14 ms·

Geothermal power is a climate moon shot beneath our feet

• pseudolus 2y ago
  https://archive.ph/mkwrR https://archive.ph/mkwrR
• iancmceachern 2y ago
  I've designed a lot of hardware in the Oil and Gas, HVAC and pump spaces. If anyone wants to design and build hardware in this space my contact info is in my bio. There is real opportunity here.
• ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
  Is this a PR campaign by Quaise? Yesterday Real Engineering published a video about the importance of geothermal energy and talked about them and today it's the New Yorker. And unless I'm missing something, neither outlets mentioned this being part of a campaign or anything of that sort.
  • digdugdirk 2y ago
    It is an interesting application of technology, and hits the "good use of oil and gas tech" button as well. So there is a chance that this was just a natural pickup from the company press release. ... But it definitely smells like a guerrilla marketing campaign.
  • VerminOctopus1 2y ago
    I am highly suspicious of the Real Engineering channel. It seems like he does full on marketing videos for whoever is willing to pay or provide access. The video on Helios was suspect and so is this one.
    • devoutsalsa 2y ago
      Personally I thought the video was interesting. Even if it’s promoting a company agenda, the technology itself is cool. I learned some stuff.
    • kragen 2y ago
      All the "Real Engineering" videos I've ever seen were full of egregious factual errors, so I stopped watching them.
      • simplyinfinity 2y ago
        I follow the channel, can you give me few examples of these errors, as I have not noticed any (I'm not a subject matter expert, or maybe not paying attention enough)
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
        • kragen 2y ago
          I checked my bookmarks file to see if I had summarized any of their videos there, but if I did, I didn't tag them with the channel name, as I usually do for especially terrible videos. So, unfortunately, to give you examples, I would have to watch another Real Engineering video, which I'm unwilling to do unless someone pays me.
        • eldaisfish 2y ago
          that channel is fine. Obviously, there are errors, especially if you happen to know a certain topic very well. Otherwise, the videos are info are fine for surface-level information.
        • laweijfmvo 2y ago
          The video being discussed in this thread started off with a rather contentious claim about the Earth being a giant fission reactor that was heavily debated in the comments. I’m not knowledgeable about the subject at all, but it certainly made me double take (and even open the comments!) and seems to be overstated at best.
          • kragen 2y ago
            The Earth definitely does not produce much heat in its core. Most heat produced in the Earth by fission is produced in the crust. Whether that amounts to "being a giant fission reactor" is a question of semantics; it's like an RTG, but doesn't sustain chain reactions.
    • seanalltogether 2y ago
      I've noticed the same is happening with the Undecided with Matt Ferrell channel. I really enjoyed his content on green energy projects at the beginning, but it seems like lately he's just creating press releases in video form.
      • Ajedi32 2y ago
        I've always felt Matt's channel was a bit too "cheerleady" (for lack of a better term) regarding the topics it covers. A lot of the videos seem to be in the format of: "Here's some long-shot green energy idea still in the concept/early planning stages of development. Here's a list of all the positives of this technology, and none of the downsides or challenges. What do you think? Is this the future? Leave a comment and subscribe!" It just feels like I can't trust anything the videos say because they're completely unskeptical of everything they cover, which makes them feel way less informative.
    • audunw 2y ago
      I don’t see the issue. Videos like the one on Helios is one of the reasons I subscribe to his channel. I want to learn more about companies doing ground breaking innovation. Of course such a video has some PR aspects to it. Everyone knows that a company granting such access wants something out of it. This is almost high school level media literacy. You should take such videos with a heavy dose of healthy scepticism, but it’s still very interesting to watch. And if he gets some money out of it which he can use to help fund production of some high quality videos on historical engineering topics now and then, that’s just a win-win IMO.
      • matthewdgreen 2y ago
        I am very skeptical of a fusion startup claiming to provide commercial power in the 2020s, and I would like any media to be appropriately skeptical as well. If it’s not, then I wouldn’t feel informed at all.
      • stronglikedan 2y ago
        > This is almost high school level media literacy. Was that necessary? Did it contribute anything to your comment? (It did for me, but not in a good way.)
