Microwave drilling. It's a known thing at small scale.[1] If it can be done at larger scale, it ought to have other applications. Doing it downhole at the end of a long pipe string is going to be much harder than doing it in a factory. So why isn't this an industrial machining process already, like plasma cutting?
GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.
The University of Minnesota was pushing electro-pulse boring in 2015.[3] Again, no deep holes.
There's something called ThermoDrilling, which, despite the name, is more like a water jet cutter.[4]
Successful projects are still using mechanical drilling.[5]
So there are a lot of deep hole drilling approaches being studied. Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working.
Conventional “mechanical” drilling isn’t very heat tolerant because heat softens metal. For oil and even gas drilling it doesn’t need to be; they’re located in cooler rock. For supercritical steam EGS heat tolerance is a sine qua non. Conventional approaches might still work best, but it’s also plausible that what’s best for gas isn’t best for EGS.
But if we get to temperatures that destory metals, isn't it enough?
Why don't we drill to whatever is the termal limit, make a big cavity there, install radiators there and just heat the watter to that temperature and take it out to surface where we can heat homes.
I know this is done in Bucharest for a water park (to much lesser depths because apparently we have hot springs near Bucharest).
This is about running your air conditioner, charging your Tesla, and molding your kitchen sink, not heating homes. Think Carnot efficiency, power density, supercritical steam, and shutting down gas pipelines.
And the temperature to destroy steel under the immense mechanical stress of a drill string is surprisingly modest. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, but softening them is enough.
Thermal mass and thermal conductivity also play a role in this example. Two more reasons a wooden ladder is better in this scenario. For ladders at the same temperature, the aluminum one would conduct more thermal energy, quicker, into a user's hand then a Wooden one. Making a wooden one more usable for longer in this scenario even though the aluminum one would technically last longer.
This is why wooden sauna seats work well, aluminum seats in the sauna would not go over so well.
Lots to consider when solving thermal problems, it's not just about turning up the dial to be able to withstand more heat. Sometimes it's about the nuance of moving the heat efficiently and putting it where it's wanted, and not where it isnt.
Wood has about the same specific heat as aluminum, but a wooden ladder weighs much more, so a wooden ladder at the same temperature contains much more sensible heat to eventually conduct into the user's hand.
I looked it up. Actually wood had about twice the specific heat as aluminum. So I must revise my original comment to remove specific heat as a driving factor. This leaves only thermal conductivity. A wood ladder would have more heat to give than an aluminum one, but it still is able to give it much slower, making it ok to touch for longer.
My general rule is that everything is 1 J/g/K except water, which is 4.2. It's obviously not true, but almost always within a factor of 2, and 1 is an especially easy number to multiply and divide by.
Reading your first paragraph, I was thinking "water. the answer is always water", when it comes to estimating the properties of life-stuff vs everything-else-stuff within a factor of 2. Not obviously, of course, but it's just such a powerful heuristic.
Reading your second paragraph, I see you're familiar with the principle, and added a good heuristic to my stockpile, thank you.
You need a thermal gradient to move heat from the surrounding rock to the water your pumping in. The higher the initial temperature the larger the difference and therefore faster you can extract heat. Aka even if the working fluid is at a constant temperature you can simply pump it faster.
Also, Carnot efficiency limits means you want the hottest steam you can handle. Further, you have various inefficiencies such as losing heat as water moves back up a borehole.
Nope. Over the last ~20 years the drilling industry has gotten good at: angle drilling (not slant drilling but turning the drill angle at the bottom) and fracking, or pumping fluid through rock to break it up. This means conventional methods can dig far down, turn the drill and make a reserve with fracking. The heat is much less but it's conventional technology.
> Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working.
To flip that around: this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground, no? Ones that make the ground radioactive, perhaps. Or that would set any potential oil fields on fire, or react them away, or irrevocably mix a combustion-inhibiting azeotropic solvent into them.
Regarding drilling operations that destroy value: you're forgetting that drilling is 1D while oil fields are 3D (technically quasi-2D with horizontal dimensions 100x to 1000x larger than vertical dimensions). If your drilling messes up everything in a 10 meter radius from the drill string, you don't care.
> Don't worry, we were doing nuclear fracking back in the days. Everything that could work has been tried for oil and gas exploration.
Likewise, everything that conceivably could be done with nuclear was tried or at least designed for a while there - lighting watches with radium, digging canals with nukes, space travel by continuously exploding nukes behind you... good times. (Horrifying times, but w/e;])
> Likewise, everything that conceivably could be done with nuclear was tried or at least designed for a while there - lighting watches with radium, digging canals with nukes, space travel by continuously exploding nukes behind you... good times. (Horrifying times, but w/e;])
I've long wanted to put some money into an eco terror fund.
It would buy controlling interests in all the companies that make some critical, specialized and heavily patented piece of modern internal combustion engines or coal turbines. Then, it'd wreck the factories, and patent troll everyone else into not producing.
Money is speech, and that would be protected political speech, right? :-)
As my wise auntie says,”You can’t see clearly through the bottom of a pint glass.”
Are you not drunk on energy? Warm or cool at will, well fed and clothed, able to travel and communicate?
There’s no collecting if you bet on the apocalypse.
<\wisdomnag>
>There’s no collecting if you bet on the apocalypse.
