14 ms·
Digging 10 miles underground could yield enough geothermal energy to power Earth
- cc101 4y agoGeothermal is not an easy solution. Just drilling deep enough doesn't begin to address the environmental and engineering issues involve. Perhaps these issues will be resolved. I hope so.
- Valgrim 4y agoErr...care to explain? I was under the impression that the only engineering issue with deep geothermal was precisely to drill deep enough. Once you've done that, the rest is pretty straightforward: boil water to run a turbine. Actually I'm 100% sure people are talking about converting coal plants in place with deep geothermal. Also,you put back the water you pump up, so it's literally a closed loop. What environmental issues are you talking about? The mud?
- firecall 4y agoWhatever they are, they are not as bad as what we are currently doing to our atmosphere!
- SoftTalker 4y agoUnknown unknowns are what usually get you in the end.
- pencilguin 4y agoMore commonly, unknown knowns: "It ain't what you don't know that gets you, it's the things you think you know that just ain't so." Usually credited to Josh Billings. It is, e.g., what turned the Iraq invasion into a national disaster. What was wasted on invading Iraq, to no purpose, could have paid, instead, for the entire transition to wind and solar, decades sooner. Numerous billionaires minted off the fiasco would not now be actively undermining democratic institutions.
- splistud 4y ago
- anakaine 4y agoFormer exploration geologist here. Drilling that deep is not easy. Directional drilling equipment is very expensive, and heat + pressure take a toll very quickly on such equipment. Directionality is important as boreholes are rarely straight an it is entirely possible to drill a borehole in a U shape accidentally. Drilling requires high pressure pumps to clear the face of the drill bit, and the cut material must be returned out of hole. That's one hell of a compressor or mud pump. Below a certain depth rock behaviour changes from brittle deformation toward more plastic (and explosive) deformation, to eventually plastic deformation entirely. Groundwater pressures can collapse holes. Deformation can collapse holes. The rock grinds back at drilling gear. Equipment can become stuck and difficult to dislodge. Holes eventually collapse and partially close on their own, requiring casing of the hole. To case, drill a section, retrieve gear from down hole, slide casing in, replace Drilling gear, repeat for each length of casing. It can be quite different per hole, and per rig setup. Some rig setups permit casing in place (this is more a drillers specialist area than my own). Then, there's the issue of keeping the hole open long term. Hydrothermal activity tends to dissolve minerals in water. Minerals tend to crystallise out inside boreholes and pipes over time, like hard water in water pipes in rural areas, constricting flow. What is being proposed is difficult and requires an extreme amount of maintenance through its life cycle.
- getcrunk 4y agoTo a lay person why do you mean by brittle deformation and plastic sand explosive deformation
- zdragnar 4y agoWhen something hard is under pressure, it can bend or deform, or it can break or shatter. Imagine a hammer striking a sheet of metal and the metal denting. For a brief moment, the pressure and heat of the hammer strike causes the metal to deform. Conversely, if the hammer hit something like a sheet of glass, it would shatter. Plastic in this sense is not like Tupperware plastic at room temperature, but plastic heated when it is first being molded into shape. Explosive deformation is again like the hammer hitting a sheet of glass- if the glass were already under pressure, breaking it would relieve the pressure causing shards to fly everywhere. Rock at the surface is relatively cold and under little pressure- it is hard, but brittle, and simply breaks. As you get deeper, it is under more pressure and as it breaks, that pressure can get relieved unpredictably (fault lines cause formerly stable walls of already drilled hole to collapse). With even more depth comes more pressure but also more heat, which relaxes the crystalline structure of the rock. It can start deforming rather than breaking. Drill bits become less effective as the rock flows around it rather than getting broken up and pumped away. Edit: if you haven't watched videos of hydrologic presses destroying things on YouTube, you see something like this in reverse; sometimes things can deform a bit, but eventually explode under pressure. The most surprising to be to watch was a deck of playing cards literally shatter.