    • Night_Thastus 2y ago
      His videos are genuinely very interesting and informative. If he does a promoted piece once in awhile that primarily dig into the science + engineering behind something while also getting a company's name out there, I don't really mind. (So long as it's disclosed)
  • jw1224 2y ago
    Even Sabine Hossenfelder did a video about it today too: https://youtu.be/dOIlMdIqXbQ?si=FG4ZdDq6jkjk_nMp https://youtu.be/dOIlMdIqXbQ?si=FG4ZdDq6jkjk_nMp
  • slyall 2y ago
    Real Engineering video is here (I posted it then I saw this thread) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0 Pretty common PR for a company/organisation to reach out to various media to get coverage. There was probably a embargo of 1st March so everybody publishing right after that.
  • filleokus 2y ago
    This phenomenon is something I would like to learn more about. Of course there is an element of frequency illusion mixed in, but this happens every now and again. Some random subject is all of sudden talked / written about by unrelated actors. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything nefarious about it, papers and YouTubers need stuff to write and talk about after all. But at the same time that can be very beneficial for e.g Quaise in this case. How does it work, I'm guessing a "publicist" is involved somehow? How much does it cost? Has anyone here done something similar?
    • thinkbud 2y ago
      I can confirm that this sort of phenomenon has happened to me and am as curious as you are to find out more about it
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • ketzo 2y ago
      My 2c would be: - tech-oriented publicists / marketers definitely do know that HN exists and matters - there are “benign” ways to game HN, like releasing at an optimal time for readership / upvotes - there are less nice ways, like sock puppet accounts / botting - all of these things are certainly done regularly - it doesn’t mean that everything you read was an astroturfed psy-op or whatever.
    • simplysublime 2y ago
      I mean, puff pieces exist, and basically every media outlet is a corporate mouthpiece. Don't be surprised by this.
    • archon1410 2y ago
      It's apparently publicists "pitching" stories to 'relevant' reporters and 'influencers'/YouTubers. I recently saw a xeet, from a columnist, complaining about irrelevant PR pitches; it gives some insight into how they work. See: https://x.com/dhume/status/1892994787734602001 https://x.com/dhume/status/1892994787734602001
    • 2y ago
  • geuis 2y ago
    Thank you for calling this out. I noticed the same thing over the last few days but didn't recall the specific places I'd seen the topic popping up.
  • martythemaniak 2y ago
    They are likely raising a round or preparing to, so would like to raise awareness of what they're doing. I think it's fine - you work on something by yourself for 2 years, you have something neat to show to world and need more money to keep going, so you invite folks over and show them what you've done.
• giantg2 2y ago
  I wonder what affects we might have when cooling the earth (ground). Smacks of the same sort of hubris that we couldn't possibly warm the earth. I guess conservation of energy is a hard concept to comprehend.
  • Aachen 2y ago
    This sounds rather dismissive that anyone could have thought about this. I never looked up what effect this has either (in my defense, I'm not a user of this type of energy), but that doesn't make me conclude conservation of energy is hard to comprehend
    • simplysublime 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • mbrumlow 2y ago
    Also. What are the effects of brining that heat up to the atmosphere? One day humans will realize that their existence and energy use will always have an environmental impact.
  • thomasmg 2y ago
    In many places it makes sense to heat the earth (yes) in summer using the heat pump (using electricity from photovoltaics) so that efficiency in winter is better.
  • lkbm 2y ago
    Not guaranteeing I got these conversions correct, but I believe the rough estimate for the thermal energy of the Earth is on the order of 10^31 Joules.[0] while the rough estimate for human energy use is 10^20 Joules per year.[0] So if we switched to 100% geothermal (a few orders of magnitude more than we're actually discussing using), we'd be using on the order of a hundred trillionth of the energy per year? [0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51920/amount-of-thermal-energy-in-the-earth https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/51920/amount-of-... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
• outime 2y ago
  At least here in Finland, it’s becoming more and more common for houses to use this kind of energy. I’ve even noticed a few isolated apartment blocks using it. Finland obviously requires a lot of heat, and it seems that everyone I know who uses it is happy, so it’s certainly interesting technology.
  • phreeza 2y ago
    Is that really geothermal, or is it a heat pump? A heat pump just uses the thermal mass of the earth to provide more efficient electric heating and cooling, it doesn't heat using geothermal power.
    • cowsandmilk 2y ago
      Ground source heat pumps are generally considered to be “geothermal”.
