3 ms·
The heat still needs to travel horizontally from this rock to your borehole. A 30 cm diameter borehole drilled 20 km deep with the bottom 12 km being used for h
by jjk166 4y ago
The heat still needs to travel horizontally from this rock to your borehole. A 30 cm diameter borehole drilled 20 km deep with the bottom 12 km being used for heat collection would give you 12000 m^2 of surface area and an average temperature gradient of 135 Kelvin, which at a heat flux rate of 7 W/m^2/K would only give you 13 MW thermal, or about 4.4 MW electric when the well is first drilled and about 3 MW after 50 years. Comparable to a single windmill. You can increase your surface area through more drilling and fracking, but that adds to cost and environmental concerns.
As a battery for storing heat energy generated by other methods though it's great.
- joshjob42 4y agoFracking with water (which is what geothermal would do) has pretty limited environmental concerns, and has enormous gains in increasing surface area and reach, so it almost certainly what we're going to end up doing. Iirc this is part of Quaise's plan: drill 20km down then frack the bottom to get a really big volume and surface area at those very high temperatures.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]