4 ms·

Startup to drill deepest holes ever to unlock nearly limitless geothermal energy

37 points by padseeker 4y ago

padseeker 4y ago
I heard this episode of How I built this, about company Quaise on how they plan to drill to unprecedented depths using new technologies involving drilling with microwaves to be able to tap into geothermal energy. The idea of repurposing coal powered plants and leveraging the turbines that were already built, then drilling holes next to these plants to generate geothermal energy is absolutely brilliant. I'm surprised more people haven't heard of this company.
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
This is interesting, but isn't the challenge with "deepest holes ever" that they frequently cave in on themselves? And wouldn't you need multiple levels of water storage while pumping upwards since there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? (rough citation on that: https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-worlds-tallest-skyscraper https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-w...)
- runnerup 4y ago
  These types of holes don’t cave in because they’re drilled through solid rock. But they do get very very hot where the drilling is done (and by design for geothermal, they want to reach hot geology). This heat melts the drill bit quickly.
- lazide 4y ago
  1) the issue is not usually that the hole ‘caves in’, but rather that at some point everything is hot enough and under enough pressure that it doesn’t act like a solid anymore. Think playdough. Casings make it doable for awhile, but then at some point it’s so soft and hot it’s more like pudding. 2) you’re thinking of limits on vacuum suction (aka ‘sucking’ water up), which yes is very limited. Deep bores of any kind are almost always submerged pumps, and they don’t have this issue (‘pushing’ water up). Typically there are strings of submerged pumps in the borehole for deeper wells. For geothermal, usually they can just push cooler water down, and don’t even need to pump it back up - the heat expansion/steam pressurizes everything and does the work for them, as it’s a closed aquifer.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? Well, no. The problems you see on your article really doesn't apply to their situation. (And it's a really small limit on the article, if it applied, we wouldn't be able to extract most of our oil or even water from some aquifers.)
InvaderFizz 4y ago
Discussion on this startup from two weeks ago, 186 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501
Victerius 4y ago
The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm. Shadow, and flame.
jollybean 4y ago
Imagine a breakthrough in some incidental category and 'poof' everyone is using geothermal and fossils, solar, nuclear etc. fall to the side, all of world geopolitics shifts and 'climate change' arguments dissapear. It would be like the change wrought by the telephone + car + radio kind of thing - just unthinkable. I don't think people from the 1890's really imagined what things would be like in 1990. That said, it may be that those things won't happen and we do have an idea of the 2090's because it's not that-that much different than today.
rektide 4y ago
I know it's so small-scale by compare, but it still feels like a really obviously bad plan to sap energy from the magneto-hydro engine deep inside spaceship earth that we probably can never recharge. The scale of drain might remain small across millenia but it's still not something I feel ok messing with. "Nearly limitless" is at some indefinite expense of some deep future, especially if it works & succeeds & scales. And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating. I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. That there are just so many orders of magnitude difference. But the doubt is still there too.
- defrost 4y ago
  > I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics. > And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating. The crux of the climate issue is our increase in the heat insulation properties of the atmosphere (now mainly via CO2, more and more by increased methane and water vapor) not so much the "heat" we output. Vast amounts of energy arrive on the surface via the sun, most of this radiates away .. the increasing amount of "human activity related blanket" has been the cause of change in recent (few thousand years) climate stability.
  - snake_doc 4y ago
    > The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics. Isn’t this thinking the type of naïveté that got us to the current situation in the first place? The CO2 in our atmosphere increased ~0.01% (absolute percentage of atmosphere) over the last 4 decades. Scientists 4 decades ago explained away any concerns in the exact same way you did. Granted, we need all hands on deck (including experiments like this) to reach our decarbonization targets, but let’s not downplay the unknown tail risks involved.
    - 4y ago
aaron695 4y ago
IceMetalPunk 4y ago
I've watched enough terrible sci-fi movies on the Syfy channel to know that if we start using geothermal energy, we'll suck all the heat out of the core of the Earth, it'll stop moving, our magnetosphere will degrade, and we'll all die in a solar flare apocalypse. No, but seriously, good luck to these guys. Someone's got to be the first to succeed at making geothermal power scalable/practical, let's hope it's them so we don't have to wait another century.