      • moogly 2y ago
        You're not wrong; however that is an unfortunate misnomer since ground source bore holes (along with horizontal soil collectors and lakebed collectors) on the order of 100-300 m deep are still utilizing heat from the sun stored in the ground, and not heat produced from Earth's core. I'd say it's a pretty good idea to not conflate the two by using more precise language, even if not doing so might be "technically correct".
      • sbierwagen 2y ago
        Not in English.
        • glxxyz 2y ago
          The manufacturers of ground source heat pumps use the term 'geothermal' in English: https://www.waterfurnace.com/residential/products/geothermal-heat-pumps/h https://www.waterfurnace.com/residential/products/geothermal... https://enertechusa.com/geothermal-product-catalog/ https://enertechusa.com/geothermal-product-catalog/ - the term is confusing though
• Animats 2y ago
  2008 article on deep geothermal power plant.[1] 2016 article on shutdown of plant.[2] "The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create." There's a group called DEEP which is trying to combine deep geothermal with fracking technology, to get better heat transfer. This creates small earthquakes as a side effect. They're working on that.[3] A startup called FERVO is still trying.[4] Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a lot of drilling just to get some heat. So far, nobody seems to have a profitable deep geothermal power operation. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep_geothermal_the_untapped_energy_source https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep_geothermal_the_untapped_... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/geothermal-power-plant-closes-deemed-not-financially-viable/7798962 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/geothermal-power-plan... [3] http://deepgeothermal.org/home/ http://deepgeothermal.org/home/ [4] https://fervoenergy.com/ https://fervoenergy.com/
  • exabrial 2y ago
    > deep geothermal with fracking technology.... this creates small earthquakes as a side effect. In typical HN form I'll say: "That's a bit of an oversimplication". Apologies, please don't hate me. Thanks for quoting all your sources though btw. The wrong geology absolutely will create minor earthquakes. This is because any fluids injected into certain rocks layers provide "lubrication" and things start slipping. Pretty crazy how much pushing is happening down there and things remain at equilibrium most of the time! However, all is not lost. Certain geologies absolutely can take external fluids no problem, because they previously contained fluids... yeah... I'm talking depleted oil wells. A bit ironic I guess. This happens all the time already in the midwest, depleted oil wells are turned into saltwater injection wells. The problem is most of the time, you can't just plunk a depleted well down anywhere that happens to have the right geology underneath it, which the geothermal guys were hoping for. Pushing high pressure water into previously dry formations will likely cause problems. No free lunch, but it is possible in certain areas. A lot of said areas aren't likely near population centers unfortunately.
  • citadel_melon 2y ago
    Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Maybe you meant that geothermal has not achieved profitability in non-especially favorable environments. I think we should be subsidizing geothermal to make the technology cheaper and cheaper, like we had with solar and wind. Seems plausible that we could make the technology economically feasible in more geographic areas (similarly to solar) and mitigate duck curve inefficiencies other green energy technologies suffer from. Also to hedge my statement: solar is not economically feasible everywhere, but it is now economically feasible in many more environments (with sufficient sun coverage) than before.
• znkynz 2y ago
  Makes the classic mistake that claims that Geothermal power is carbon free. Its not. It can be made better through reinjection = https://www.gns.cri.nz/news/carbon-re-injection-revealed-to-be-a-win-win-win/ https://www.gns.cri.nz/news/carbon-re-injection-revealed-to-...
  • daveguy 2y ago
    Or you could use closed loop geothermal, which is better for reliability too.
  • alex_young 2y ago
    Geothermal power plants emit 99% less co2 than equivalent sized fossil fuel plants. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-energy-and-the-environment.php#:~:text=Geothermal%20power%20plants%20have%20low,from%20the%20geothermal%20power%20plants. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/geothermal/geothermal-en...
• knappe 2y ago
  If you're interested in geothermal, David Roberts did an interesting podcast on Fervo who are experimenting with fracking style drilling but used for geothermal, which is now being called "enhanced geothermal". https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
• phreeza 2y ago
  One thing I have never quite understood about geothermal, maybe someone can enlighten me: the energy flow from the Earth's core to the surface is not that huge, less than 1 watt per square meter. Doesn't that fundamentally limit the usefulness of geothermal power as a general solution outside of exceptional spots where this gradient is locally much higher, or there is an opportunity to collect from a wide area with a single small borehole? And if I drill a hole and collect 500 watts from it on a 100 sqm plot, am I effectively siphoning the heat from my neighbors plots?
