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Ucs, the controversial organization, has an interesting analysis of geothermal. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-geothermal-energy https:

Ucs, the controversial organization, has an interesting analysis of geothermal. https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-geothermal-energy https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-geoth... The takeaway > Enhanced geothermal systems, which require energy to drill and pump water into hot rock reservoirs, have life-cycle global warming emission of approximately 0.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour [11]. > To put this into context, estimates of life-cycle global warming emissions for natural gas generated electricity are between 0.6 and 2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour and estimates for coal-generated electricity are 1.4 and 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour. Nothing is really truly zero carbon currently. Solar has manufacturing and maintenance. Nuclear has construction, mining, refinement, containment, etc. It's nice to see the full lifecycle being looked at. We can't pretend that something essential for the process doesn't matter because we do a classification handwaving. It all counts

goda90 5y ago
So we should be doing calculations of "what percentage of its lifetime power production is required to sequester the carbon it took to create and use it?"
- kristopolous 5y ago
  That's almost a peak oil approach, which was both insufficient and the most accurate possible. We can only state things in terms of stuff which currently exists. The future will yield different results because new techniques and technologies will come along. But we can't rely on or predict them. There's a lot of "pons and fleischmanning" when talking about future energy use - mass scale geo-engineering or sucking carbon out of the atmosphere technology, it has to be avoided. The technologies don't exist yet. We have to use real-world stuff. Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists. It's messy, sloppy, and requires a large trashcan but the alternative is to get to results that rely on things that literally do not actually exist. Kinda like how the people planning Operation Downfall (the land invasion of japan during ww2) weren't told about all the other things in the works (backroom deal to get Russia to declare war on Japan and the Manhattan project), they had to assume those things would continue to not happen. [1] - The Hubbert peak was essentially that the amount of energy to extract and refine oil would surpass the energy from the oil and thus make it unsustainable so the operations for oil extraction would cease. New techniques have been developed (such as fracking) which have changed this math, but in 1956, using 1956 knowledge, this was the best prediction possible. It's somewhat Malthusian - who was also as "correct as possible" with the best science that 1798 had to offer. He couldn't factor in, say, the Haber–Bosch process from 112 years in the future in his food growth computations.
  - scarby2 5y ago
    > Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists. but are certain that at least one of these fictitious scenarios will come into being. We just have no certainty as to which.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The first step in this is inventing a scalable way of sequestering the carbon from atmospheric CO2. We have been talking about carbon markets for over three decades now and still have not solved the supply side of the equation. It's frankly embarrassing.
  - rapind 5y ago
    Is it embarrassing? Maybe it’s a shortage of market incentives or maybe it’s just a really difficult problem? We shouldn’t assume we’ll have innovative solutions for everything. I think a healthier futuristic perspective would be one that considers only some percentage of problems will be solved through innovation, at least in the near term. That way we accept we still could be screwed and need to work harder!
    - jandrese 5y ago
      It's embarrassing that we are still using fossil fuels without any plan to deal with the pollution it causes. It isn't like people weren't aware of the problem either, I remember talks in the 80s about the Greenhouse Effect and how we needed to act quickly before the problem got out of hand. We're already well past the point where if we just stopped emitting we will be ok. We now need carbon capture as part of the solution and thus far nothing has panned out. Nor is there much political will to actually push for solutions. They're just seen as pure cost that will make your country less competitive so nobody wants to be the only country who goes for "truth" in this prisoner's dilemma.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        The big problems in the 80s were acid rain and recycling. We kind of nailed those. Global warming wasn't as important as a nuclear winter. Embarrassing to use fossil fuels? In front of who? some future self who judges you? Wait till you see next decades' problems.
        beebeepka 5y ago
        Recycling has been nailed? I might have missed a few major breakthroughs because the plastixa problem seems anything but fixed to me
swiley 5y ago
The "free energe" is moving the heat from the hot rock to the atmosphere. The difference is that it's not doing that by oxidizing carbon to CO2.
- tsmarsh 5y ago
  Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.
siddboots 5y ago
Life-cycle emissions accounting is useful if we're considering technology options or feasibility assessment for a specific project. But the linked article isn't talking about any specific project. It's talking about whether geothermal is a good tech in general. In that context the lifecycle emissions stats are less useful because the calculation assumes a rate of indirect emissions (due to construction, mining, refinement, containment, etc.) based on the incumbent power generation tech. In other words, if geothermal power was more ubiquitous, then the indirect emissions for a new geothermal project would be lower.
emtel 5y ago
Yes, but carbon costs come from burning fossil fuels. If you don't burn fossil fuels to drill wells or build PV panels, then those don't have an embodied life-cycle carbon cost. I'm being a bit pedantic, but I think its an important point: The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time.
- imtringued 5y ago
  You can probably do "time" arbitrage here. The CO2 price is low today so CO2 intensive construction is still viable today but it won't be in the future. Thus your geothermal plant will end up becoming more profitable over time.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  > The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time. Sure but we are talking about right now. Things will eventually be swapped out. That's a different conversation though, it's an advocacy and not a descriptive one. People tend to use things that are marginally adequate way longer than anyone intended. For instance, the ancient Roman gravity dam of Proserpina is still doing its job. Even if we had say a sleek $1,000 self driving solar car that never needs charging and goes for a million miles without maintenance, there's no guaranteed adoption curve, production capacity, distribution and logistic timeline, consumer acceptance, these are all hard unknown realities regardless of how silvery the bullets are.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible). Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well. Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants! I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine. We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.
User23 5y ago
Zero carbon is a nonsensical goal. The carbon cycle is necessary. The issue is whether or not it ends up in an equilibrium pleasant for human life or not.
chmod775 5y ago
> life-cycle global warming emission of approximately 0.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour "pounds per kilowatt-hour" has to be a strong contender for most ridiculous choice of units. One might almost use that as a joke. Even "pounds per mechanical horsepower hours" would have been more sane.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  The standard unit is gCO2e/kWh (grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour).
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
> We can't pretend that something essential for the process doesn't matter because we do a classification handwaving. It all counts Funny thing: in France, stats for wind energy include the cost of wiring, and cables are required to be buried. Stats for nuclear just ignore the wiring. I'm pro nuclear, but that always bugged me.