That's just not true. Misery and suffering is it's own reward, to some. This is arguably the main point of Orwell's 1984, when O'Brien explains to Winston Smith why they bother torturing people before killing them. O'Brien says that to knowingly cause suffering in someone is the ultimate expression of power, and it is axiomatic to him that power is good in-and-of-itself.
Honest question: if something is patented, sure China could manufacture it, but wouldn't patent protection prohibit importing the counterfeit good into the USA?
I've never actually thought about whether patent protection covered just the sale, or the manufacture, or exactly what, so thanks for bringing that nuance to my attention!
Once it had demonstrated enough success to instill fear in the hearts of wall street bankers, I think it could start turning a profit. It would announce targets ahead of time, tanking the stock. On the way down, the companies would reinvest the money they make selling themselves for parts back into the fund.
You're not going to tank a stock by publicly telling people you're going to buy a bunch of it. A bunch of people will try to get in front of you and bid you up.
Hey, if a DAO can raise enough money to almost buy the Constitution, maybe you don't need to wait for Someone Else™ to start the slush fund required to pull off that stunt /s (but also not /s) -- err, specifically I meant the "fund" part, not the "wrecking factories" part, unless you meant economically wrecking, in which case I think it's still plausible
> this would imply that the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches to deep hole boring would be the ones that destroy the economic value of any oil-and-gas in the ground,
That is only one explanation to why a technology would be among the most under-investigated-in-industry approaches. There are many others, such as:
- It does not work at all.
- It is more expensive than traditional methods
- It is illegal in some way
- It is incompatible with the rest of oil&gas processing.
Oil companies sell finite fuel for energy to people in cars, on the move.
Geothermal heating provides unlimited fuel for people in houses, staying still.
The technology is similar, and it's boring ;-) The market is different. This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to hire expert drilling engineers out of the oil industry!
Core of sun: 27 million ºC
Surface of sun: 6,000 ºC
"The leading idea among experts is the sun's magnetic field is actually bringing energy from inside the sun up through its surface and into its atmosphere."
The "napkin math" will involve gathering some data about RF power harvesting, and some assumptions (e.g. cosmic rays)
It's even more interesting that you mention the magnetic field, could we use solar panels to draw more energy from the sun to power a tesla coil and microwave the core?
It's surprising how often that movie comes up, especially given how it's often accompanied by a note that it's not good. I suspect it's hit a pseudo-cult classic film status. The last few times I've seen it mentioned I've had the desire to seek it out and watch it again since I only remember bits and pieces.
This could also have good use for ground source heat pumps - they're the most efficient, robust and consistent source of domestic heating we have, but require fairly deep (60m ish) boreholes. If digging could be quicker, easier or faster these heat pumps could be installed everywhere.
I have one of those. The well is 170m deep. Took 2 guys about half a day to drill it, so that actually doesn’t seem excessive in terms of time required (mostly sand, no rock below my house).
Out of curiosity, what were you digging with? Unless you were digging with a toy sand shovel or making a very large hole, that seems like a very long time.
As a kid, my cousin, my sister, and myself were able to dig a hole deep enough for me to be completely inside in an hour or two using a post hole digger. (Yes, this is a very stupid idea.)
Sink directly into it for the summer. Heat exchanger between the source (approx 10-15C) and the water from the floor heating/cooling system. Because the heat pump is not involved it's very efficient (only the power of the well pump)
I'm actually considering if it makes sense to push a lot more heat into it in the summer (Deliberately leaving curtains open, then moving this heat into the well; or even PVT panels), but I'm not sure if the well would retain heat long enough to make a difference towards the winter.
It definitely should, I'm not sure making your A/C work harder deliberately makes sense economically, I guess you'd have to do the math. PVT or even just thermal panels (i.e. rolls of garden hose painted black in a glass covered box) would make a lot of sense if you're in a colder climate though.
Your system should give a an overview of your yearly input/output and any drift of the well temperature right?
Except this technology is for after you get to the plate of rock at the bottom of topsoil unfortunately. They mentioned it in the article. You use conventional drilling to get to depth first.
Indeed horizontal (pipe network, like underfloor heating in reverse) is the most efficient solution, digging deep is for when the plot is too small or otherwise encumbered (or if one sits on top of a volcano).
A 60m borehole is not a source of energy, it is a store of energy. It only makes sense if you can sink enough heat into it in the summer, to use that energy in the winter. Or vice versa in warmer climates.
We have a ground source heat pump and one summer we were away and did not use out air conditioning that year much at all. Mid winter our return loop temperatures (the glycol being brought in to our heat pump after circulating in the ground) was at one point 3 degrees C cooler than it had been any other year. Quite a noticeable difference. For reference, our loops are 8 vertical at 250ft.
Very interesting context here, thanks. Do you know of any write-ups that give a deeper picture of the progress of any of these (or other similar) projects? It seems that there are tough problems to be solved, but we're just seeing the marketing materials.
Another thing that should be considered: how do you keep the hole open while drilling? At extreme P and T, the hole will close in on the drillstring. Also, fluids turn very nasty in those conditions. You'll need some unobtanium and some of Superman's suit material.
Wouldn't massive scale geothermal end up pumping more heat into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn't be there?
In contrast, the energy collected by solar and wind generators is from the energy added to Earth by the sun and would be energy in our atmosphere regardless of whether or not we collect it.