  • brightball 2y ago
    That has always been my understanding. It’s useful for HVAC for a home for example, where you aren’t trying to do a conversion to electricity but instead are directly leveraging the consistent temperature to reduce strain on the system.
    • phreeza 2y ago
      Yea that is a heat pump scenario where you are also putting energy back in at certain times, that makes sense to me too, it doesn't have much to do with extracting geothermal energy from the core iiuc.
  • meindnoch 2y ago
    The cited value is the energy flow through the surface, which is about 0.1 W/m^2. But this is conducted through kilometers of rock and soil, which acts as insulation. Geothermal power works through convection instead of conduction. You inject cold water into a borehole, and hot water (steam) comes back, and spins a turbine. Convection can extract energy at a much higher rate than conduction through the crust. If you boil a pot of water, you can still comfortably hold the pot's handle if it's long enough, indefinitely. This is heat conduction. On the other hand, if you try drinking from the pot with a straw, you'll find it very painful. This is convection.
    • archon1410 2y ago
      Perhaps a stupid question, but... what are the risks? Wolndn't extracting too much energy from the earth's core cool it down, at least a little bit? Or does it contain so much energy that extracting it to replace all of 'surface generation' won't make even a little difference?
• electric_mayhem 2y ago
  I’m renovating an old building that doesn’t currently have any HVAC. I tried like hell to get a geothermal heat pump set up for it. This entailed researching companies that make good geothermal equipment and talking to all of their preferred vendors to get quotes. Literally every shop I talked to, and they were over a dozen that are supposed to be installing these companies equipment told me they don’t install them because air source heat pumps are so much cheaper. Even with tax credits and rebates (which may not exist by tax time next year when they would pay out), when I finally found a company that would do geothermal, they want 120K USD for a basic system. if I want to be able to run different rooms in different modes (entirely possible given that it’s a 5500 square-foot building) we’re talking 180K total to work in a heat recovery option. Meanwhile the same company will do Mitsubishi H2i air source heat pump set up for the entire building for 57K after credits and rebates. The air source heat pump solution is less efficient and uses more electricity, but the clincher for me was that the cost of each as a complete system, ground source or air source plus the cost of solar raised to drive their respective loads…. Came out as a wash over their lifetimes. Except the air source plus solar solution costs 40K less upfront than even the cheapest and least functional ground source solution. I would genuinely love it if it were otherwise, but I have months into this and ground source just doesn’t seem economically viable at this point
  • grumbelbart 2y ago
    That's just economy of scale, though. It's always more expensive to be the early adaptor. In Switzerland, 15% of all buildings are heated using geothermal heat pumps.
    • thomasmg 2y ago
      Yes. And in Switzerland, I believe most new houses have some other type of heat pump (drilling for geothermal is not allowed everywhere, or too expensive). This all still needs electricity; but many houses now install photovoltaics. (At least where I live.)
      • kragen 2y ago
• emtel 2y ago
  As pointed out in the intro to the article, the total amount of power generated in the earth's center is ~50TW. Global total energy (not just electricity) consumption is currently 180,000TWh/year, or about 20TW. So we would have to capture nearly half of all available geothermal energy to replace current energy usage. Meanwhile, Solar PV covering (a favorably located) 1% of the earth's surface area would generate 20TW. (This is based on the estimate of 400kwh/year for a 1m^2 panel in a sunny area from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency. I don't expect geothermal to do well in this showdown.
  • krona 2y ago
    > favorably located That's the problem, isn't it?
    • epistasis 2y ago
      With enhanced geothermal, especially that being explored by Fervo, a massive fraction of locations on earth are opened up to favorable geothermal. Fervo is actually drilling and producing energy today, and scaling the technology, using existing technologies. If Quaise is successful, it will only enhance what Fervo is already accomplishing, but we don't need the huge technical advance of Quaise to get a massive amount of geothermal energy on the grid. The Volts podcast has been following Fervo over the past few years, and they have met and exceeded all their milestones so far. (Unlike, say, big fission or fusion startups) https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
  • LeoPanthera 2y ago
    Geothermal should be an obvious choice for new-build homes. Put a ground-source heat pump source in the ground, and build your home on top of it.
    • cyberax 2y ago
      This works well only in a few cases. If you live in an area like Pennsylvania or New York, then you're far better off with an air-source heat pump. It's cheaper to install, and the average air temperatures are warm enough for the air source to work well. If you live in a place like Minnesota, then the ground-source pump needs a water table. Or you'll just be freezing the water in the ground. And you'll likely still be better off with an air-source pump.
