)

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

#205

Post by marcosdumay »

axiolite wrote: post #49
a1371 wrote: post #24

A lot of people like to talk about nuclear as a climate solution. Geothermal is the most gargantuous nuclear plant we can fathom, all we have to do is to extend a pipe and harvest it. Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape. I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity…

> that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape. I think coal and most other mineral extraction industries would love to have the relatively good environmental record of oil and gas companies. One small opening at the surface, no need to send hundreds of people in. Pretty small and quiet facility above ground where all the work gets done, etc. A…

As terrible as oil spills are, gas spills are currently a much larger problem. They are just not as visible.

Once we get enough solar capacity to start thinking about carbon capture, maybe methane capture is the most interesting problem to start with.

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

#206

Post by tomrod »

joshuacc wrote: post #176
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, we were doing nuclear fracking back in the days. Everything that could work has been tried for oil and gas exploration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy Regarding drilling operations that destroy value: you're forgetting that drilling is 1D while oil fields are 3D (technically quasi-2D with horizontal dimensions 100x to 1000x larger than vertical dimensions). If your drilling messes up ever…

Why do you think that drilling is one dimensional? Drilling at an angle, and even at gradually changing angles is common.

Technically embedded in that case, as your drill line can be represented (often) by a single parameterized function.

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

#207

Post by tinco »

hectormalot wrote: post #84
leoedin wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could also have good use for ground source heat pumps - they're the most efficient, robust and consistent source of domestic heating we have, but require fairly deep (60m ish) boreholes. If digging could be quicker, easier or faster these heat pumps could be installed everywhere.

I have one of those. The well is 170m deep. Took 2 guys about half a day to drill it, so that actually doesn’t seem excessive in terms of time required (mostly sand, no rock below my house).

Awesome! Do you sink heat into it during the summer, or do you also use it for airco?

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

#208

Post by InDemoVeritas »

hedora wrote: post #177
derefr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working. To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil f…

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? :-)

As my wise auntie says,”You can’t see clearly through the bottom of a pint glass.” Are you not drunk on energy? Warm or cool at will, well fed and clothed, able to travel and communicate? There’s no collecting if you bet on the apocalypse.

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

#209

Post by tinco »

FredPret wrote: post #168
jmacd wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a ground source heat pump and one summer we were away and did not use out air conditioning that year much at all. Mid winter our return loop temperatures (the glycol being brought in to our heat pump after circulating in the ground) was at one point 3 degrees C cooler than it had been any other year. Quite a noticeable difference. For reference, our loops are 8 vertical at 250ft.

Wait, do you need eight 250ft wells?

Yeah for a family home that seems about right. 250ft is not very deep at all, and you need to store a lot of energy to past a whole winter/summer.

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

#210

Post by hedora »

popcube wrote: post #94
Joeri wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gree…

yes, until now, scientists always can save us. but they just need one time...

Scientists have done more than enough. The issue now is entrenched interests blocking progress.

We had all the technology we needed to go carbon neutral back in the 1980's. Back then, even the American Petroleum Institute (yes, the planet burners) were raising alarms over CO2 and global warming.

We have many technological doublings ahead of us before technology fails to provide opportunities for growth. That's not the problem.

The problem is that our economic system is terrible at pricing in externalities.

Edit: Come to think of it, the American Petroleum Institute scientists said the exact same thing back then. Skip to the last page:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3483045-AQ-9-Task-Fo...

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