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Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? (2016)
- pstuart 5y agoOn a related note: why not seriously tap these geothermal hot spots for energy? Doesn't stop at night or when the wind dies down.
- pope_meat 5y agoIt's hard to drill in to hot things, bits melt.
- ceejayoz 5y agoYou don't have to go all the way in to be able to obtain energy. Hawaii and Iceland both have geothermal power generation facilities; it's very doable.
- robbedpeter 5y agoMaintenance costs overrun any efficiency gains by using geothermal even under optimal conditions, so unless there's other reasons to use it, ideological or economic, most companies will stick to the local grid. There are some really cool innovations with graphene coatings generating power as hot saltwater flows over it, simplifying power generation by basically creating giant linear convection flows(, as well as graphene coatings on bits to increase durability.) The technology has a ways to go to compete with solar or coal or gas if grid proximity isn't a problem.
- jbuzbee 5y agoIceland generates 25% of their energy geothermically https://nea.is/geothermal/ https://nea.is/geothermal/
- 1123581321 5y agoThere is plenty of geothermal. Where there’s not, it’s usually because another local form of generation is more attractive (e.g., hydro for volcanos near the sea) or the volcanic system is environmentally or culturally protected.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoWe do, where it makes sense, like Iceland: https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/iceland#energy-mix https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/iceland#energy-mix But, as it being listed as 'other renewable' hints, it doesn't make as much sense elsewhere, where generally you can just install more solar and wind and save more carbon/money that way, and leave worrying about windless nights till you've picked the low hanging fruit. For example, the current US plan is that after getting to 95% carbon free energy, to switch the focus to electrifying more things that currently burn fuel directly, rather than worry about that awkward last 5% before they need to.
- toss1 5y agoIt's a great idea and they do it, particularly in Iceland and Hawaii, iirc. My recollection is that the big issue with geothermal is the minerals leaching out of the drilled rocks and fairly rapidly fouling the near/above-round equipment or depositing on the tubes/pipes closing them down. I understand that progress had been made; if anyone has more details handy, could you post links?
- pcmaffey 5y agoHere's a good "state of the art of geothermal drilling" article - https://austinvernon.site/blog/drillingplan.html https://austinvernon.site/blog/drillingplan.html
- jandrewrogers 5y agoAt least in the US, environmental activism has contributed to lack of geothermal development. While the US has large regions with high geothermal potential, such as the Great Basin area of the mountain West, much of this land is undeveloped and under Federal control. This allows activists anywhere in the country to make getting permission difficult and expensive, the effect of which has been to limit the practical size of the power plants to ~25 MW. Large-scale geothermal installations are not pretty and they cover large areas of land. The individual bore holes must be widely separated from each other, so if you are aggregating the energy of many bores, you are building giant pipe networks. It looks a bit like a large oil field. This gets attacked by environmental activists as despoiling the natural habitat/beauty etc of the formerly undeveloped land. In places like Nevada, which has a lot of geothermal power, there is nothing attractive or unique about this land, it is essentially volcanic badlands of the boring variety, but the campaigns against them use deceptive pictures from other parts of the country suggesting that they are paving over national parks and similar. This propaganda against geothermal power generation makes it impractical at scale. Instead, the geothermal power plants that are practical to build in this regulatory environment are all solutions with small land footprints. The largest geothermal power plant in Nevada is <100 MW and most don't even do 20 MW. Of course, there are similar challenges when trying to install solar power at scale in the same kinds of places. Too much of our "green energy" policy is dictated by activists that don't want to build any kind of power generation anywhere.
- ncmncm 5y agoThere is plenty of geothermal power generation going on in the US, but it is not increasing. That is not a triumph of ecoterror, but of economics: solar and wind are already substantically cheaper, and continue getting much cheaper, where geothermal, like nukes, stays just as expensive to build and operate as ever. So, pace baseload, a dollar spent today is overwhelmingly better spent on a solar panel or wind turbine, or, soon, storage for solar and wind, or production of H2 as feedstock for industrial processes and hydrocarbon synthesis from captured CO2. There is never any need to install new solar or wind in wilderness. Both coexist productively and synergistically with current agricultural land use. A farm or pasture with solar is more agriculturally productive than the same without, and also generates clean power. In effect, the power output subsidizes construction of the shading infrastructure that reduces heat stress and evaporation. A wind turbine displaces minimal ground area, and thus may be in the middle of a solar farm, both situated in current, productive cropland. Output may be used locally to produce ammonia when spot prices bottom out, useful on-site for both fertilizer and fuel.