• metalman 2y ago
  Here are a few examples of drilling technology that will try and drill 10-30 km down through the crust into areas with enough heat to make supercritical steam. Lasers, plasma, etc. Russians did it the hard way back in the day. https://www.foroenergy.com/drilling https://www.foroenergy.com/drilling https://www.ieg.fraunhofer.de/en/references/ppgd.html https://www.ieg.fraunhofer.de/en/references/ppgd.html https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1995822624003388 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S199582262... https://www.wired.com/story/new-tech-cuts-rock-without-grinding-it/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-tech-cuts-rock-without-grind...
• piokoch 2y ago
  “There’s a very decent chance you can do that with wind and solar,” It is so pathetic that Standford professor spreads this kind of crap. No, wind and solar will not save us, as on majority of our planet we have long period of time without wind and solar. Unpredictability of solar/wind energy forces to use something to balance the grid. Which, typically, has to be gas, as only gas power station has sufficiently fast start/stop cycle (about 1h in case of modern installation, lignite power plant has several hours cold start, coal power plant even more). And gas means CO2 emission, even though in some countries, which were buying gas from Russia through Nord Stream, it was considered to be "ecological", similarly like "biomass", that is burning wood and corn (and as we all know burning wood does not emit CO2, right?). In addition, this is economical idiocy. When there is too much wind/sun, you need to pay producers to stop producing, not to overload the grid. When there is no wind/sun you need to buy energy paying overpriced spot prices. That's why "renewable energy champion" - United Kingdom has the most expensive energy on the planet. We have one ecological, 100% CO2 emission free, source of energy - nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it works). But how Standford professor might promote nuclear power plants when for long, long years all major universities and organizations, with Greenpeace on the head, were fighting nuclear energy, leading to the shitty situation we have now. 10 years ago anyone who wanted to work on nuclear energy research were treated like Holocaust denier, so there was almost no development of new tech in that area. And now exactly the same people, who were telling us how bad is nuclear energy, are telling us to use wind/solar. What can go wrong...
  • Reason077 2y ago
    > "nuclear energy (check France if you don't believe it works)" France's latest nuclear reactor, Flamanville 3, was finally connected to the grid in December 2024 after 17 years (!!) of construction beset by problems, delays, and massive cost overruns. Nuclear can be part of the solution, but renewables are much cheaper and faster to build. So for every $/€ spent, you are achieving more CO2 reduction, much more quickly, by building renewables compared to building new nuclear.
    • numpad0 2y ago
      US Navy has been building, commissioning, operating nuclear submarines successfully, literally every years for at least past two decades. The sub reactors are PWRs, only built with unadulterated high purity Uranium. The "problems, delays, overruns" is basically euphemism for political sabotaging. I can't feel so sympathetic to those in denial of that. It's just hot rocks boiling in a pressure cooker. 1940s technology. Not 1940s as in Portal timeline. Making assumptions that there must be complicated technical challenges that cannot be overcome or could delay construction as long as 17 years to mitigate is just stupid.
• alas44 2y ago
  Recent video on the topic by Real Engineering, interviewing a start-up in this domain that aims at creating new technology to dig 10km+ bore holes using plasma to vaporise rocks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
  • thinkcontext 2y ago
    Highly speculative. Last I looked they had drilled inches in a lab.
    • deIeted 2y ago
      [dead]
  • kragen 2y ago
    This article is about that startup, describing a visit to their lab; unlike Real Engineering videos, the article is fact-checked.
• adrithmetiqa 2y ago
  These guys have made huge progress with their closed loop system https://www.eavor.com/technology/ https://www.eavor.com/technology/
• sampo 2y ago
  Finland tried a project, drilling two 6km deep holes. The temperature at 6km depth is 120C. The idea was to pump water down one hole, and get heated water up from the second hole. But the rock wasn't porous enough, they could not get enough water to flow from the bottom of one hole to the other hole. So in the end, they couldn't extract enough heat out of the setup. https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/drilling-finlands-deepest-well-on-record-the-geothermal-well-at-otaniemi/ https://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/drilling-finlands-deepest-wel... https://yle.fi/a/3-12414600 https://yle.fi/a/3-12414600
  • ip26 2y ago
    I would have thought directional drilling could work to bridge the two boreholes
    • JusticeJuice 2y ago
      It's really really hard to 'aim' a 6km deep hole. Hitting a slab of tough rock can deflect the drillbit off course. If you remember the Chilean miner rescue in 2010, who got rescued by a new hole being drilled - they had 3 seperate holes being drilled at the same time as backups, just because they were worried about the success rate of actually hitting their target. And that was only 0.7km underground.