But it seems like the heat inside the Earth's core should be fairly well insulated by the lithosphere, and it only slowly leaks out over time. If we start pulling that energy out at a faster rate to generate electricity, could that have a noticeable net increase on total energy under the atmosphere, or is it such an insignificant amount of energy relative to the sun's to not even bother worrying about?
You are correct in that the earth core is really well insulated from the surface. So well that the light of the sun delivers an order of magnitude more energy per M2 to the Earth's surface.
That information also answers your question, our problem isn't with the amount heat we produce, it's with how much of that solar radiation we trap in our atmosphere due to the green house effect of CO2 and similar gases.
So yeah we introduce a little bit more heat by drawing from the Earth's core, but it's nothing compared to what trapping the sun's energy with CO2 is doing to the planet right now.
Conversely using that energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere might even cool the planet, but that's a question for the next generation.
I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction.
The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed.
But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then it fundamentally changes how we think about it. Removing CO2 (insulation) is one option, but so are projects like solar reflection or some other forms of heat dissipation or heat sinking.
The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable.
Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the green movement wants and has always wanted is a conservative growth model, where the growth is not based on the depletion of finite resources. It is mostly the promoters of unsustainable growth that twist this into an anti-growth narrative.
Now, techno-optimists say we can solve the problems created by unsustainable growth with more technology, and this may be true. But it is asking everyone to take a pretty large gamble on technology that does not exist yet. The conservative strategy is sustainability, and that goes much wider than just solving climate change.
Eventually, one day, sooner or later a very unsustainable chunk of high speed space rock will hit the planet and wipe us out, or some other completely natural and “green” disaster, like a supervolcanic eruption, as has happened repeatedly in history. The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology to a point to divert the problem or make ourselves sufficiently resilient from the problem. There is no “if” here, it’s statistically guaranteed.
As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth. More people with a higher standard of living means more teachers, scientists, artists, engineers, and leaders. We need those people because hiding in a cave is exactly the wrong thing to do.
From this point of view, which I certainly share, the responsible thing to do is to grow as fast as humanly possible until we are spread far and wide across the solar system, while also hedging our bets and making an effort to grow in the cleanest way that doesn’t slow us down.
I agree with the main argument, I question the means to get a higher standard of living. ATM it seems like rather than sustaining people we're sustaining their management by and for corporations... it seems like multiple layers and huge inefficiencies to get that QOL you speak of... I mean after all isn't leisure the mother of philosophy ?
We treat time as something we don't have enough of...(not surprising as routines tend to contract the perception of time )
We treat humans as disposable, when they have more knowledge, experiences, social contacts the older they get...
We revere money more than empathy (moreso in Western Europe, some developed countries or among those "who have")
I'd suggest it's all a play by the politicians to remain in power, rather than let people decide (if they weren't working so much to sustain real-estate, rental, health care)
We need to replace them by choosing them at random... I believe the term is Stochocracy
> The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology
This is your objective to meet your end which is survival. I don't agree with it, but I'll respond as if I took it for a given.
> As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth.
What you mean by growth here matters. More people with a higher standard of living is two types of growth. One is economic the other is population. But there are other dimensions to grow across.
For example, peacefulness has produced just outstanding yields in many valuable areas such as productivity, research, and ecological protection. But peacefulness did not arise out of nothing. It took lives to create our world which is peaceful for most people. Real people working on arms control agreements and diplomacy.
Improving education is similar. You could argue that education requires resources, and that is true to a point, but we are well, well past that point. North Korea is capable of nuclear weapons and rocketry. Most elementary school programs can get by on $100 worth of reusable books a year and some paper and pens.
Now the green model has some fatal flaws, and there is a reason I'm a Canadian Liberal not a Green, but the core thrust of Green thinking is a good thing in my opinion because I've found that, in general, prevention is more efficient than cure because it's easier to align incentives with prevention.
One of the problems with incentive alignment is that the international system is anarchistic and individual choices are unpredictable and given over to passions that are often unethical. This leads to unavoidable arms races (literal and figurative) across multiple aspects of society and politics.
So, for example, China builds new coal power plants because they're in a power competition with the West and to build wind turbines instead would cost a non-trivial portion of their GDP and institutional focus.
Anyway, in summary, yes with what you outlined as your objective economic growth matters, but so do other forms of growth. I would even include spiritual growth (or decline) matter too. People are acting incredibly sanctimonious and paranoid right now and it isn't helping their more charitable instincts.
I tend to agree with you philosophically, but when it comes to implementation that's where I really struggle. How do you curtail either of the two types of growth? It seems like the only options include authoritarian and borderline human rights violating. A group of progressive countries could band together and try to invade China and force them to slow their growth, but even ignoring the ethicality of forcing our will on others, most people would agree that the death and suffering would be pretty bad.
So far the best form of population control has been prosperity. Birth rates tend to fall as quality of life goes up (not always of course because there are many factors in that). The other option is outlawing reproduction much like China did for a long time. That seems questionable re: human rights also.
I think if you are talking at that time scale, the imperative for humanity in particular to be the one to make that advancement is just anthro vanity. The history of humanity is such a relatively brief thing on the cosmic scale you are talking about, and yet in our brief time we have screwed things up massively for ourselves. But not necessarily for future species and human-like life.
