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Largest Geothermal Development in America Taking Shape in Utah
- prpl 2y agoIronic that fracking experience proved to be the technology enabler here.
- pfdietz 2y agoHorizontal drilling predates the fracking boom. It's an adjacent technology. Your overall point stands, though.
- bobthepanda 2y agoA lot of geology is funded by petrochemicals and mining companies, since they invest top dollar into figuring out what’s under us.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the professional organisation of geology professionals, is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This is an outlier amongst US professional science associations: - Physics: APS, College Park, MD - Astronomy: AAS, Washington, DC - Chemistry: ACS, Washington, DC - Biology: ASBMB, Rockville, MD; ASCB, Bethesda, MD; ESA, Washington, DC; AIbS, Washington, DC. - Psychology: APA, Washington, DC - Sociology: ASA, Washington, DC. - Political Science: APSA, Washington, DC. - Economics: AEA, Nashville, TN. (That last ... surprised me.)
- jacobolus 2y agoThe members and officers of the AEA are geographically distributed at universities around the country, and their biannual conference moves around from city to city, but their Secretary–Treasurer is a professor at Vanderbilt (the previous Secretary–Treasurer was also a professor at Vanderbilt) and they have a permanent office in Nashville.
- dredmorbius 2y agoYeah, I get that. I'm just ... curious as to how the AEA came to be at Vanderbilt / Nashville, and if that's always been the case. I've searched a bit on the history w/o success. AEA was founded in Saratoga Springs, NY, by amongst others Richard T. Ely (interesting history), though I don't see any obvious Tennessee connection by him, or cofounders Katharine Coman (Wellesley College) or Edwin R.A. Seligman (Columbia University).
- jacobolus 2y agoMy impression is that Saratoga Springs is just where their first conference was. I don’t think they ever had an office there. I couldn't figure out in a brief search if they had a prior permanent office before the one in Nashville.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThat is in fact what I was trying to say about Sarasota Springs ;-) My next tack is to track down old copies of AEA journals (AER, J. Ec. Lit., J. Ec. Persp.) and see where they're published from or where they otherwise indicate location.
- Cupertino95014 2y agoGenuinely curious here: who was doing horizontal drilling before fracking, and what were they doing with it?
- pfdietz 2y agoDrilling through more conventional formations (oil or gas) that didn't need fracking. Particularly on formations with large, flat layers it could greatly reduce the number of wells needed, vs. vertical drilling. It's also very useful for offshore drilling. Measurement-while-drilling (where instruments in the drill string sense the surrounding formation, allowing it to follow ups and downs in the layers) is quite a technical accomplishment. Think about the problem of getting data back to the surface.
- gherkinnn 2y agoIt's called directional drilling [0] and is related to milkshakes [1] 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_drilling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_drilling 1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a5d9BrLN5K4&pp=ygUddGhlcmUgd2lsbCBiZSBibG9vZCBtaWxrc2hha2U%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a5d9BrLN5K4&pp=ygUddGhlcmUgd2l...
- narnarpapadaddy 2y agoConstruction projects frequently use it on a small scale when excavation or disturbing existing infrastructure isn’t possible. For example, you need to lay an electric cable for a new development across a road and you can’t shut down the road, so you drill horizontally underneath it and run the cable through.
- julienchastang 2y agoThe word ‘geothermal’ is overloaded these days and can mean one of two things: 1. Extracting heat energy from magma within the earth via steam turbines. This is what is mentioned in the article. 2. Using the ground as a sort of infinite thermodynamic reservoir via a heat pump working as the same principle as a refrigerator.
- Retric 2y agoThere isn’t such a clear line between those two as going slightly deeper for slightly warmer rock makes a big difference when you mostly want heat from that heat pump. ~1c per 40m may not sound like much, but it quickly adds up over 50 years.
- pfdietz 2y agoThere was a story in the NY Times six months ago about colleges in the US going with geothermal. Many are putting in shallow geothermal to be used with heat pumps (depth ~900 feet), but Cornell has also been looking at true geothermal with an exploratory well to nearly 10,000 feet (bottom temperature was 82 C). https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/climate/geoexchange-climate-colleges-heat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/climate/geoexchange-clima... (may be paywalled)
- cwal37 2y agoThis is more people just casually conflating two separate terms: geothermal and ground-source. Pretty frustrating since it is right there in the name of each, ground-source heat pumps are near-surface and basically leveraging the annual average air temperature while geothermal resources are leveraging higher temperatures much deeper in the earth.