    • notatoad 2y ago
      directional drilling could work if they started nice and high up and aimed to meet somewhere, but turning 90 degrees at the bottom of a 6km borehole is going to require a 6km long directional drilling rig, and probably a fair bit of extra depth to make that turn. it might be possible, but at those depths everything becomes much more difficult to the point where it might make more sense to just give up and abandon the project. it does like a good opportunity for the fracking techniques mentioned elsewhere in this thread - drop some explosives down those boreholes and see if you can artificially increase the porosity.
  • qwerty_clicks 2y ago
    All these failures help progress the industry. Lessons learned are a gift
• dboreham 2y ago
  Planetary Dyson Sphere.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• kragen 2y ago
  The big issue I'm not seeing any discussion of in the comments here is cost per watt. We can divide this into two big buckets: the cost of heat, and the cost of turning heat into electricity. This article is all about how geothermal can reduce the cost of heat (especially EGS), how immense that resource is, and how it's basically carbon-free. But I think the bigger issue is the second bucket: the cost of turning heat into electricity seems to still be too high to compete with solar and wind, even if the heat were free. The article doesn't mention this at all, but I think it's the crucial issue. I don't understand why heat engines are still so expensive 250 years after James Watt, but they do seem to be. In January I came across https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost/pdf/capital_cost_AEO2020.pdf https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... which is an EIA-commissioned study of the capital cost of building different kinds of power plants, and I am hoping that studying it will give me the answer. The article mentions the intermittency of wind and solar a few times as if it were a showstopper—as if no amount of solar and wind power generation capacity could be an adequate substitute for any amount of geothermal power, because you don't have solar power at night, for example. But actually that's just a question of how much it costs to store the energy until it's needed or transmit it from where it's still being produced. We have upper bounds on those storage costs from existing utility-scale storage facilities, and they already look pretty okay. We can expect that they will get cheaper over time.
  • micro2588 2y ago
    You are right there is no getting around that relatively low grade heat in geothermal is a big barrier for scaling in terms of energy production. Binary /organic rankine cycle geothermal plants used for these low / medium temperature resources operate at ~10% efficiency. Dry / flash steam resources are higher but produce waste in terms of emitted GHG and / or crap in the geothermal brine.
    • kragen 2y ago
      Deep geothermal promises to provide what is usually considered high-grade heat (800+°), but what I'm trying to understand is how cheaply you can convert that high-grade heat into electricity, because the answer seems to be "far too expensively to be competitive with wind and solar".
• modeless 2y ago
  I wonder, if geothermal was somehow scaled to supply a large fraction of our current energy use, would we start influencing plate tectonics? Couldn't it actually thicken the plates under the power plants and influence how they respond to currents underneath?
• qwerty_clicks 2y ago
  I work for a O&G super major. You’d think that one of these groups would be more interested right? It’s all about money, if one can’t make huge profits (especially with huge gov subsidies) then they will continue to ignore the prospect. Megacorps aren’t trying to save the world they are trying to get mega rich.
  • simplysublime 2y ago
    Wait until they see what happens when all of their exploitable employees get cooked lol.
• lisper 2y ago
  Coincidentally (at least I presume it was) Sabine Hossenfelder just published a piece about geothermal today as well: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/03/i-was-wrong-about-geothermal-energy.html https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/03/i-was-wrong-about-...
• ggm 2y ago
  The problem is motivations in the capital investment market related to energy. Australia has hot rocks. We are ideally placed to capitalise on this. The last attempt failed at scale, when the test bore and fracking had problems and the money sucked out of the project, the entire thing ground to a halt and rusted in the tin shed in the outback for 5 years before being formally closed down. You can make faster ROI in energy plays by doing other things. Thats the sad truth: It required public finance models of ROI, expectations on energy supply markets, basically a different approach to funding and returns to make it work. But it definitely can work, and is used e.g. in New Zealand where its vented closer to the surface. But, we have the hot rocks. we have the deep water. we have all the mechanistic requirements to do the rock splitting to make a two or ten or twenty hole thermal energy extraction method work, and we even routinely do the fracking for gas well optimisation: we know how to do this. It's just that other things make money faster, and thats what motivated people to do things: making money, not fixing climate
• newman314 2y ago
  On a related note, I remember reading about Dandelion Energy a while but have not heard much since. I'm interested in knowing if anyone here has gotten it installed and their experience with it.
