I always wondered why we didn't have laser drills yet, but microwave drills sound way cooler.
Why not make it microwave lasers? :-)
You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
261–270 of 314 posts
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#262The idea of drilling deep geothermal to repurpose existing fossil plants is an elegant one. I imagine others have thought of this before, but it was new to me. Being able to take over the existing equipment (turbines, power transmission connections) seems appealing. Of course, it all depends on how expensive the drilling process is vs. the existing capital asset in the turbines, but maybe you could hit a price point…
It's also the drilling industry. There are millions of skill people and a worldwide supply chain already setup. As a bonus, these are the same companies and people who would lose their jobs when drilling for oil and gas is overtaken by geothermal.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#263Something 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…
The amount of heat in the atmosphere at any point doesn't really matter all that much for global warming. What matters is the break-even point between the amount of energy we gain from and lose to space. Since the earth emits more energy if it's warmer (black body radiation), the break-even point relates to the temperature of the earth. If we change something about the earth's in or output of energy, the earth's temp…
We aren't talking about a system with an evenly distributed energy. It wouldn't be life on Earth if the global temperature average was between what is now the temperature of the atmosphere, and all the ones below surface. As long as the thermal isolation remains in place it shouldn't be a problem and the biggest foe should be the unbalance between heat in and heat out from sun/space, but what if we do a big scale and sustained thermal transfer between the core and the surface?
I know, I'm oversimplifying a lot, and the orders of what humans can do may be dwarfed by any volcanic eruption, but it should be a safe margin at some point at which the scale and time of heat transfer with underground may start to affect global average temperature.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#264Earlier 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…
High CO2 concentrations have other effects too, including ocean acidification and cognitive impairment.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#265Earlier 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…
I agree, there is a big defeatist and regressive narrative. But some of us do focus on the positive -- we can fix this, and fix a lot of other problems at the same time, and it's not even that costly if we do it right, gradually switching our energy sources over time and gradually changing our living habits where we're willing. People always talk about a carbon tax, because it's a really, really good idea: it is very economically efficient, is targeted like a laser at the real problem, and will have huge benefits even just in terms of reducing premature deaths from particulate pollution.
The reason I think stopping use of fossil fuels is really the only reasonable solution, or is at least a necessary part of any solution, is that anything else is like trying to fix your car accelerating out of control by just driving around with one foot on the brake. Trying to balance the increased greenhouse effect by blocking sunlight might work a bit, but there are all sorts of ways it can go wrong -- it creates a moral hazard where everyone will have less incentive to stop using fossil fuels and thus continue making the root cause of the problem worse, and we have to keep doing it forever -- stopping means a sudden massive amount of climate change that people won't have time to adjust to. There are so many really easy ways that we can cut our emissions massively, with technology we have available today, with virtually no impact on our living standards. The rest will take some time and technological improvements, but it's all doable!
And I've not heard of any sort of heat dissipation geo-engineering ideas -- the only feasible way I know of to get the earth's heat dissipation back to normal is to take off this extra blanket of greenhouse gases we've put on it. Any sort of heat dissipation would have to transfer heat to the upper atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2, and I don't think there's any way we could do that at the scale required to have a noticeable effect.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oil companies sell finite fuel for energy to people in cars, on the move. Geothermal heating provides unlimited fuel for people in houses, staying still. The technology is similar, and it's boring ;-) The market is different. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to hire expert drilling engineers out of the oil industry!
> Geothermal heating provides unlimited fuel for people in houses, staying still This sounds like the beginning of a great sci-fi novel. A future where Earth's core has cooled because of excess draws to power humanity. Now, the planet is losing it's magnetic field. To save humanity, humans need to re-heat the core, build biospheres, or leave the planet.
Do you think that reheating the core of Mars could reboot life there?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30476002
It's even more interesting that you mention the magnetic field, could we use solar panels to draw more energy from the sun to power a tesla coil and microwave the core?
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
If and when we get to that point various theoretical methods are available for bleeding off surplus heat; one of them is aiming a neutron beam at the moon. One upside of all this learning the hard way via profligate energy generation and accidental geoengineering taking place since the industrial revolution is that it opens the door to possibilities of regulating the impact of Milankovitch cycles on our civilization…
If you can concentrate energy, eg into a neutron beam, then it's not waste heat. It's a form of energy you still can get useful energy out of. The only thing you can do with true waste heat on the scale of earth is to radiate it into space. You might want to look into eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
My comment was written with precisely the second law of thermodynamics in mind. If you’re generating energy at a rate greater than you have a use for, to the point that you have a problem, yet also able to harvest it, then you want to radiate it back into space, yes. Neutron beams would be a cool, perhaps fanciful yet potentially practical way of doing that in a concentrated manner.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you may have missed what these folks are doing differently. To put it into context, geothermal energy that taps underground water reservoirs near heat sources has been shown to cause earthquakes and other not good side effects. All of those effects are associated with water being released from aquifers that were previously sealed, or ground changes due to water incursion into previously dry structures (whic…
Great start, but one important factor is missing from this analysis: The surface area (for heat exchange) of a closed-loop borehole is tiny compared to the surface area in a natural hydrothermal system. The walls of the borehole will cool off relatively quickly due to the low thermal conductivity of rock, and you'll soon be unable to make power. Conventional geothermal gets around this by pulling from very large rese…
I'm not sure I understand. Could you point me to a resource that goes into more detail?
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Geothermal heating provides unlimited fuel for people in houses, staying still This sounds like the beginning of a great sci-fi novel. A future where Earth's core has cooled because of excess draws to power humanity. Now, the planet is losing it's magnetic field. To save humanity, humans need to re-heat the core, build biospheres, or leave the planet.
"A future where Earth's core has cooled because of excess draws to power humanity." Has anyone done the napkin math for how long that would take?
About as long as it would take to cool the surface of the sun.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2013/04/28/the-center...
Core of earth: 6,000 ºC
https://www.space.com/why-sun-atmosphere-hotter-than-surface
Core of sun: 27 million ºC Surface of sun: 6,000 ºC
"The leading idea among experts is the sun's magnetic field is actually bringing energy from inside the sun up through its surface and into its atmosphere."
The "napkin math" will involve gathering some data about RF power harvesting, and some assumptions (e.g. cosmic rays)
https://news.mit.edu/2020/energy-harvesting-wi-fi-power-0327
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics
Do you believe in the 1st law of thermodynamics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe
We could just balance the system:
core of Earth too hot -> use geothermal
core of Earth too cold -> use solar power
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
High CO2 concentrations have other effects too, including ocean acidification and cognitive impairment.
And crop nutrient depletion