- QuercusMax 2y agoMy dad had a "geothermal" heat pump installed back in the late 90s; that was the term that was commonly used at the time. The US Department of Energy uses that term even today: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps Not sure where you're hearing the term "ground-source heat pump" in common usage, but it certainly has not filtered out into common parlance.
- phaedryx 2y agoDoes anyone know exactly where this is supposed to be? I'm from "southwest Utah" so I'm curious.
- phaedryx 2y agoFound an answer to my question: Milford, UT https://kslnewsradio.com/2113554/largest-geothermal-energy-development-in-the-u-s-is-here-in-utah/ https://kslnewsradio.com/2113554/largest-geothermal-energy-d...
- Mistletoe 2y agoI was curious where this could work in the USA and here is a map. https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geothermal-energy-resource-US https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geo...
- briffle 2y agoMy old University has been powered by Geothermal for 11 years now, and they produce quite a bit more than they need, so they sell excess to the hospital next door. There are other geothermal wells on campus (not as deep or hot) just for hot water, that are used to flow in pipes directly under large staircases (campus is built on a hill) and sidewalks to keep them clear in winter, and are also used with large heat pumps to heat and cool all buildings on campus. Those have been used since the 60's.. Warning, PDF's https://chptap.ornl.gov/profile/174/OIT_ORC-Project_Profile.pdf https://chptap.ornl.gov/profile/174/OIT_ORC-Project_Profile.... https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/895238 https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/895238
- hcfman 2y agoIs this so that it can power the Utah datacenter from the NSA ? Wasn’t that meant to be in Utah ?
- yinser 2y agoThat’s been built and operating for a while off the regular old grid. The customer for this power seems to be California for residential power.
- jandrese 2y agoEspecially since this is a PPA, so it's basically a crowdfunded power plant. People will buy shares in each well to get it constructed and use the energy produced to offset their power bill. Usually you see these with solar projects, but I don't see any reason a geo plant can't operate on the same principle.
- v8xi 2y agoI think of geothermal the same way I think of tidal power - seemingly renewable but not really. Harnessing tides dampens the lunar oscillations surprisingly fast (as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283). With geothermal, yes there is a huge reservoir of potential energy but speeding up the extraction of this energy is absolutely a terrible idea long term. I'm not gonna rant here, but look at what happened to Mars (only slightly smaller than earth) when the core cooled and the dynamo shut down.
- allemagne 2y agoIf this is something we actually need to be worried about, why not rant here? I think most people are pretty far from convinced that literally cooling off the earth through geothermal is a possibility we need to be taking seriously.
- foota 2y agoIt's sustainable in the short term (for a very long definitoon of short term) though, which is what really matters wrt migrating off of fossil fuels. We could pull many times humanity's energy consumption from the earth for a century and it would still be a drop in the bucket. Now, some of these hot spots might not be renewable (in the sense that we drain too much ehat from them and they don't have sufficient heat flux to sustain as much extraction as might seem), but I don't think there's any risk of cooling the core. See e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-will-earths-geothermal-energy-last/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-will-earths-geothermal-...
- spacemark 2y agoYeah the scale of thermal energy contained in the earth makes this fear (prematurely cooling the earth) irrelevant. The entire global consumption of energy is less than 2% of earth's thermal heat flow from the core.
- itishappy 2y agoWe're at about 40%. Current energy use is 20 TW per year, and the heat capacity of the earth is about 50 TW. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt
- fooqux 2y agoDrilling 125 wells for 400MW of power seems like a pretty poor return. Although it's hard to tell as the article doesn't go into much detail around the depth of those wells.
- cassepipe 2y agoUnless the price of energy goes up globally because of political/commercial instability created by climate change ? If we knew something that had all the perks of oil and none of the disadvantages, we would be all hooked on it. All clean energy are trade-off's compared to oil. Solar ? Short lifespan, land occupation, requires mining, the sun does not always shine, not much energy so you need a lot Wind ? Lifespan, much skill to build and to maintain, the wind does not always blow, not much energy so you need a lot Nuclear ? Big upfront cost, need skilled workforce to build and maintain Geothermal ? Big cost for not so much energy ? All of those need a good grid too
- kwhitefoot 2y ago> All of those need a good grid too So does oil.
- zdragnar 2y agoLots of oil rigs work off-grid, and refineries have historically also operated off grid, though nowadays they buy or sell electricity as needed, depending on load and price. What oil actually depends on is a transportation network, and aside from trains and pipelines, that's pretty flexible too.