  • benzible 2y ago
    Interview with the CEO from a few months ago: https://www.builderonline.com/building/dandelion-raised-40-million-for-geothermal-whats-next_o https://www.builderonline.com/building/dandelion-raised-40-m... From this, it sounds like the economics are dependent on Inflation Reduction Act incentives which face an uncertain future at a minimum.
• CaptainBanger 2y ago
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• gcanyon 2y ago
  Real Engineering just realeased a video on a drilling company using megawatt masers to vaporize rock to reach the depths required. It’s promising, but still experimental. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b_EoZzE7KJ0
• bufferoverflow 2y ago
  Doesn't geothermal heat up the surface of the planet? You're essentially taking the heat that normally stays very deep and being it to the surface.
  • ricardo81 2y ago
    Purely a gut feel as I haven't verified, the amount of solar irradiance the surface receives would make any geothermal amount insignificant.
• neuralnomad 2y ago
  Am I the only one who thinks that maybe tapping the planet for energy may not be a good idea? Every time we dig really deep we discover new things that surprise us, but we're 100% sure that this is perfectly fine to do?? I'm pretty sure this is how Krypton exploded :|
• jgord 2y ago
  Are we so beaten down that we think no new useful technology is possible ? That we cant do large projects ? It is quite hard to not be cynical .. we have lots of evidence that we should be cynical, that our politicians are scamming us etc. But it does seem to me that we have geo-engineered our way into a warming climate - by burning Carbon fuels the last 150 years - and we will need to geo-engineer our way out of the mess. I saw a statistic that said around 50% of people dont believe that climate warming is caused by human activity. It seems unpopular on HN to talk about climate change, but here goes : We are nearing or at +1.5C now, currently at a long plateau of peak CO2 and CH4 emissions .. and we may be warming at around +0.3C per decade. That puts us near +2.1C by 2045 .. not so far in the future. Lets say we electrify everything and reach "Net-Zero" by 2060 .. the accumulated CO2 will stay there for a long time until we remove it. Its the area under the graph that counts. Net Zero emissions == Peak CO2 == PEAK HEAT Were headed for more ice melt, more energetic storms, more wildfires, more floods, crop failure, less stable food supply. Id prefer if we could go back and stop burning carbon 30 years ago .. but here we are, soon heat itself will be its own problem. Only a few crazy people seem to be willing to discuss the unthinkable option of _deliberately_ polluting the sky with Sulfur particulates to increase cloud cover over the ocean, so more light is reflected and less heat is absorbed by the sea .. but what other plan is there to survive peak heat ? Given the urgency of the problem - the burning need to get away from Carbon fuels - I have to wonder why governments aren't underwriting large projects such as deep drilled geothermal ? If otoh, Small Modular Nuclear reactors are really the best solution.. why dont we have a whole coterie of them working by now ? Why aren't rich ex-founders financing more of these hail-mary projects ? Drilling a 12-km hole in the ground and pouring a billion dollars into it, with 5% odds of getting a vast supply of free energy out of it seems an okay tradeoff to make, if I have 10Bn net worth and there is a chance that Ill be making the planet livable for my grand-kids.
  • orson2077 2y ago
    My impression was that stratospheric aerosol injection has been kept out of the public consciousness deliberately. If the public discussed it now, they’d learn quickly about things like termination shock, and the calculable consequences to weather systems depending on where the sulphur is injected (eg Inject over Norway and mess up el Nino), and come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty undesirable option. If, however, it’s left to the last minute, fossil fuels can continue, and then use this as a “last resort” card.
• askvictor 2y ago
  Some years ago I read about a system to store solar (heat) energy in a well during the day (by warming water and pumping it down), and retrieve it by night. But haven't heard anything since - did anything become of this plan?
  • rcaught 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy
• hnmullany 2y ago
  I wrote an introductory piece on the economics and technology of enhanced geothermal with good technical sources. I think it summarizes the state of the tech better than the New Yorker article. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energy-michael-mullany-i0q7e/?trackingId=e3GbYAXURauBi0YgqH86Fw%3D%3D https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/note-fracked-geothermal-energ...
