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It's an interesting thought; I think you'd also have to look at the absolute dollar amounts of "luxury spend vs. capital/research reinvestment" to get the full
by theptip 8y ago
It's an interesting thought; I think you'd also have to look at the absolute dollar amounts of "luxury spend vs. capital/research reinvestment" to get the full picture. (Since the actual benefits accrued to society are proportional to the absolute spend on R&D).
Also, is R&D in fracking transferable? Or is it just tech that will be irrelevant in 20-30 years? (I don't have a good picture on this one; I could see a reasonable argument that we will be using natural gas for a long time, even when we're a mostly-renewable economy, since it's a convenient-to-transport form of energy as LNG).
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI can't imagine fracking is too transferable unless there's some other easily flowing substance you want to get out of the ground besides water, oil, or natural gas. EDIT: It might be useful for enabling greater storage density of CO2 in rock formations if we attempt to sequester CO2 out of the atmosphere at scale: https://phys.org/news/2018-11-co2-underground-curb-carbon-emissions.html https://phys.org/news/2018-11-co2-underground-curb-carbon-em...
- ggm 8y agoFracking is important in geothermal. An experimental form uses drilling to dry hot rocks and injection of water (even waste water or grey water) to produce steam. Destructive uses of aquifers may mean we need skills in underground water table remediation. I don't think fracking directly helps (I think it hinders) but we're going to need to understand how to use it to fix things as well as extract things.