- Cupertino95014 4y agoMaybe a little homework is in order? It's not as though no one's thought of this before, or that no one is putting serious money into it.
- twobitshifter 4y agoIt’s usually quakes https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/15/swiss-geothermal-power-earthquakes-basel https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/15/swiss-geotherm... https://www.dw.com/en/france-firm-shelves-geothermal-project-after-mini-earthquakes/a-55829869 https://www.dw.com/en/france-firm-shelves-geothermal-project...
- cc101 4y agoI was mostly thinking about the corrosive power of water when it is extremely hot and contains dissolved minerals as this water will. I doubt very much that you could actually reuse the water. Protecting the equipment, disposing the heat, obtaining make up water, and doing something with the brine are major problems. I'm not saying that it can not be done. It probably can, but I feel that the article was a little naive. I suppose that I should say something about injecting high pressure water into the earth. At this depth you are interacting with tectonic forces. High pressure water can unlock existing forces resulting in earthquakes in a manner similar to the quakes triggered by fracking. In summary, there is a cost for everything. There are few, if any, silver bullets capable of solving major problems.
- mwint 4y ago> There are few, if any, silver bullets capable of solving major problems I'd argue that there are silver bullets for major problems, but once we find them the problems stop being major. - Sewers were a silver bullet for sanitation - Many medicines have been silver bullets for many diseases - Printing press for information distribution - Telegraph (and later Internet) for fast information distribution - Rail for moving stuff
- jcampbell1 4y ago> quakes triggered by fracking Where do you get your misinformation from? This seems to be a widely held false belief.
- cc101 4y agoWhere do you get your false information?
- surfaceofthesun 4y agoThey’re likely referencing something like this [1]. The “fracking earthquakes” have stemmed lazy disposal of well wastewater. Wells can take millions of gallons of water; ideally we’d be treating reusing that water. —- [1] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-hydraulic-fracturing-related-earthquakes-and-tremors#:~:text=Reports%20of%20hydraulic%20fracturing%20causing,injected%20into%20deep%20wastewater%20wells https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-hydraulic-fracturing-related-e....
- drtgh 4y agohttps://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/why-geothermal-energy-renewable-resource-can-it-be-depleted https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/faq/why-... "At any one geothermal field, however, the temperature of the geothermal reservoir or the fluid levels/fluid pressure in the reservoir may decrease over time as fluids are produced and energy is extracted. Produced fluids can be re-injected to maintain pressures, although this may further cool down the reservoir if care is not taken. Over time, it is commonly necessary to drill additional wells in order to maintain energy production as temperatures and/or reservoir fluid pressures decline." { Cooling of the area. New area. New hole } Loop.
- WalterBright 4y agoI remember when cold fusion was discovered in the 1980s. Everyone was very excited - clean, cheap, unlimited power. The environmentalists were horrified. (Unfortunately, it turned out to be a fraud.)
- pfdietz 4y agoThe physicists weren't excited. They pointed out that if Pons and Fleischman had been making enough DD fusion to boil water, they'd have been killed by the neutrons.
- WalterBright 4y agoThe internet of the time consisted of NNTP newsgroups. There was a lot of talk about it by a lot of people, and a lot of opinions and claims of expertise. Filtering out what was true wasn't that easy. I am not a nuclear physicist and nobody I knew at the time was, either, though personally I thought it was one of those too-good-to-be-true things, and sure enough, it was. My larger point, however, was that there was a lot of pushback from environmentalists who, when faced with a solution to the energy problem, looked for a way to stop it.
- postalrat 4y agoWhat if the temperature was already a fraction away from boiling and the fusion was just barely enough to bring it to boil?
