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I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal. Geothermal has been around for
by modeless 4y ago
I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal.
Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep.
Geothermal energy exists under every point on Earth, in quantities far greater than we could ever use, in the form of heat which can be used to run steam turbines that existing power plants already have.
The problem is that this energy lies deeper than we have ever dug. If we could dig deeper, we might be able to replace the fuel burning part of most existing fossil fuel power plants with geothermal steam. Deep boring is a hard problem to be sure, but is it harder than fusion? Seems unlikely!
Anyway, this startup https://www.quaise.energy/ https://www.quaise.energy/ was on HN a while ago, and while I have no idea if their specific technology works, it seems like we ought to be allocating at least a medium size fraction of the fusion research budget to deep bore geothermal research instead.
- macspoofing 4y agoUltra deep bore geothermal is a science project right now.
- modeless 4y agoSo is fusion.
- macspoofing 4y agoAbsolutely. Fission on the other hand, proven and ready to go.
- pfdietz 4y agoIt's a shame it's an economic loser of a technology, even after generations of government pump priming.
- macspoofing 4y agoBut it can do something that wind/solar can't ... it can actually power a modern economy. So fission is a loser, what does that make wind/solar?
- pfdietz 4y agoWind/solar can power a modern economy, and probably more cheaply than nuclear can.
- macspoofing 4y agoThere is no country on Earth that is powered by wind/solar or replaced fossil fuels with wind/solar.
- pfdietz 4y agoAh yes. If something hasn't happened yet, it's impossible. This is an excellent future-oriented mindset you have there.
- macspoofing 4y agoObviously that's not true, but it is a data point you have to explain. For all the lip-service paid to wind and solar, nobody is actually acting like wind/solar are the future.
- pfdietz 4y agoLook, all that the lack of domination of solar/wind shows at this time is that solar and wind are not yet cheap enough to displace already installed, capital-cost-sunk fossil-fuel-using plants which are not being charged CO2 fees. Be able to achieve that would be remarkable. However, in most of the world, most new generating capacity is renewable, even without CO2 charges. Renewables have crashed in cost so quickly that there's still a large installed base of fossil fuel capacity that just hasn't reached end of life yet. The persistence of this zombie technology doesn't mean renewables can't power the world, it just means zombies are hard to kill.
- cptcobalt 4y agoA science project that could indeed be worth it.
- macspoofing 4y agoYeah - put R&D and money in it, and maybe it'll work in a couple decades. But don't bank on it just yet as a solution to climate change.
- purplerabbit 4y agoAnd we should absolutely pursue it. In the meantime let’s do more natural gas, solar, wind, and nuclear.
- alex_suzuki 4y agoAh… Moria. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Nicholas_C 4y agoFervo (https://www.fervoenergy.com https://www.fervoenergy.com) is another deep bore geothermal startup.
- jacobsimon 4y agoSounds too good to be true! Is geothermal truly renewable? Or is it just abundant enough that it would last us for thousands of years? I wonder if there are other long term side effects of releasing heat from the core.
- layer8 4y agoRead here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Renewability_and_sustainability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Renewability... It should probably last until the sun becomes a red giant. (And earth will have lost its atmosphere long before that.)
- telchar 4y agoMost geothermal heat is produced by nuclear decay in subsurface radioisotopes vs gravitational/frictional source or residual heat of planetary formation, so it's effectively renewable at any kind of level of extraction that we might feasibly be able to make use of. "About 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the Earth’s crust, or surface, is the hottest part of our planet: the core. A small portion of the core’s heat comes from the friction and gravitational pull formed when Earth was created more than 4 billion years ago. However, the vast majority of Earth’s heat is constantly generated by the decay of radioactive isotopes, such as potassium-40 and thorium-232."[0] [0] https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/geothermal-energy https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/geothermal...
- jacobsimon 4y agoInteresting! This might be my favorite type of energy now :D