37 points by padseeker 4y ago

I heard this episode of How I built this, about company Quaise on how they plan to drill to unprecedented depths using new technologies involving drilling with microwaves to be able to tap into geothermal energy. The idea of repurposing coal powered plants and leveraging the turbines that were already built, then drilling holes next to these plants to generate geothermal energy is absolutely brilliant. I'm surprised more people haven't heard of this company.

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

This is interesting, but isn't the challenge with "deepest holes ever" that they frequently cave in on themselves? And wouldn't you need multiple levels of water storage while pumping upwards since there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? (rough citation on that: https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-worlds-tallest-skyscraper https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-w...)

runnerup 4y ago
These types of holes don’t cave in because they’re drilled through solid rock. But they do get very very hot where the drilling is done (and by design for geothermal, they want to reach hot geology). This heat melts the drill bit quickly.
lazide 4y ago
1) the issue is not usually that the hole ‘caves in’, but rather that at some point everything is hot enough and under enough pressure that it doesn’t act like a solid anymore. Think playdough. Casings make it doable for awhile, but then at some point it’s so soft and hot it’s more like pudding. 2) you’re thinking of limits on vacuum suction (aka ‘sucking’ water up), which yes is very limited. Deep bores of any kind are almost always submerged pumps, and they don’t have this issue (‘pushing’ water up). Typically there are strings of submerged pumps in the borehole for deeper wells. For geothermal, usually they can just push cooler water down, and don’t even need to pump it back up - the heat expansion/steam pressurizes everything and does the work for them, as it’s a closed aquifer.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? Well, no. The problems you see on your article really doesn't apply to their situation. (And it's a really small limit on the article, if it applied, we wouldn't be able to extract most of our oil or even water from some aquifers.)

InvaderFizz 4y ago

Discussion on this startup from two weeks ago, 186 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32342501

Victerius 4y ago

The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm. Shadow, and flame.

jollybean 4y ago

Imagine a breakthrough in some incidental category and 'poof' everyone is using geothermal and fossils, solar, nuclear etc. fall to the side, all of world geopolitics shifts and 'climate change' arguments dissapear. It would be like the change wrought by the telephone + car + radio kind of thing - just unthinkable. I don't think people from the 1890's really imagined what things would be like in 1990. That said, it may be that those things won't happen and we do have an idea of the 2090's because it's not that-that much different than today.

rektide 4y ago

I know it's so small-scale by compare, but it still feels like a really obviously bad plan to sap energy from the magneto-hydro engine deep inside spaceship earth that we probably can never recharge. The scale of drain might remain small across millenia but it's still not something I feel ok messing with. "Nearly limitless" is at some indefinite expense of some deep future, especially if it works & succeeds & scales. And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating. I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. That there are just so many orders of magnitude difference. But the doubt is still there too.

defrost 4y ago
> I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics. > And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating. The crux of the climate issue is our increase in the heat insulation properties of the atmosphere (now mainly via CO2, more and more by increased methane and water vapor) not so much the "heat" we output. Vast amounts of energy arrive on the surface via the sun, most of this radiates away .. the increasing amount of "human activity related blanket" has been the cause of change in recent (few thousand years) climate stability.
- snake_doc 4y ago
  > The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics. Isn’t this thinking the type of naïveté that got us to the current situation in the first place? The CO2 in our atmosphere increased ~0.01% (absolute percentage of atmosphere) over the last 4 decades. Scientists 4 decades ago explained away any concerns in the exact same way you did. Granted, we need all hands on deck (including experiments like this) to reach our decarbonization targets, but let’s not downplay the unknown tail risks involved.
  - 4y ago

aaron695 4y ago

IceMetalPunk 4y ago

I've watched enough terrible sci-fi movies on the Syfy channel to know that if we start using geothermal energy, we'll suck all the heat out of the core of the Earth, it'll stop moving, our magnetosphere will degrade, and we'll all die in a solar flare apocalypse. No, but seriously, good luck to these guys. Someone's got to be the first to succeed at making geothermal power scalable/practical, let's hope it's them so we don't have to wait another century.