I wonder if you could optimize it a little further to get energy from both directions…
Energy produced in the way up (heated water) and on the way down (gravity-Fed turbines)
You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
41–50 of 314 posts
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#42Yeah 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
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.
It seems like this is a real problem: https://news.stanford.edu/2019/05/23/lessons-south-korea-sol...
That said, it also seems like this proposed technique is very different and probably wouldn't have the same issues.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#43Earlier 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…
I think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
I think we're deep into the territory of "literally anything we choose to do or not do is going to create a never ending game of whack-a-mole unintended consequences".
We own the fate of our civilization and the environment it relies on.
It's time to take ownership and stop cowering in the cave.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#44Earlier 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.
Many countries have almost no wilderness left; everything is either urban or agriculture or mountains with no convenient place for an earthquake.
Seismic disturbances are generally a concern for dense urban areas. It seems unlikely that agricultural areas would care that much.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#45Microwave drilling. It's a known thing at small scale.[1] If it can be done at larger scale, it ought to have other applications. Doing it downhole at the end of a long pipe string is going to be much harder than doing it in a factory. So why isn't this an industrial machining process already, like plasma cutting?
GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.
The University of Minnesota was pushing electro-pulse boring in 2015.[3] Again, no deep holes.
There's something called ThermoDrilling, which, despite the name, is more like a water jet cutter.[4]
Successful projects are still using mechanical drilling.[5]
So there are a lot of deep hole drilling approaches being studied. 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.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270653673_Microwave...
[2] https://www.gadrilling.com/
[3] https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/electro-pulse-boring...
[4] https://www.geodrillinginternational.com/deep-geothermal/new...
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#46Yeah 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
The Staufen im Breisgau mishap is one of the learning experiences of geothermal energy, like analyzing the type of rock that you plan to drill through, and maybe not drill in a town center.
But apart from that, you seem to have misinterpreted the Quaise technology, mixing apples and oranges. This is not conventional drilling which can cause water to flow into adjacent rock (not to mention fracking which deliberately cracks the bedrock to allow water to flow through).
This technology is vaporizing the rock and at the same time creating a sealed shaft which funnels the water directly to the great depths where the water can reach supercritical steam state, and so avoiding the issues that caused the Staufen im Breisgau mishap.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#47How much energy is in the core of the Earth? What happens if we cooled the core to the point that it became solid? I’m guessing that would be bad, but is it something that’s not conceivably possible on any human timescale?
Not until humanity becomes a type 2 Civilization. Which seems like at least a 1000 years away.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#48Something 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…
Solar is also trapping more energy than what would never be there. If the sun's rays just hit the ground, a portion of it would be reflected back. We're using dark material to aborb most of what would be reflected back and we end up trapping more energy than we should... Solar panels are around 15% efficient, which means 85% of this trapped energy is immediately converted to heat, heating the local environment... and…
Good point.
I wonder if solar energy is going to need to install high albedo surface area to offset it's low albedo energy absorption to satisfy some future version of ESG constraints.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#49A 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. As terrible as an oil spill is, they're not very common.
Re: You can have geothermal power everywhere if you drill deep enough
#50Earlier 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…
The current narrative is intentionally defeatist because it's promoted by fossil fuel interests to serve their short term interests.
People who aren't interested in prolonging our use of fossil fuels are instead excited about the cheapest energy in history that renewables provide.