Its ok if we don't make it guys, there was species before us, and there will be some after us. The universe is vast. We are probably not even that special, but we can do our best and enjoy life and try to minimize the suffering that will certainly happen from our mistakes... to want to "win" anything beyond that will just cause more suffering.
Its ok to admit we messed up, we couldn't know at the time that a global capitalism predicated on an unlimited nature would not end up great, the timeline of scientific discovery was not in out favor there. On all accounts we are most likely too late, its not anyone in particulars fault, its ok.
Time is very vast, that can scare you or humble you.
Scientists have done more than enough. The issue now is entrenched interests blocking progress.
We had all the technology we needed to go carbon neutral back in the 1980's. Back then, even the American Petroleum Institute (yes, the planet burners) were raising alarms over CO2 and global warming.
We have many technological doublings ahead of us before technology fails to provide opportunities for growth. That's not the problem.
The problem is that our economic system is terrible at pricing in externalities.
Edit: Come to think of it, the American Petroleum Institute scientists said the exact same thing back then. Skip to the last page:
We may have had the technology in the 80s, but the economics is only just getting close. We could have switched but it would have meant a drastic reduction in quality of life for everyone who wasn't rich. We might still be in 80/90s technology had we done that, because the wealthier we are as a society, the faster we can develop technology.
There are certainly cases where a more holistic view is very important. For example a plan to plant trees in the Sahara desert, irrigated by desalination plants powered by solar, at first glance seems like a "reasonable" plan to sequester carbon. But once you account for the fact that the desert reflects a lot more light then trees do it actually looks like it would accelerate global warming. The plan gets kind of "saved" once you consider the effects of the new forest on weather patterns: the trees cause more clouds to form which are quite reflective and bring the plan back into the green, but not enough to be useful.
So not a great plan, but a great example of how some of the solutions can be a lot more complex than just "remove CO2". At the same time any plan that cools without removing CO2 (e.g. planetary sunshades[1]) have the downside that they don't solve ocean acidification.
I think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
I think we're deep into the territory of "literally anything we choose to do or not do is going to create a never ending game of whack-a-mole unintended consequences".
We own the fate of our civilization and the environment it relies on.
It's time to take ownership and stop cowering in the cave.
> not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification
Look up carbonate compensation depth, your mind will be blown. Yes, researchers understand the effects of climate change because they have been looking at it for 40+ years. Being extra worried about climate change is a lot like climate denial, in that it doesn’t show trust in our scientists. There is no need to invent trouble — the challenges we know we will face are hard enough.
It's also a bit more difficult to diffuse out of classrooms and such with 400+ ppm background vs 300ppm. At what threshold it affects alertness, cognition, or motivation is disputed.
The fixation on GHG reduction is, as a friend of mine puts it, a suicide pact, simply reducing the second derivative. Unfortunately it's easy to understand and discuss, so that's where all the attention goes.
The issue of climate repair (and long term curation, unfortunately) seems to frighten lots of people. There are people working on it, but they are a small community.
Literally “climate repair” and “climate restoration”. Some NGOs to check out include the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge and Foundation for Climate restoration.
Human energy utilization is on the order of 20 terawatts, 0.02% of the power the sunlight that hits the atmosphere. Our energy utilization doesn't matter a lot.
I agree, there is a big defeatist and regressive narrative. But some of us do focus on the positive -- we can fix this, and fix a lot of other problems at the same time, and it's not even that costly if we do it right, gradually switching our energy sources over time and gradually changing our living habits where we're willing. People always talk about a carbon tax, because it's a really, really good idea: it is very economically efficient, is targeted like a laser at the real problem, and will have huge benefits even just in terms of reducing premature deaths from particulate pollution.
The reason I think stopping use of fossil fuels is really the only reasonable solution, or is at least a necessary part of any solution, is that anything else is like trying to fix your car accelerating out of control by just driving around with one foot on the brake. Trying to balance the increased greenhouse effect by blocking sunlight might work a bit, but there are all sorts of ways it can go wrong -- it creates a moral hazard where everyone will have less incentive to stop using fossil fuels and thus continue making the root cause of the problem worse, and we have to keep doing it forever -- stopping means a sudden massive amount of climate change that people won't have time to adjust to. There are so many really easy ways that we can cut our emissions massively, with technology we have available today, with virtually no impact on our living standards. The rest will take some time and technological improvements, but it's all doable!
And I've not heard of any sort of heat dissipation geo-engineering ideas -- the only feasible way I know of to get the earth's heat dissipation back to normal is to take off this extra blanket of greenhouse gases we've put on it. Any sort of heat dissipation would have to transfer heat to the upper atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2, and I don't think there's any way we could do that at the scale required to have a noticeable effect.
All the geoengineering we might do is totally unproven and untested. If the alternative is a calamity then yes, of course we'll do it. As things stand, it seems like we should be putting as much effort as we can into the thing we know works (reducing greenhouse gas emissions).
plants are 99.9999% carbon from carbon dioxide, though... what?
edit: i mean of the things in a plant that contain carbon and don't, 99... whatever percent of a plant is atmospheric carbon. all the soil amendments added are to replace stuff like fungus that normally forms a relationship with nearby plants and gives nutrients that plants use to modulate energy production and transpiration (or whatever), similar to how we need all of the "salts" to have a functioning brain. N-P-K lets plants more efficiently turn atmospheric carbon into food than without. Couple this with the fact that humans use nearly all of a plant now, to make cooking oil, fuel oil, and animal feed, there's nothing left after we harvest for the fungus to eat.