- gerdesj 4y ago
- spoonjim 4y ago“Digging 10 miles underground” is like “building a solar panel the size of California” — really useful if you can find a feasible way to do it
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoIf we had a solar panel the size of California, what would we do with it? Is there a flat contiguous area of land that size where no one lives, or does it float in the ocean? I guess the idea is that since we're imagining things that don't exist anyway, we could assume the panel is made of invisible pixie dust. But at least for me, drilling a ten mile hole is intuitively easier to envision. Maybe that's ill-informed on my part, I don't know, but it's why the idea is appealing. It instinctively seems like a feasible task.
- chaosbolt 4y agoThe Sahara desert and Australia are huge but at least for the thermosolar farm in the Moroccan desert, the difficulty is transporting the electricity far enough to sell it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
- pmoriarty 4y agoAnother option is to build it in space. Lots of room there.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoIt's easy to generate solar power in space, but difficult to do anything with it.
- iquerno 4y agoLet's see, area of california = 423k km2. Check. Largest solar park in the world = 57 km2, cost 1.3B$. Check. Total cost of a solar panel the size of california, with the help of the most intricate indian technology = 9.6T$
- jacknobody 4y agoIs it really necessary to go so deep? Why not start in the foothills of some granitic massif and drill up? I'm sure you'll get lots of heat!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- margalabargala 4y agoIt's not that 10 mile holes will be necessary everywhere, it's that "10 miles" is the depth necessary to make these worthwhile anywhere. You don't need to drill 10 miles to get to geothermal temperatures in Iceland, nor in Yellowstone. But you might in Ohio, or Ireland.
- pfdietz 4y agoYou also don't need to drill so deep if all you're interested in is lower grade heat. For example, at Cornell in Ithaca, NY they've just drilled a 3 km deep hole to evaluate getting heat (at ~90 C) to make hot water for heating the campus.
- sidewndr46 4y agoWhat was the result of that evaluation?
- pfdietz 4y agoThe temperature is high enough; beyond that we haven't heard yet.
- toomuchtodo 4y agoAny paper on this specific initiative? This sounds like a slam dunk for any population center needing district heat.
- pornel 4y agoIs the amount of heat released this way any concern from the global warming perspective?
- twosdai 4y agoAs far as I know (which isnt much) Global warming isn't really about heat released in systems. It's about its inability to leave the earth due to greenhouse effects. While it is a concern if we produce a lot of extra heat, I think the main issue is being able to expect the heat to leave into space. Which is why most of climate change science focuses on greenhouse gases and not heat produced by machines.
- tasty_freeze 4y agoNo, not at all. The problem of AGW is not due to the calories we are releasing burning fossil fuels. It is because the waste byproduct of CO2 causing a slightly larger percentage of the sun's heat to be retained until the new, higher equilibrium temperature is reached where the trapped heat matches the heat the earth radiates.
- pauljurczak 4y agoSpeaking of CO2. Capturing CO2 seems to be much less technically difficult than drilling 10 miles down. Various technologies already exist, and pilot plants are running. Perhaps focusing on the practical would be more productive than an illusory silver bullet.
- CuriousCosmic 4y agoIt's not just CO2. It's CO2 and all the other greenhouse gasses. And regardless, capturing them takes a lot of energy and unless we have a clean source (such as geothermal for example), that means that we will be releasing more greenhouse gasses than the produced amount of energy will capture.
- sdenton4 4y agoIt is far more efficient to not emit CO2 than to recapture it. It's worth doing the napkin math on how much air needs to be processed to undo one American's yearly CO2 footprint... It's a hell of a lot.
- nonrandomstring 4y agoMany are keen to point out that we live in proximity of a giant fusion reactor and ought to be smart enough to harness its output. But it took me a long time to appreciate something odder; We're living on a giant fission reactor [1]. The Earth's core isn't hot because it just hasn't cooled down in the icy void of space. It's actively producing heat. Our gravity acts upon the heavy elements, which sink through the molten iron and silicon, to the core, where they become fissile. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/nuclear-fission-confirmed-as-source-of-more-than-half-of-earths-heat/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/nuclear-fi...