- fooqux 2y agoSorry, I should have worded my comment better. It was not to detract from the need for new and renewable sources of power, but rather surprise at how little power you get from each well, and the cost of drilling each of them.
- beembeem 2y ago
- allemagne 2y agoHm... some articles are saying "largest new" and others just "largest". I don't think it's the largest but maybe it depends on what we mean by "geothermal development". The article quotes 400 MW and 125 wells, but according to a Wikipedia list [0] there are at least two geothermal complexes in the U.S. that produce more power than that and at least one that has over 350 wells [1] that appears to not only be the largest geothermal complex in the country, but in the whole world. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geothermal_power_stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geothermal_power_stati... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
- dredmorbius 2y agoThe editing on this piece is ... sloppy in the extreme: In a victory for the development, one of the nation’s largest utility companies, Southern California Edison, has agreed to purchase electricity from the development. The 15-year agreement will power the equivalent of 350,000 and begin when the development's first part is operational in 2026. 350,000 what? (The answer is all but certainly "homes", which draw about 1.2 kW each, which puts this plant at about 400 MW output ... as is noted three 'graphs further down the article. Compare against a typical large nuclear power plant at 1--2 GW output per reactor.) As you note there's also the Geysers plant in northern California (near Healdsburg) which has a nameplate capacity of ~1.6 GW, and a 53% capacity factor (that is, it's operational about half the time. Which would make the Met's article wrong on this point as well. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers>
- hnburnsy 2y agoI think the article is mis-interpreting what is going on. Fervo announced the following... "World’s largest geothermal PPAs highlight increasing utility demand for clean, reliable next-generation geothermal energy" PPAs are power purchase agreements https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-purchase-agreements-with-southern-california-edison/ https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-...
- dahfizz 2y agoGenuine question: does "cooling" the center of the Earth via geothermal power plants have any sort of ramifications? If we converted to using 100% geothermal power, what kinds of effects would that have on the Earth's core?
- entangledqubit 2y agoWhen I looked into this the numbers suggested that energy-wise we'd be extracting a drop in the bucket. There are concerns for local effects though (e.g. earthquakes).
- maxerickson 2y agoThe heat is already escaping at some rate, geothermal power accelerates it a bit. We drill a few thousand meters into the crust. There's several thousand kilometers of earth below that.
- dredmorbius 2y agoGeothermal concentrates the thermal flux to the geothermal energy site. What happens in practice is that such sites end up being rate-limited by either the thermal flux of the surrounding rock, in the case of dry holes which are bored and take out heat directly, or by depleting the groundwater and/or hydrothermal reservoir which feeds a "wet" geothermal project (as with California's Geysers). Dry holes end up having a limited effective life of a few decades, based on what I've seen, after which there's insufficient thermal energy to drive electrical generation (though it may be suitable for other lower-grade heating applications). Wet holes vary in response depending on how rapidly groundwater is replenished. I believe that the Geyers has dried up numerous wells. In places with ample water infiltration (e.g., near coastlines or in wet climates), I speculate that intrusion of fresh cold water might cool the geothermal reservoir somewhat. But the source heat, which is radiating from the Earth's core though the mantle and crust, has an effectively fixed flux. There's only so much heat radiating outwards, and a few localised pinpricks and steam generators won't effect that measurably. Volcanoes are far larger and similarly have little overall effect.
- itishappy 2y ago
- causal 2y agoGreat if renewable, but is there a hidden freshwater consumption cost here?
- snickerbockers 2y agoIf geothermal energy were to be utilized at every opportunity, could all the thermal energy being pumped out of the ground create a new kind of environmental crisis? Or is there so much energy down there that mankind as a whole would never be able to make a non-negligible change to the earth in that way?
- bdamm 2y agoSimilar to how if we came up with some clean fusion and then multiplied all our energy use 10, 1000, 10,000-fold, then at what point would we be actually heating up the atmosphere directly (instead of indirectly via green house gasses)? I'd like to see the math on this too.
- readthenotes1 2y agoOr if we create cryptocurrency and AI training centers that require huge amounts of energy...
- tialaramex 2y agoNo. It will be a slightly warm damp rock regardless of what we do, until in the distant future the nearby star either destroys it or goes out leaving it to gradually cool down.
- hnburnsy 2y agoSome better details from the source... https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-purchase-agreements-with-southern-california-edison/ https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-...
- assimpleaspossi 2y agoI was on my way to Hawaii on vacation and we flew directly over that. I wondered what the heck that was out there in the middle of nowhere but couldn't find anything online. And, now, here it is!