- q1w2 5y agoIt's not a very efficient process. Firstly, you need to drill very very far down, unless you are near an active volcano. If it isn't very near the surface, most heat is lost traveling up the bore hole. Remember that you never drill INTO the magma chamber, because that would collapse/plug the hole, so companies drill adjacent to the magma chamber and allow radiant heat to rise. It's also unstable and inconsistent. Ground water changes, magma movement, hole collapses, all make it an unreliable source of power.
- zoe4883 5y agoWould not that have massive CO2 footprint? It would be very expensive to pay for it. Vulcanic eruption is natural and does not count, but man-made emmisions require permit.
- gambiting 5y ago>>Vulcanic eruption is natural and does not count, I'm pretty sure the Earth's atmoshphere is physically incapable of differentiating between man-released CO2 and naturally released CO2. >> man-made emmisions require permit Whose permit? On what authority? Even if such permit would be required, who would deny it if the alternative was literally the destruction of a large portion of the United States(if we are talking about Yellowstone exploding)?
- Supermancho 5y agoThis would be an issue of national security. I would not want to be the person who spends money to set up drilling toward the Yellowstone Supervolcano without alerting the US Department of the Interior of the plans.
- gambiting 5y agoI can only imagine that such a massive enterprise would be entirely conducted by the US Government, probably any of the military branches(is Engineers Corps still a thing?)
- kingaillas 5y agoThe Army Corps of Engineers is a thing... their civil works authority makes them the final authority on water management (changing river flow, dams, anything related to water management.) Not sure about supervolcanos though, couldn't find that on their website. I am sure that a minimum of the US Geological Survey and ACE will be involved in any supervolcano remediation plan. And probably FEMA but hopefully they won't need to act. ;)
- deleted 5y ago
- ortusdux 5y agoRe: the first paragraph's reference to nuking the Deepwater horizon's oil leak, Soviet engineers demonstrated that this was a viable technique back in the 60's. Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years, but this is the only one I can think of that is actually somewhat of a good idea. Any fallout is minor and contained under 1km+ of bedrock, and the harm prevented is worth the cost. I am surprised that the author dismisses it so rapidly. https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonated-a-nuke-miles-underground-to-put-out-a-gas-well-fire https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57Xq03njsc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57Xq03njsc
- jjk166 5y agoThe author's logic is that only things comparable in scale to a volcano can cancel out the volcano by brute force, and nuclear detonations are thousands to millions of times smaller than volcanic eruptions. Proposals for things like this involve using nuclear detonations to make small but critical disruptions to systems, so the logic doesn't apply, but without actually digging into it you generally wouldn't know that's what the plan entails. Admittedly, it's unintuitive to think of nuclear detonations as a precise scalpel instead of a blunt cudgel. It also doesn't help that the well thought out proposals often get crudely parroted, so "collapse the well 1 km down to choke off the flow of oil" becomes "blow up the well".
- Brian_K_White 5y agoI would think the biggest point about collapsing a well is that the well IS a human-made, human-scale object. It IS a blunt instrument not a pin prick in that case.
- ryanmercer 5y ago>Plenty of wild non-war applications have been proposed for nuclear bombs over the years Yup, Project Plowshare (US) and Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (USSR) looked a lot of interesting/crazy ideas for non-military applications for nuclear weapons. Some of the ideas were just nuts for use on earth (like making bays) but if we ever do start setting up shop on another planet, like Mars, nuclear detonations could probably be used for construction efforts early on to get some serious work done quickly - Project Orion, especially if done with materials mined from the asteroid belt, could be an extremely viable option for interstellar travel even if just for probes. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Plowshare https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Plowshare https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_Natio... https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsio...
- q1w2 5y agoI think the answer is good, but misses one important point - it is not like there is a thin barrier where there's a sharp pressure gradient, such that you can "pop" the volcano, or allow it to fizz like a shaken coke can with a tiny hole. When you drill down into the volcano, the hole just collapses on itself and plugs itself back up. The closer you get to the caldera, the rock become viscous and hot. Not only does your drill bit melt, but it's like trying to a hole into warming ice-cream - you don't accomplish anything. Geothermal energy plants function by drilling holes near magma chambers, and allowing some heat to radiate into the bore hole, and then up the shaft. ...and while this process extracts some heat, the energy withdrawn is orders of magnitude smaller than what is present.