- foobarbecue 4y agoNot a fission reactor. Just a radiothermal generator. It's not critical. This article doesn't say anything surprising; the news is that these guys calculated how much heat is produced.
- foobarbecue 4y agoOk I just read a bit more and apparently there are some fringe geophysicists who think it really is more like a reactor. I didn't know that.
- defrost 4y agoThere were actual "natural" fission reactors in the crust in central Africa some time ago[1] .. the broader region provided the bulk of the ore for the Cold War production of weapons grade ore. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine
- pencilguin 4y agoNature used up the best ore billions of years ago. We did get radiation-resistant microbes in exchange.
- defrost 4y ago
- superkuh 4y agoI wonder how they will keep the waveguide free of contaminants and >1/10 wavelength irregularities that dissipate power over such a long transmission line relative to wavelength. They're starting from only 10kW from a single gryotron but absolute power isn't the real issue. They can always just incoherently combine many since it's not for communications but even doubling the power twice isn't going to get you past the number of 3dB (half power) losses you'd get with an improvised borehole mm-waveguide 10km down. The extremely long low loss underground mm-wave waveguide would seem to be their first problem to solve. Edit: https://publications.mygeoenergynow.org/grc/1034509.pdf https://publications.mygeoenergynow.org/grc/1034509.pdf is okay and on page 5 of 16 in Fig 2 you can see how they propose using purge gas down the waveguide segments to keep it clean.
- pfdietz 4y agoI assume they'd have a drilling pipe down which the mm waves would be directed. It would also carry down gas to blow the recondensed rock dust back up. The inner surfaces of the pipe segments would presumably be lined with a smooth, very conductive material.
- prewett 4y agoLet's just suck out the energy that powers the internal convection that powers the magnetic field that prevents the solar wind from stripping the atmosphere of water, what could go wrong? On a small scale, no problem, but "powering the Earth" with the dynamo that prevents us from becoming Mars/Venus? It'll be great until we suck too much energy out. CO2 will seem like a cakewalk by comparison. At least we know the planet is livable with high levels of CO2, and we know that the rocks and trees soak up CO2 and that the ocean precipitates it out as limestone, so if worst comes to worst we can just wait a while. Once the dynamo stops, it's not restarting, and we've got maybe 50 million years until things are unlivable. Forever. Now maybe we don't think we'll actually make it as a species for that long. But we should think about the risk, this time around.
- giantdude 4y agoSee Netflix show 'Into The Night'
- googlryas 4y agoIf we take too much heat, we can just plant all of our nukes deep down and rekickstart the process.
- reallymental 4y agoI, and the director of the movie "The Core", agree completely.
- feet 4y agoIf we take out too much energy, will the gravity run out? That would be concerning
- jachee 4y agoIn an all-to-brief summary: All gravity cares about is mass.
- 4y ago
- gtvwill 4y agoWorked on a core drill rig that that did 2200m core drilling, worked a number of holes from 100-2200m on a few different types of surface rigs. Stuff gets weird when you get deep >1500m. Runs take ages, bit changes can take an entire shift. The structures in the rock can come out looking like a picture in space (black base littered with color). Hitting 10 miles (16km) would be epic. Something like 100 ton rod string hanging at BQ size. Insane.
- foobarian 4y agoWhat do these bits look like? How wide are they? How does the drilling work, are they hollow and the material goes in the middle, which you then pull up every now and then? Do they come in sections (how long) and you just keep putting in more? Sorry for many questions just can't find much info on actual field truth (just generic info on theory of operation).