goda90 5y ago

So we should be doing calculations of "what percentage of its lifetime power production is required to sequester the carbon it took to create and use it?"

kristopolous 5y ago
That's almost a peak oil approach, which was both insufficient and the most accurate possible. We can only state things in terms of stuff which currently exists. The future will yield different results because new techniques and technologies will come along. But we can't rely on or predict them. There's a lot of "pons and fleischmanning" when talking about future energy use - mass scale geo-engineering or sucking carbon out of the atmosphere technology, it has to be avoided. The technologies don't exist yet. We have to use real-world stuff. Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists. It's messy, sloppy, and requires a large trashcan but the alternative is to get to results that rely on things that literally do not actually exist. Kinda like how the people planning Operation Downfall (the land invasion of japan during ww2) weren't told about all the other things in the works (backroom deal to get Russia to declare war on Japan and the Manhattan project), they had to assume those things would continue to not happen. [1] - The Hubbert peak was essentially that the amount of energy to extract and refine oil would surpass the energy from the oil and thus make it unsustainable so the operations for oil extraction would cease. New techniques have been developed (such as fracking) which have changed this math, but in 1956, using 1956 knowledge, this was the best prediction possible. It's somewhat Malthusian - who was also as "correct as possible" with the best science that 1798 had to offer. He couldn't factor in, say, the Haber–Bosch process from 112 years in the future in his food growth computations.
- scarby2 5y ago
  > Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists. but are certain that at least one of these fictitious scenarios will come into being. We just have no certainty as to which.
jandrese 5y ago
The first step in this is inventing a scalable way of sequestering the carbon from atmospheric CO2. We have been talking about carbon markets for over three decades now and still have not solved the supply side of the equation. It's frankly embarrassing.
- rapind 5y ago
  Is it embarrassing? Maybe it’s a shortage of market incentives or maybe it’s just a really difficult problem? We shouldn’t assume we’ll have innovative solutions for everything. I think a healthier futuristic perspective would be one that considers only some percentage of problems will be solved through innovation, at least in the near term. That way we accept we still could be screwed and need to work harder!
  - jandrese 5y ago
    It's embarrassing that we are still using fossil fuels without any plan to deal with the pollution it causes. It isn't like people weren't aware of the problem either, I remember talks in the 80s about the Greenhouse Effect and how we needed to act quickly before the problem got out of hand. We're already well past the point where if we just stopped emitting we will be ok. We now need carbon capture as part of the solution and thus far nothing has panned out. Nor is there much political will to actually push for solutions. They're just seen as pure cost that will make your country less competitive so nobody wants to be the only country who goes for "truth" in this prisoner's dilemma.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      The big problems in the 80s were acid rain and recycling. We kind of nailed those. Global warming wasn't as important as a nuclear winter. Embarrassing to use fossil fuels? In front of who? some future self who judges you? Wait till you see next decades' problems.
      - beebeepka 5y ago
        Recycling has been nailed? I might have missed a few major breakthroughs because the plastixa problem seems anything but fixed to me