- hinkley 5y agoWhen you core a tree to look at growth rings you have to be fast because the wood will begin to swell almost immediately. If you get distracted then you lose the corer. The tree is stronger than the handle. I would think rocks under high pressure would do the same thing. You’d either have to dig a conical hole to get a cylindrical bore, or the boring machine would have to have cutters on both the face and the sides to keep grinding away rock that expands into the void you are creating.
- deepsun 5y ago> the hole just collapses on itself and plugs itself back up Same with modern day oil holes. They just reinforce the walls of the hole with concrete. Much harder problem is to prevent oil and gas from rushing up through the well, and breaking the rig (it always ignites afterwards). Imagine that with lava.
- tombh 5y agoThanks, I think yours is actually a much more relevant answer than the one in the article. Personally, I took the original question as a _geophysical_ one, not a logistical one. I mean sure it's geophysically interesting that our current drills are just orders of magnitude too inconsequential, but your answer actually corrects the implied intuition that both I and the question asker wrongly had, namely that magma is like coke in a can.
- jjk166 5y ago[0] https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/documents/DefendingCivilizationFromSupervolcanos20151015.pdf https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/sites/default/file... You wouldn't want to drill into the magma chamber to relieve pressure, instead you would drill next to the magma chamber to cool the rocks on the edge, shrinking the chamber. Every few decades after the chamber had shrunk, you'd drill a new set of boreholes closer. The expense would be substantial, but well within the range of major government projects, and if you use the heat for power generation you can recover some of that cost - indeed if you subsidize the initial logistical setup, the long term operation can likely be fiscally self sustaining.
- gonzo41 5y agoAnd if you make a mistake....or cause an earthquake things could very quickly get away from you.
- senectus1 5y agohasn't the unintended consequences of FRACKING taught us anything? you go poking fairly stable systems and they will become unstable for us fairly quickly and uncontrollably.
- xyzzy21 5y agoAlso if you apply hydraulic equations to the lave through such a small diameter borehole, you quickly find that you would NOT be in control of anything and you'd probably do more to trigger a large eruption - the velocity of lava out of such a borehole would be hypersonic at least and quickly open the borehole to form a new vent equal to an actual eruption.
- dmos62 5y agoHypersonic lava sounds AWESOME!
- trenning 5y agoThis could be used as an assist to space maybe :) sustainable Earth based lava launches
- dmos62 5y agoI always felt that space colonization was a semi-conscious way of giving up on sustainability on Earth. Purposefully erupting supervolcanoes to launch spaceships would be the ultimate illustration of that.
- ineedasername 5y agoI'm not sure if that would be better or worse than Project Orion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
- chasd00 5y agoWell if it came out above the escape velocity maybe it would just shoot off into space ;)
- beerandt 5y agoWith volcanos, the more viscous the magma, the more energy gets stored before an eruption. Supervolcanos are the most viscous type, hence the massive explosion. Think boiling water vs thick oatmeal vs boiling a pressure cooker until it explodes, but obviously worse. So "relieve pressure" in this case isn't like a pressure release valve on a water heater. You'd need to either cool the mass, remove the overburden, or create some sort of massive voids for expansion. The US nuclear test done in Mississippi resulted in vaporizing the rock and soil and creating a large underground void, for whatever that's worth as a sort of proof of concept.
- MisterTea 5y ago> The US nuclear test done in Mississippi resulted in vaporizing the rock and soil and creating a large underground void, for whatever that's worth as a sort of proof of concept. Where did the vaporized rock and soil go?
- beerandt 5y ago>Where did the vaporized rock and soil go? "What are you, the rock police? I put'em up on my a**. How's that?"
- jdsully 5y agoI imagine it escaped as a gas.
- caeril 5y agoIt escapes . . . as a gas . . . in an already highly pressurized environment . . . that is already containing a large amount of high-pressure hydrogen sulfide that cannot escape as it is? I'm pressing X to doubt.
- ineedasername 5y agoThat just means you need a second nuke to blow a hole that allows the gas to escape & lave to flow in, and a 3rd nuke to collapse the hole before the lava gets too far. It's all there in my book, "How to nuke your way out of any problem"
- Subsentient 5y agoLol. Yeah that totally sounds like a great idea that is going to end super well and not backfire at all!
- Terry_Roll 5y agoI've often wondered if its possible to use a fault line as a waste compactor and recycling centre considering all our "man made" waste comes from this planet?
- VintageCool 5y agoMost subduction zones are quite far underwater, so... the trash would probably just bob to the surface and float.