- gtvwill 4y agoSo we drilled core for gold. There are two main types of drilling RC and diamond core. RC is like a pneumatic hammer system i didnt work with those so cant say much about them (they recover a dust pile as their sample type, diamond core pulls out preferably a long cylinder core sample that has orientation marked on it (e.g. north). Diamond core drilling tho is basically a cylinder shaped drill bit attached to a hardened drill rod that is attached to a rod string (groups of 3m pipes). Everything is basically done in 3m lengths, mostly for transport reasons. When your drilling you work with the rods in bundles of 3 so 9m lengths. I worked mostly on UDR 1200's and a prototype surface rig that there were like...3 built? partnership between a few big companies. That rig was the one that could do (estimated) up to 3000m or so. Deepest I worked on was 2200m. Drill bit sizes if your interested in looking them up that we worked with are BQ,NQ,HQ,PQ. So external diameters ranging from 60mm with bq (core size of 36.5mm) to PQ @ 122mm ext. and 85 ID. We worked all manual by hand so PQ with a drill barrel weighing like 50kg was our limit. Shaking core from 3m HQ drill rods nearly broke me the first time I did it. The drill barrels have a inner tube that is the core holder/lifter that hangs like a few mm from the spinning bit at all times while drilling, these are 6m long. After you have drilled 3m, you clamp the rod string so its hanging from the drill rig and add 3m until you have preferably 6m drilled. Drilling stops, you pull back on a wireline that is holding the core tube to engage the internal clamps on it and haul up your 6m of core. A empty tube gets sent back down, you add another 3m rod to the string and repeat the process. While this happens the full core tube is orientation marked, shaken out and cleaned and re-assembled as it comes out of the hole in core trays. ^^^^ Everything above is if things go to plan. Rough ground, broken bits, hard ground, loss of water return all kinds of things can cause problems and make runs stop, go short, loose rods, drop core, require bit changes, cause equipment to overload and break so on. Been a few years since I did it but I do kind of miss the work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUMftmjpdNg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUMftmjpdNg This is a video of after a bit change. they are pushing rods back down the hole to hit the point where drilling stopped. They are moving real slow. 111 rods roughly to 1000m. Worst shift I had was 16 ton of rods moved. >1000m down, started shift pulling rods for a bit change, bit snapped a tooth after we got it back down in under 5m of cutting and had to come straight back out. Hell of a night. If your lucky you have 3 to a rig (driller and two offsiders) if your unlucky its just 2 on a rig. No breaks. You eat while you drill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF3_TqN6AQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF3_TqN6AQA This video also covers the whole basics pretty well.
- boringg 4y agoGetting fusion to successfully work would power humanity forever.
- kvetching 4y agoThis guy got a form of it working. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q_IvxWoY4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q_IvxWoY4E
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoIs it a joke? He claims to be able to solve pain in most diseases with basically the same fusion device: https://primerfieldfoundation.org/issues-treated https://primerfieldfoundation.org/issues-treated He cites three papers on Cell, Nature. The one on Nature does not seem to be related to this "array of magnets" https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54d7e4ece4b0a551f3b3a78b/t/54e956b4e4b0904aceb0b13f/1424578228164/ZhaoProtocols.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/54d7e4ece4b0a551f3b3a...
- jeanloolz 4y agoI am very skeptical of the claims made on their website. Basically heals (almost!) everything, for the price of 1200 euros. It has all the properties of a scam product.
- andbberger 4y agofission could power humanity forever and already works
- OJFord 4y agoTo be pedantic, fusion also already works, just not economically!
- pencilguin 4y agoLikewise, fission: costs too much to bother. Fusion already powers the planet. We just need to build out the solar panels and wind turbines to collect as much of it as we care to find uses for.
- rbanffy 4y agoI always wonder why places like Yellowstone aren’t used for power generation. Seems more accessible than most geothermal heat sources. Also Hawaii is another place where geothermal energy could make sense.