I normally would have launched into a diatribe against bayer/monsanto as a reply about stuff like this, but as it stands, i'm fine with careful and scientifically sound application of N-P-K for huge farms. I do, however, have a problem with pesticides and their "inactive" ingredients, not the least of which due to drinking water from an untreated well, myself.
Studies show higher atmospheric carbon means the crops grow faster and have lower micronutrient density than crops grown in lower co2 environments. Our crops grow faster but aren't as healthy for us.
I would like to read those, should you happen to know which ones. It seems counter-intuitive. soil amendments only including N-P-K don't seem like they'd help much with micronutrients anyhow, so ideally "functional local farming" should be considered an imperative, at least for supplementing mass-farmed foods. Like sure, canned and frozen vegetables for 6 meals a week, but one meal should have locally sourced something that hasn't been frozen or otherwise treated.
A properly managed and grown acre of land can provide a quarter ton to a ton of food in a year, but you can't use tractors or anything, it all has to be managed by hand or small machines.
The heat is not the problem. It radiates into space quite quickly. The current world energy supply per year is over 160 TWh.[1] By comparison, the erruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 released aprox. 237.5 times more energy in a single incident (~38 PWh).[2] The problem at that time was not an extended (regional) heat wave, but the substances that entered the atmosphere and remained there for several years, causing a global weather change.
[2] Other less spectacular examples: 160 TWh is equivalent of 5 to 6 times the energy released by the Mt. St. Helens erruption of 1980 (~28 TWh) or the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake (~30.6 TWh), or half of the energy released by the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa (~232 TWh), or 1/4 of all nuclear bomb explosions so far (628 TWh). For this an other examples see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent
Solar is also trapping more energy than what would never be there. If the sun's rays just hit the ground, a portion of it would be reflected back. We're using dark material to aborb most of what would be reflected back and we end up trapping more energy than we should... Solar panels are around 15% efficient, which means 85% of this trapped energy is immediately converted to heat, heating the local environment... and the part which becomes electricity eventually gets converted to heat as well (no matter what you use it for).
So, only ones I can think of which don't add additional heat to the planed may be wind and hydro.
Except, you know, 100% of the energy obtained by fossil fuels also eventually becomes waste heat. All of our electricity consumption and production is a rounding error to the earth. Global warming only works because the Sun can do most of the work.
>Except, you know, 100% of the energy obtained by fossil fuels also eventually becomes waste heat.
And? Where did I say it doesn't?
>All of our electricity consumption and production is a rounding error to the earth.
Agree. But I'm talking to those who believe solar is the solution to global warming... when what solar does is capture more energy from the sun and turn it to heat.
That's still such an inconsequential effect compared to the additional heat trapping caused by atmospheric ghg increases from fossil fuel burning that it doesn't really tip the scales. Solar does solve the biggest problem: ghg emissions. In order of importance: #1: stopping emission of greenhouse gasses on a huge, planet destroying scale, ~#15 reducing current ghg concentrations back to baseline, ~#900 worrying about reflectivity or absorption levels of solar energy installations.
Both wind and hydro convert kinetic energy into electricity and heat. The heat is from the moving parts in the turbines and the power conversion electronics. Heat is a product of just about every energy conversion you can imagine.
Already been there done that. Asphalt roads and roofs do this en masse and create some slight overnight heat storage in urban environments. Solar is just a marginal addition I believe.
If you've ever driven on a road approaching a hillside photovoltaics installation from the east at just the right time in the afternoon when it projects the sun right into traffic, you wouldn't be so sure to assume that 100% of incoming photons go either to electricity or to heat... but yeah, high albedo photovoltaic might be an interesting research topic. We have semi-translucent panels that seem to only sacrifice so much efficiency, some room for high albedo should exist (probably not much). Market would of course be people showing off that they can afford different looks, like those musk-shingles. But efficiency also dereases with temperature, so perhaps this might be another angle ? Invoking the impact on total earth albedo certainly won't drive any buying decisions, tragedy of the commons and all that...
No, it's not, the parent poster overestimates the effect. Something like 0.1% of the surface would need panels. Energy trapped by those solar panels pales compared to what's trapped by all the greenhouse gasses we've emitted burning coal and oil.
I wonder if solar energy is going to need to install high albedo surface area to offset it's low albedo energy absorption to satisfy some future version of ESG constraints.
I don't think "it's a rounding error" is enough analysis here. A couple of meters of sea level rise, a couple of degrees temperature rise; these could be termed rounding errors.
Not degrees, thousandths of a degree, so possibly something like a centimeter if sea level rise.
Considering nuclear and fossil fuels directly release stored energy and solar increase albido this isn’t a 1:1 increase in energy. Further the earth radiates more energy from hot places than cool, still you can approximate it as something like:
Black body radiation is temperature in kelvin to the 4th power. (285 * (170,017^0.25 / 170,000^0.25) - 285) is an increase of ~0.007 C / (whatever our current percentage of energy from fossil fuels, nuclear, or solar).
So if our energy consumption increases by 4% per year (current global average) for ~110 years, we'd need to capture / produce as much energy as the Sun hits us with. Crazy!
I don't know if this would be any extra heat, because the radioactive material would already be decaying anyway if it was left in its natural state. Maybe the same problem where radioactive material would be left mostly underground and insulated where its heat would leak slowly.
