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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

#141

Post by eru »

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.

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.

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

#142

Post by eru »

wongarsu wrote: post #110
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.

In Germany you will be hard-pressed to find a place more than 10km/6mi from the nearest village with more than 500 inhabitants. Those people don't like earthquakes or cracked buildings either. Same thing in England.

Pay to earthquake proof their building and give them a bit of extra money on top. It's not that hard. Have a sort of auction to see who in the vicinity it willing to accept the geothermal plant for the cheapest.

Keep in mind that Germany has plenty of open pit lignite mines. Like eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Schleenhain_coal_mine

The disruption from geothermal is minuscule by comparison.

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

#143

Post by eru »

hutzlibu wrote: post #91
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.

"It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much." Why would you think that? Because the peasants are all too stupid to notice an earthquake that damage their houses? Sure, fewer people would be affected, than in a dense city, but the problem solution of: out of sight, out of mind, is fascinating.

You know that you can earthquake proof buildings?

Offer to do that plus a bit of extra money on top, and you'll find plenty of rural takers. Pick the cheapest bidder.

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

#144

Post by eru »

masklinn wrote: post #51
eru wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city? Doesn't even have to be somewhere where there are no buildings. Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.

> 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?

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

#145

Post by darkerside »

tinco wrote: post #20
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…

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…

Turning on the car activates the heat but lets us open the window

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

#146

Post by eru »

Fiahil wrote: post #26
eru wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city? Doesn't even have to be somewhere where there are no buildings. Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.

> Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive. So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ? And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ? Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?

> So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?

What do you mean? A few really minor earthquakes are all that was reported by the comment I was replying to. So I'd assume more really minor earthquakes.

> And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ?

The usual way of paying an insurance company?

> Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?

Depends on the jurisdiction. But sure, you can make the plant operator responsible for that and responsible for having gigantic insurance coverage.

(Just look at whatever liability people who operate dams have today. A breakage of a major dam would also devastate entire regions. So whatever arrangements are good enough for that use case are probably good enough here.)

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

#147

Post by Retric »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #116
anonporridge wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. All civilization consumes around 17 TW of energy while the sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with 173,000 TW. We could rebase all of civilization on geothermal and the extra heat in the atmosphere would be a rounding error to the sun's energy.

I don't think "it's a rounding error" is enough analysis here. A couple of meters of sea level rise, a couple of degrees temperature rise; these could be termed rounding errors.

Not degrees, thousandths of a degree, so possibly something like a centimeter if sea level rise.

Considering nuclear and fossil fuels directly release stored energy and solar increase albido this isn’t a 1:1 increase in energy. Further the earth radiates more energy from hot places than cool, still you can approximate it as something like:

Black body radiation is temperature in kelvin to the 4th power. (285 * (170,017^0.25 / 170,000^0.25) - 285) is an increase of ~0.007 C / (whatever our current percentage of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, or solar).

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

#148

Post by eru »

Glawen wrote: post #62
eru wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city? Doesn't even have to be somewhere where there are no buildings. Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.

The goal of the plant was to provide heat for Strasbourg, so it has to be near the city.

Yes. Originally I typed a longer version of my comment that had a section on heat vs electricity.

Basically, the idea I proposed would only work for generating electricity, not for using the heat directly.

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

#149

Post by darkerside »

usrusr wrote: post #126
hackernewds wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you telling me a family drilled to heat their home and caused earthquake? that sounds absurd

The really interesting question might sound even more absurd: did that earthquake release stress that would have been released sooner or (worse:) later anyways? Should people affected by the earthquake thank the family for releasing stress before more accumulate?

Not absurd. Do you think the same might apply to quakes caused by fracking?

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

#150

Post by twobitshifter »

I can’t find what the progress or results of the arpa-e project were either on the quais website or elsewhere. https://arpa-e.energy.gov/technologies/projects/millimeter-w...

The Altarock energy site is currently showing a 503. Altarock from Seattle won the arpa grant and were noted as an “affiliate” of Quais in the ieee article.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/altarock-energy-melts-rock-with-mi...

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