- eesmith 4y agohttps://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/why-cant-we-drill-yellowstone-stop-eruptions-and-make-power https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/why-cant-we-dril... > Geothermal power exploitation in Yellowstone, however, is illegal by act of Congress—the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970 (amended in 1988). This act requires the Department of Interior to preserve and monitor hydrothermal features, like Old Faithful, in units of the National Park Service, and there is a good reason that the law exists. In many places, including California, Nevada, Chile, New Zealand, and Iceland, geothermal power production has altered the behavior of nearby hydrothermal features. There is still quite a lot we don’t understand about how water moves beneath the surface in the Yellowstone area, and it is likely that even geothermal development outside the Park would impact features within the park.
- rbanffy 4y agoHow far from the interesting hydrothermal systems would it need to be? The caldera is enormous.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoReally, now?? You say the problem is we don't know how to drill that deep? Does it not occur to you that whatever you put down your hole will have the same problem? And how do you plan to keep your hole open? Rock flows at that depth.
- pencilguin 4y agoIt does not, in fact. But it is hard to keep your drill bit enough harder than the rock to cut it.
- aaron695 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- julian_sark 4y agoJust turn the Spanish Island of Lanzarote into a huge power station, dig 50m deep there, and be done with it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tablespoon 4y agoAnd then we eventually cool the core so much that the Earth's geodynamo shuts down.
- briga 4y agoIs that even possible? Any geophysicists here? Eventually I suppose that would also disrupt the Earth's magnetic field.
- jl6 4y agoNot a geophysicist but I feel extremely confident based solely on Fermi estimates, that humans do not have the capability to extract that much heat from the Earth even if we tried our best for thousands of years.
- Kamq 4y agoNever underestimate humanities ability to consume resources. They thought the US had enough land that it would take 20 generations to settle (it took 2). That being said, we should probably still do it. Seems like a slower death route.
- pencilguin 4y agoIt is not possible. It is not even a millionth of the way to possible. It is, instead, cheap concern trolling. Worry instead about money diverted, from building out wind and solar that actually address looming climate disaster, to chase wills-o-th'-wisp.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- llsf 4y agoExtracting heat from 10 miles underground, means cooling it. What would the impact of cooling it ? I guess nothing is truly free, even harnessing solar energy comes with a price. I do not know the numbers, they might be negligible. But curious to hear about the potential 1st and 2nd impact.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sfe22 4y agoEarth is way too big to have any significant impact even if we harnessed for millions of years, which we will likely not need.
- codedokode 4y agoIsn't it dangerous? What if Earth will freeze inside because of this and become like Mars or Moon?
- likecarter 4y agoWe have plenty of active volcanoes and the earth doesn’t freeze. The earth is very big.
- NoPicklez 4y agoWe will just line the hole with electric blankets, it will be fine
- choeger 4y agoThe ideal use case for something like plasma drilling, no? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_deep_drilling_technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_deep_drilling_technol...
- Andrew_nenakhov 4y agoThis is basically the plot of early Soviet hard sci-fi novel "Победители недр" (1937) [0] by Grigory Adamov. A few intrepid scientists go build a thermal power station deep below the surface in a specially designed subterranean vessel, and somehow a young pioneer sneaks on board with them, eventually saving them all. [0]: https://archive.org/details/pobediteli_nedr https://archive.org/details/pobediteli_nedr
- pencilguin 4y agoThis thing bobs to the top of HN every few weeks. 1. No, there is absolutely no hint of any danger of extracting too much heat, no matter what random problem you make up. Really. 2. A 10km deep hole gets you 1/600th of the way to the center of the planet, much less than e.g. the skin of an apple or the enamel on a billiard ball. So, it would tell you nothing about stuff deeper, never mind bollocks it. 3. Geothermal energy is not a major growth sector even where heat is right near the surface. Geothermal, like nukes, costs too much to ever be competitive again. Wind & solar cost less already, and get much cheaper every year. There is no need for, or value in, more expensive alternatives. It is a good thing that solar and wind are simple and uninteresting. Places where both wind and solar do not suffice can continue importing fuel, as they do today, indefinitely. Eventually, it will be synthetic, or delivered by transmission lines. Tropical solar farms will synthesize ammonia for export.