Then again, part of the Earth's core heat comes form radioactive decay. So in a way, geothermal is an indirect form of nuclear fission.
That's a pretty solid question. I really don't know but hopefully someone else can answer. My guy hypothesis though is that even for all of our energy demands the amount pulled out would be pretty negligible. The reason being that only like 0.1% of the earth covered with solar panels would meet all our energy demands and heat wise geothermal should be much more efficient. The issue with heat and global warming isn't the actual heat it's the thicker atmosphere not letting it dissipate fast enough.
It's not significant indeed. Imagine a balloon the size of the earth and pricking a tiny hole in it. Does it 1) rapidly deflate, or 2) does not change measurably in size at all for millions/billions of years? Replace your mental model of a balloon with that of a massive amount of hot stuff surrounded by a thin crust and you have your answer.
Geothermal works pretty well anywhere from a technical point of view. The main issue is that drilling holes is expensive. There is a company called Eavor that is actually re-purposing former (failed) oil drilling attempts to get a head start on that. That is smart. Even so, they are on the expensive side of the spectrum. It's just a lot of capital expenses to get to warm enough temperatures that you can get steam to drive a turbine. And of course you need either a lot of holes or a very big one to scale it.
Eavor claims that they are going to be essential for baseload. IMHO they might be too expensive for that but we'll see if they can lower their cost over time.
The amount of heat in the atmosphere at any point doesn't really matter all that much for global warming. What matters is the break-even point between the amount of energy we gain from and lose to space. Since the earth emits more energy if it's warmer (black body radiation), the break-even point relates to the temperature of the earth. If we change something about the earth's in or output of energy, the earth's temperature will naturally rise until the break even point is reached again.
By introducing greenhouse gasses, we are affecting earth's ability to radiate energy to space and thus the temperature at which we have our break-even point. Should all greenhouse gasses disappear, the earth would rapidly start cooling until it reaches its new break-even point.
We aren't talking about a system with an evenly distributed energy. It wouldn't be life on Earth if the global temperature average was between what is now the temperature of the atmosphere, and all the ones below surface. As long as the thermal isolation remains in place it shouldn't be a problem and the biggest foe should be the unbalance between heat in and heat out from sun/space, but what if we do a big scale and sustained thermal transfer between the core and the surface?
I know, I'm oversimplifying a lot, and the orders of what humans can do may be dwarfed by any volcanic eruption, but it should be a safe margin at some point at which the scale and time of heat transfer with underground may start to affect global average temperature.
It could. The available fossil sensible heat energy is something like hundreds of millions of years of sunlight. Right now geothermal is uneconomic except in special situations, and human world marketed energy consumption is four orders of magnitude smaller than insolation, so it’s not yet a practical concern.
It turns out to be millions of years of sunlight, not hundreds of millions.
You have: earthmass 2000 K 1J/g/K
You want: J
* 1.1944337e+31
/ 8.3721685e-32
You have: earthmass 2000 K 1J/g/K/(circlearea (earthradius) 1000 W/m2)
You want: years
* 2968252.9
/ 3.3689851e-07
Yeah right. They drilled in Strasbourg, France, to get this "free" energy. When they entered production, the city was experiencing an earthquake every month, waking the city at night.
After a magnitude 4 earthquake, they finally shut down the plant.
The Staufen im Breisgau mishap is one of the learning experiences of geothermal energy, like analyzing the type of rock that you plan to drill through, and maybe not drill in a town center.
But apart from that, you seem to have misinterpreted the Quaise technology, mixing apples and oranges. This is not conventional drilling which can cause water to flow into adjacent rock (not to mention fracking which deliberately cracks the bedrock to allow water to flow through).
This technology is vaporizing the rock and at the same time creating a sealed shaft which funnels the water directly to the great depths where the water can reach supercritical steam state, and so avoiding the issues that caused the Staufen im Breisgau mishap.
A conventional drill can be cemented as well, the technology is already existing but mishap happened anyway
Another town near Strasbourg is devastated like staufen Im breigsbau: Lochwiller. With the same issue as staufen, except that in this case it was a family who drilled to heat their home.
The straufen issue wasn't an earthquake. A chemical reaction occured when water mixed with an anhydrous layer, causing the ground to swell up to 12 inches per the linked wiki article.
The really interesting question might sound even more absurd: did that earthquake release stress that would have been released sooner or (worse:) later anyways? Should people affected by the earthquake thank the family for releasing stress before more accumulate?
Wildfires are the clear analogue. I wonder if it actually works that way. I would guess not. The size and strength of a massive earthquake is just so hard to understand. That the Richter scale is logarithmic is just incredible. A few small quakes here and there seem unlikely to meaningfully detract from its power.
Assuming this is a real problem, wouldn't you just put your geothermal power plant well outside of any city?
Doesn't even have to be somewhere where there are no buildings. Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.
Is there any conceivable burden urbanites don't imagine the people and land outside urban areas can tolerate?
We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.
Huh? Read my comment. I did not suggest there are no building in non-urban areas. Just fewer, and thus it would be less expensive to make them earthquake proof.
Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time. Earthquakes stronger than whatever a bit of geothermal energy production would produce.
Because Japan deals with natural earthquakes all the time, japan has quake-safety standards. They were written in blood, and don’t exist in places which don’t routinely have earthquakes, because quake safety is constraining and expensive.