- phkahler 5y agoOne thing not considered in TFA is the idea of drilling a hole and then using nuclear explosions to pulverize the surrounding rock to effectively increase the size of the hole. This might also punch through the last (how many?) meters of rock that are too hot to drill through. I still doubt it would work, and if it did that might be really bad too.
- TrainedMonkey 5y agoBoth Cold War superpowers considered some variant of using nuclear weaponry for subterranean engineering in their "peaceful atom" projects. For example soviets actually used a nuke to put out a gas well fire: https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonated-a-nuke-miles-underground-to-put-out-a-gas-well-fire https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...
- ineedasername 5y agoYep, the US had a program called "Project Plowshares" dedicated to their use in, primarily, construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
- dragonwriter 5y agoThe quiet-part-out-loudness of naming a project designed as a propaganda measure to leverage peaceful applications of nuclear technology (including explosions) to build acceptance of (/ mitigate opposition to) nuclear weaponry qua weaponry so as to invoke Joel 3:9-10 (“Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: / Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong”) is, well, pretty amazing.
- techdragon 5y agoNeat, now I have a counter quote for “swords into ploughshares”
- anm89 5y agoFollow up question: if you were able to meaningfully release that heat, would it be enough to affect the global climate?
- zardo 5y agoThe heat will be getting out one way or another.
- anm89 5y agoAs far as I know, nothing has been releaseed from one of these major calderas at scale in recorded history
- ceejayoz 5y agoThat's like saying humans don't have to eat because you haven't been hungry in the last minute.
- anm89 5y agoNo it's like asking the question: "how would it affect it" because I don't have any data. I'm not arguing that it's never happened. I'm quite aware of the fact that the earth is older than written records of the earth.
- margalabargala 5y agoGenerally no. Heat on earth is radiated out to space quite quickly. When Mount St Helens exploded, it released about 1.0e11 MJ of energy. The earth receives 21MJ of energy from the sun, per day, per square meter. So MSH in total released as much energy in total as a square of land 70km on a side receives in a single day from the sun. Which isn't tiny, but is a relative drop in the bucket compared to the whole planet. Considering that this hypothetical heat source would be very concentrated and so would radiate to space efficiently and not spread out as much, I wouldn't expect it to have much of any effect on the climate.
- ethbr0 5y agoMy favorite National Park Service quip of all time. At the bottom of the page on Yellowstone's volcano [0] are a few questions and answers, and among them this gem: >> What is Yellowstone National Park doing to stop or prevent an erruption? > Nothing can be done to prevent an eruption. The temperatures, pressures, physical characteristics of partially molten rock, and immensity of the magma chamber are beyond human ability to impact—much less control. In my head, some staff geologist, tired of answering dumb questions, was asked and finally snapped a little. [0] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/volcano.htm https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/volcano.htm
- intpx 5y agoThis is a very clear distillation of the absolute lack of imagination that is endemic across the National Parks Service. It is this mindset that stagnating progress in the National Parks. 105 years and there have been no major developments in Parks technologies. No waterfalls running in reverse, no water-skiing bison, no Grander Canyon. /s
- ncmncm 5y ago"PSA: Before drilling into a supervolcano magma chamber, please arrange to accept and dispose of at least 1000 cubic miles of superheated lava to be emitted at a flow rate of up to 1 cubic mile per hour. Thank you for your attention to this detail."
- ineedasername 5y agoYep- a rapid pressure release where the outlet is the surface of the earth is pretty much indistinguishable from a normal unplanned eruption. With, as a comment in the post suggested, a nice dose of nuclear fallout in the mix.
- ineedasername 5y agoTLDR: No. But RTFA anyway, it's a good read, and a little unsettling how many problems people think could be solved with just a bit of nuclear bombing.