• lormayna 2y ago
  In Tuscany we have two areas that produce geothermic energy covering 33% of the whole region energy demand. https://www.cosvig.it/geotermia/numeri-enel-toscana/ https://www.cosvig.it/geotermia/numeri-enel-toscana/ The main problem is, that especially in the Amiata areas, the steam that come out is full of heavy metals like mercury or boron that are very toxic for population and require expensive filtering.
• boringg 2y ago
  Geothermal and Tidal are in the same category -- niche energy that works for very specific locations on the planet. The strategy should be deploy solar - deploy nuclear. Put some research dollars towards deep geothermal and piggy back on O&G research but don't distract from the needed current strategy.
  • hexator 2y ago
    If we can get drilling tech improved, we could drill far deeper and geothermal would be viable anywhere on the planet.
    • boringg 2y ago
      Well that and then the deeper you drill, the more you will need to pump. There are significant complications. On paper I agree - pragmatically it still seems far away when we have great options already available: I mean alternatively we could use the power of the Sun (technology we have already developed). We could also use uranium and plutonium to power long lived electricity. Convert that electricity to heat via heat pumps (already available tech). All for improving drilling tech -- maybe let O&G bare most of the cost of research though if we need to compete for research dollars.
• code_for_monkey 2y ago
  one thing thats frustrating about this kind of article is it doesnt reckon with the reality of why were addicted to oil, its about who owns the means of production and which people are enriched by it.
• datadrivenangel 2y ago
  Nuclear Power is cheaper than geothermal at large scale.
• m101 2y ago
  I would appreciate it if someone could chime in here who knows what they're talking about on the physics of this: My intuition is that there are a number of big problems: 1) power that a power station could supply is limited to the thermal conduction within the earth's crust that the power plant has access to. Instantaneous power can be high, but it would cool down the rocks. I don't think rocks are good conductors. It seems one needs to somehow access a large surface area (facing down) of rocks but a drill hole is vertical. 2) getting heated steam from inside the crust to the surface for electricity conversion faces losses by way of heat conduction to the drill hole. What are the losses there per km, for instance? Does this make some depth infeasible? Separately, has anyone done a calculation of the actual energy that is released from the inside of the earth through the surface? It seem extremely small for most parts of the world and so would need a massive surface area. I am sceptical that there are many areas which would provide consistent long term energy (over just cooling the rocks too far).
  • ihodes 2y ago
    1. Fracking tech allows us to drill horizontally, and enhanced geothermal systems rely on this to get that surface area exposure at 7+ km below the surface 2. The steam's extremely (225C+) hot, so there are losses but doesn't make it infeasible. Below a certain depth, the earth gets 1º hotter per 40m of depth.
    • omdv 2y ago
      Fracking has nothing to do with horizontal drilling. Fracking is used to increase the connectivity of the reservoir to the wellbore, in the case of low permeability reservoir. For geothermal applications there is no reason to pick the low perm and increase the cost of well completion. Horizontal directional drilling is a very established field, which is very technologically intensive and some of the things we can do in this area are nothing short of amazing. Basically any trajectory can be executed, including some smart things like underground loops. Couple this with electric submersible pumps (ESP), which help to increase the flow and potentially run water through several cycles to maximize the contact with hot payzone before getting it to surface and you can do many interesting things.
• glitchc 2y ago
  Geothermal is great except for one thing: It's not portable. And that factor alone limits its usability tremendously.
• Ken_At_EM 2y ago
  We're designing the navigation systems that are leading the way in GeoThermal energy. You can check out our presentation from the ISCWSA last year in Glasgow (apologies for the potato quality video.) https://www.youtube.com/live/kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7865s https://www.youtube.com/live/kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7865s If you want to join our team: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43244633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43244633
• salynchnew 2y ago
  We can also just build more solar, and then the need for 90% of this just goes away. Why not just use the DEEP ideas and tech for pumped solar energy storage?
• tomashm 2y ago
  We are developing advanced physics simulations, including one aimed at enhancing geothermal power efficiency at https://simuport.com https://simuport.com. Our online simulators are currently template-based, primarily serving as a showcase of our models' capabilities. We have ambitious plans to expand, adding many more simulators and advanced features.