swiley 5y ago

The "free energe" is moving the heat from the hot rock to the atmosphere. The difference is that it's not doing that by oxidizing carbon to CO2.

tsmarsh 5y ago
Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.

siddboots 5y ago

Life-cycle emissions accounting is useful if we're considering technology options or feasibility assessment for a specific project. But the linked article isn't talking about any specific project. It's talking about whether geothermal is a good tech in general. In that context the lifecycle emissions stats are less useful because the calculation assumes a rate of indirect emissions (due to construction, mining, refinement, containment, etc.) based on the incumbent power generation tech. In other words, if geothermal power was more ubiquitous, then the indirect emissions for a new geothermal project would be lower.

emtel 5y ago

Yes, but carbon costs come from burning fossil fuels. If you don't burn fossil fuels to drill wells or build PV panels, then those don't have an embodied life-cycle carbon cost. I'm being a bit pedantic, but I think its an important point: The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time.

imtringued 5y ago
You can probably do "time" arbitrage here. The CO2 price is low today so CO2 intensive construction is still viable today but it won't be in the future. Thus your geothermal plant will end up becoming more profitable over time.
kristopolous 5y ago
> The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time. Sure but we are talking about right now. Things will eventually be swapped out. That's a different conversation though, it's an advocacy and not a descriptive one. People tend to use things that are marginally adequate way longer than anyone intended. For instance, the ancient Roman gravity dam of Proserpina is still doing its job. Even if we had say a sleek $1,000 self driving solar car that never needs charging and goes for a million miles without maintenance, there's no guaranteed adoption curve, production capacity, distribution and logistic timeline, consumer acceptance, these are all hard unknown realities regardless of how silvery the bullets are.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible). Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well. Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants! I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine. We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.

User23 5y ago

Zero carbon is a nonsensical goal. The carbon cycle is necessary. The issue is whether or not it ends up in an equilibrium pleasant for human life or not.

chmod775 5y ago

> life-cycle global warming emission of approximately 0.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour "pounds per kilowatt-hour" has to be a strong contender for most ridiculous choice of units. One might almost use that as a joke. Even "pounds per mechanical horsepower hours" would have been more sane.

stephen_g 5y ago
The standard unit is gCO2e/kWh (grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour).

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

> We can't pretend that something essential for the process doesn't matter because we do a classification handwaving. It all counts Funny thing: in France, stats for wind energy include the cost of wiring, and cables are required to be buried. Stats for nuclear just ignore the wiring. I'm pro nuclear, but that always bugged me.