- sethd 4y ago> “If we can get to ten miles down, we can start to find economic temperatures everywhere. It’s a shame the article doesn’t seem to mention what those temps are.
- jasmer 4y agoIt would rather seem to me that despite the challenges, that it should be easier to dig a hole than to do 'Nuclear Fusion' in which case we ought to consider maybe doing more substantial research? Imagine if we solved this problem and over the scope of 40 years the whole world just went geo and dumped Oil, Solar, Nuclear?
- credit_guy 4y agoNo, geothermal will never work. Someone posted a more informed comment on Hacker News about 2 months ago. The idea is that if you drill to 5 km deep, let's say, you find very hot rock. But once you extract the heat from that rock, new heat is very slow to come because rock is a good thermal insulator. So, you'd need to produce secondary holes. Lots of them. In the end the math just doesn't work out by orders of magnitude.
- pencilguin 4y agoGeothermal works fine, in numerous places worldwide today, as may be seen simply by looking. It just costs more than wind and solar. Same as nukes. Unlike nukes, geo was once competitive without heavy subsidy, in places.
- credit_guy 4y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but I think geothermal works where the nature has done the work for us. Where there are underground springs that turn hot and the water comes up steaming. If you plan to drill the holes yourself, you have a lot of work to do. Drilling is expensive, and a single hole will not get you a lot of heat after the initial honey moon period.
- pencilguin 4y agoCalifornia has got reliable power from geo for quite a few decades, as has Iceland. Iceland is not awash in geysers. Geo costs more than renewables, but that was not at issue. It is anyway cheaper than nukes, in places where it is used.
- nine_k 4y agoWhy spend the limited internal energy of the Earth's core while the much less limited energy of our star, which is conveniently delivered daily to the surface, where it's easy to harvest? I can understand geothermal energy in very high latitudes, like they do in Greenland, where Sun energy is scarce, and lava is close to the surface. On most of the earth, geothermal energy is much harder to get than solar.
- ajmurmann 4y agoGeothermal goes 24/7. Also don't underestimate winter even in more moderate climates like northern or even central Europe. Sure you'll get some sun, but it's limited to maybe 9 hours and rainy and overcast.
- koheripbal 4y agoGeothermal may not be cyclical like solar, but it's output varies and the wells can easily stop producing at any time. At these depths, the walls collapse regularly. It's like drilling into jello
- Waterluvian 4y agoI’m curious what’s on your mind when you mention geothermal being limited. How many years is “limited“ and how does that practically affect things?
- nine_k 4y agoEasily accessible geothermal sources are relatively rare (unless you are willing to drill 10+ km as the article suggests), and picking energy from under your feet may have consequences for the land above, see e.g. [1]. [1]: https://earth.stanford.edu/news/lessons-pohang-solving-geothermal-energys-earthquake-problem https://earth.stanford.edu/news/lessons-pohang-solving-geoth...
- foverzar 4y ago> where it's easy to harvest Are we already capable of harnessing enough to power anything actually serious and industrial, rather than a small household with some consumer electronics and lightbulbs somewhere like California, where heating isn't even an issue?
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoI've wondered: can you do cheap nuclear power by simply digging a really deep hole and dropping radioactive fuel down there? No need for moderators or control rods or containment (aside from the steam coming out of the shaft?
- tim333 4y agoThere have been natural fission reactors in Gabon something like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... You'd probably have a job getting the permits to do it deliberately.
- la64710 4y agoGreat and let’s accelerate the timeline of crossing the global temperature threshold increase of 1.5 degree Celsius.
- hanafudafan 4y ago"Could" eh? Seems like an enormous risk and expense just for a "could" doesn't it? I'd like to see some verified proof that it WILL yield enough geothermal energy to power Earth before we start. "Could" isn't good enough.
- 8bitsrule 4y ago(Even if it were feasible) Just another expensive way to boil water?