Retrofitting an entire country for quake safety because you’ve decided to create artificial earthquakes is inane.
Given the example quoted, not all that far. One article talked about Strasbourg having some minor wobbles, not the entire region. They would have surely seized on the sensationalism of reporting a wider impact.
Of course, there's no clear border. Wobbles will be biggest at the epicentre and get smaller further out.
In any case, you just do the actuarial math, and figure out how much it would cost to wobble-prove buildings in the area in question, and stick that into your cost benefit analysis. It's not like other forms of energy generation are completely without downsides either.
> We don't live in grass yurts you know. Bridges and dams are a thing. Earthquakes are a problem. Deep fracking operations have demonstrated this already.
What percentage of rural areas are situated in close proximity to large dams and bridges?
Your statement is unclear, are you saying it doesn’t matter if dams and bridges get destroyed, or that it doesn’t matter if rural habitations get destroyed as long as they’re not destroyed near infrastructure?
In Germany you will be hard-pressed to find a place more than 10km/6mi from the nearest village with more than 500 inhabitants. Those people don't like earthquakes or cracked buildings either. Same thing in England.
Pay to earthquake proof their building and give them a bit of extra money on top. It's not that hard. Have a sort of auction to see who in the vicinity it willing to accept the geothermal plant for the cheapest.
There surely are various solutions and it is also a solution to shift side effects to areas where fewer people are affected (and more easily compensated) - but the tone of that statement above was "who cares for rural areas" at least I read it like this, because why else would rural people not care about it?
I do agree with the commenter who said that we don't need to earthquake proof agricultural land itself. Especially not against minor wobbles. Fields just lie there.
(Just to avoid confusion: any buildings close to agricultural land need to be considered, of course. I am talking purely about the fields.)
> Why would you think that? Because the peasants are all too stupid to notice an earthquake that damage their houses?
Yes, exactly. I also don’t expect dense residential buildings prone to earthquakes to be prevalent in low density sparsely populated agricultural areas.
There is nothing “fascinating” except that stating facts about rural areas immediately brings out the worst kinds of trolls out of the woodwork.
In every state where fracking got authorised, earthquakes above 3.0 have increased by an order of magnitude (or even appeared where they were considered essentially inexistent).
Hundreds if not thousands of buildings have been damaged across OK and TX because they’d been built with no quake resistance as they’d been built in zones considered inactive, insurers have jacked up their rates and the USGS had to revise their risk maps.
The risk to populations is also non-negligible, because aside from a lack of quake-proof constructions the populations are not trained for or aware of quake safety for the same reason that the areas are historically stable.
I don’t think that’s happened yet in the US (as no fracking quake has exceeded 5.0 yet), but in 2019 fracking started killing people in china: the Sichuan basin, historically a geologically very stable region, got hit with 4 quakes between 4.9 and 6.0, at least 15 died and hundreds were injured.
> Just somewhere where hardening the few existing buildings against small earthquakes etc won't be too expensive.
So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?
And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ? Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?
> So, expending twice on a bad idea ? Seriously, what do you think will happen ?
What do you mean? A few really minor earthquakes are all that was reported by the comment I was replying to. So I'd assume more really minor earthquakes.
> And even it was technically possible, how do you insure a company like that ?
The usual way of paying an insurance company?
> Will the plant operator be responsible for the repairs and damages when they destabilize an entire region ?
Depends on the jurisdiction. But sure, you can make the plant operator responsible for that and responsible for having gigantic insurance coverage.
(Just look at whatever liability people who operate dams have today. A breakage of a major dam would also devastate entire regions. So whatever arrangements are good enough for that use case are probably good enough here.)
I believe you may have missed what these folks are doing differently.
To put it into context, geothermal energy that taps underground water reservoirs near heat sources has been shown to cause earthquakes and other not good side effects. All of those effects are associated with water being released from aquifers that were previously sealed, or ground changes due to water incursion into previously dry structures (which happened in the reference German town).
These guys however are digging below all of that. In fact finding water that near the surface would likely cause them to determine the location unsuitable.
What these guys propose doing is essentially drilling into rock 6+ miles down. That is about 5 to 10 times deeper than current plants. Using the heat from the rock which is near 1000 degrees to heat water that they pump through it into steam and recover through the turbines. The whole "pipe" from well head to return is nominally sealed with the vitrified walls created by the microwaving process.
Let's assume (and I don't know since I don't work for these guys but we need numbers if we're going to guess at things) that their "drilling" with microwaves technology leaves behind a 12" diameter hole that is > 6 miles deep. And we can drill two of those holes in such a way that they meet at their maximum depth. I'm imagining holes that start on the surface 100+ yards (or meters) apart drilled with a slight angle to meet when they are 6+ miles deep. How much power could we expect to get out of that?
So let's do a little math, water weighs about .03621 lbs/cubic inch. And a 1ft tall, 1ft diameter cylinder of water would way about 49 lbs. A mile is 5280 feet so a mile high column of water, 12" in diameter, would weigh 258,851 lbs, and a 6 mile high column would weigh 1,553,283 lbs (a bit under 777 tons) so the force at the bottom of the column would be about 13,734 psi. At 935F it would pretty much instantly convert to 'dry' steam, and could likely be recovered at about 10,000psi on the other side of the well.