- hilbert42 5y ago"People who think a nuclear device is comparable to the energy released by a volcano just haven't seen a restless volcano up close. They are a whole lot bigger than they seem to be in the films. Mount St Helens is a relatively small volcano, yet it still took me nearly 6 hours to walk out of the center crater." I can well attest to that. A year or so after the major eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, I had business in both Portland and Seattle and on that occasion I drove from Portland to Seattle rather than fly, as I'd normally do. (I'd been to Tektronix to whinge about ongoing problems we'd been having with a PAL 625 TV sync pulse generator—an interesting story in itself but I'll leave that for another time). I live an ocean away—thousands of miles from Portland but I had an ulterior motive for renting a vehicle in Portland and driving to Seattle, as this time I wanted to visit and drive over the 'renewed' Tacoma Narrows bridge which replaced the infamous Galloping Gertie that failed in 1940—of which I'd learned so much about years earlier in structures and physics. Having a vehicle made that possible. Visiting Mt St Helens wasn't on my agenda—and I'd already seen it post the 1980 eruption from a commercial SFO/SEA flight although I did expect to see it in the distance to the east from the I5. It was somewhat latish afternoon, 3:30–4:00 pm, when I arrived at my nearest point on the I5 to Mt St Helens and unexpectedly nearby there was a small airfield. Signs on the highway indicated that a company was offering joy flights to Mt St Helens, so on-the-spur-of-the-moment I decided to take the flight. Unfortunately, I was the only one wanting a flight at that time and the pilot told me that it was uneconomic to take only one person (two being the minimum) so I'd have to wait until additional sightseers turned up—and if that didn't happen soon (within 15 or so minutes) then it'd be too late in the day to fly! Anyway, I struck a deal at somewhat less than the amount for two people and we were on our way. I don't need to describe this remarkable scene except to say it was spectacular—much more so than the somewhat limited view from the commercial jet; and anyone who's interested will already be familiar with the wonderful photos in National Geographic and elsewhere. However, one point I must comment on is that for mile after mile in this desolate lunar-mud-like landscape the remaining trunks of the flattened pine trees were all facing radially away from the exit point of the explosion like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, it was one of the strangest sights I've ever seen. There was no doubt that this was an extremely huge explosion. After doing the standard joy flight, the pilot suggested that seeing I'd paid much more than the normal fare would I like him to take me closer to the crater. Gleefully, I agreed and we not only got closer to the crater but we actually flew around inside it — right, the crater is truly huge when one's actually inside it! When the author says it took him nearly 'six hours to walk out of the center of the crater' he not exaggerating one iota. 'Tis a damn shame photos aren't allowed on HN, otherwise I'd post some of my old slides taken from inside the crater (they're truly spectacular).
- phendrenad2 5y agoPoke it with a giant straw like a juice box and suck the lava out. Straw should be made from non-stick ultra-high-temperature ceramic. You just need to find someone large enough to use the straw.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoIt seems like there's a mistaken assumption here. Suppose you had a cheat code for the drill problem (starship Enterprise is in orbit, it fires its phasers and ablates a huge hole down to several kilometers). The only way to relieve the overpressure is for a sufficiently large volume of hot, liquid rock to rush up through that hole to the surface - that is to say, an eruption. Which is precisely what you were trying to avoid.
- tlamponi 5y agoThe difference would be (very simplified) the one between poking a controlled hole with a needle in an only somewhat inflated water balloon now, causing a small but steady stream of water to push out, vs. waiting until it fills up and bursts completely, one is way more violent than the other.
- JulianMorrison 5y agoSupervolcanoes generally aren't violent, though. They're just really, really big. It's the ash and gases that do the damage.
- tlamponi 5y agoI do not get your point, as where do those ash and gases from if not said super volcano erupting due to high pressure - which can mean both higher pressure than previously or less pressure resistance of the chamber, or a combination of that, which could be reduced by letting out a steady magma flow earlier which itself doesn't mean there has to be lots of ash or gases getting spewed out (i.e., the violent part).
- beerandt 5y ago>Supervolcanoes generally aren't violent, though. Yes, they are. You're probably thinking of pyroclastic flow, which is also quite violent on its own. It's the waterfall of everything in the eruption column falling back to earth, and contains solid and molten rock, ash, deadly chemicals, and superheated gas, all traveling at hundreds of miles per hour. >>A supervolcano is a volcano that has had an eruption with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 8, the largest recorded value on the index. This means the volume of deposits for such an eruption is greater than 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles). The most recent supervolcano eruption was what formed Lake Taupo, New Zealand: >>The Oruanui eruption of the Taupō Volcano was the world's largest known eruption in the past 70,000 years, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index of 8. It occurred around 26,500 years ago and generated approximately 430 km3 (100 cu mi) of pyroclastic fall deposits, 320 km3 (77 cu mi) of pyroclastic density current (PDC) deposits (mostly ignimbrite) and 420 km3 (100 cu mi) of primary intracaldera material, equivalent to 530 km3 (130 cu mi) of magma. >>Modern Lake Taupō partly fills the caldera generated during this eruption. Tephra from the eruption covered much of the central North Island with ignimbrite up to 200 m (660 ft) deep.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago>Can you drill into a supervolcano to relieve pressure? Yes, but I'm going to need a bigger drill . . .