It has been a long time since I had to figure out from a steam table how much energy was extractable from super heated steam, but it is a lot. It goes through the turbine, piped through a cooling tower to condense it back into water, and then dropped back into the source hole.
The risk of earthquakes and other geo-technical disturbances is minimized by what is essentially a closed loop system.
Now it is true that you're going to cool the crust (energy is conserved after all and if you're running turbines it means the crust is cooling) the question then is how quickly is that heat returned by other actions. And of course if you were to pull "all" the energy out fast enough this way you could presumably "freeze" the core of the Earth and that would be a bad thing, but we're talking about way more energy than the entire world consumes in a centuries and I'm not sure how to judge that risk compared to the heat generation mechanisms inside the planet. An actual geologist probably has an idea.
> Let's assume (and I don't know since I don't work for these guys but we need numbers if we're going to guess at things) that their "drilling" with microwaves technology leaves behind a 12" diameter hole that is > 6 miles deep. And we can drill two of those holes in such a way that they meet at their maximum depth. I'm imagining holes that start on the surface 100+ yards (or meters) apart drilled with a slight angle to meet when they are 6+ miles deep.
I'm doubtful that any drilling process can be that straight and accurate unless straight lines are inherent in the drilling process (e.g. lasers somehow). Just think of how much trouble they had drilling to those stranded Chilean miners to rescue them, only 700m down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Copiap%C3%B3_mining_accid...
That is entirely fair. And per @animats comment it isn't clear they have managed to do anything "new" yet.
That said, microwaves (like lasers) do tend to go straight. So from the point they start using them going forward, I would expect it to be possible (not easy, but possible) to keep them in a straight path.
> That said, microwaves (like lasers) do tend to go straight.
Actually, none of them do. Cutting equipment (even after adapted to drilling) is heavily focused on the near region, usually a few cm away. On distances larger than a few cm, they are no more self-aligning than any mechanical drill.
Great start, but one important factor is missing from this analysis: The surface area (for heat exchange) of a closed-loop borehole is tiny compared to the surface area in a natural hydrothermal system. The walls of the borehole will cool off relatively quickly due to the low thermal conductivity of rock, and you'll soon be unable to make power. Conventional geothermal gets around this by pulling from very large reservoirs that include natural convection and huge fracture surface area.
This means that a closed loop system needs many many many miles of boreholes in order to last long enough to pay off.
You may be right. Back of the envelope kinds of computation though, 6 miles of 12" diameter bore hole is 99,525 sq ft of surface area for thermal transfer. If you think of the lower half of that as the heat injection surface (so 3 miles -> 6 miles and then back up to 3 miles on the way out) call it 100k sqft of rock surface. Now some people have spent a lot of time studying rock (https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1988/0441/report.pdf) I'm not one of them (more of a casual geologist because I like hiking in the mountains) but if I'm reading the heat transfer equations from pg 91 of that report it still seems like you'd get a decent amount of heat transfer (order of 10's of MJ) into the water.
Assuming this technology works, it's worth that risk. To be fair, that's a big assumption; most things don't. Meanwhile, already past the point of no return, the inconvenient situation with our climate gets worse while we try to negotiate. This is probably nothing, but it's worth trying.
At the end of this article, there's a bit about the "tech won't save us" crowd. Not saying you're in it, just that it surprises me that such a thing could exist at all. At this point, what the hell else could save us? God, positivity, bans on plastic straws?
This is why pushback against climate change policies is, I believe, a healthy thing. Yes, protecting the environment is super important, but time and time again we are told to trust the science, trust the experts, everything is going to go exactly as planned. And time and time again, it turns out the experts didn't account for this, or for that, or were just flat out wrong, and then everyone pays for the "oops".
We see this with everything: social policy, monetary policy, tax policy, etc.
I think a public online resource that documents instances like this, where the experts, or the government, told us X, but it ended up being Y, would be a really powerful tool to fight back against folks who treat science like an infallible religion.
Whenever the topic comes up, it always seems strange that going more than just a handful of mi/km down is an incredibly difficult task.
Because it makes me realize-- or remember-- that the most life-hostile & technology-defying environments aren't in far off geographic locations or far out in space, they're a constant presence just under my feet. A shorter distance from me right now than I travel in my daily commute.
That as space enthusiasts (rightfully) speculate or plan the future above our heads, there are incredible things going on beneath our feet at forces and temperatures that also produce very exotic materials and even the prospect of untapped clean energy just a short distance away from every single place in the planet. (Assuming that drilling down for geothermal power isn't horrible for the environment?)
Just another example of how very little in the natural world is truly mundane and there are incredible things everywhere.
If we converted all energy production to geothermal, would it be possible to significantly increase the cooling of the Earth's core?
The flow from the Earth's core to the surface is estimated at 47±2 terawatts[0]
The total energy supply for 2017 was 162,494 TWh[1]
World energy demand is expected to grow 27% by 2040
Currently, heat escaping from the Earth accounts for only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface which is dominated by the 173,000 TW contributed by solar radiation[0] What effect would it have if the vented heat were equal to the amount contributed by the sun?
surely there must be some numbers wrong here? How can the total energy supply be only just barely less than the entire amount of energy applied to the planet by solar radiation?
Is it suggesting that covering the entire surface of earth with 100% efficient solar panels would just barely cover 2017's power supply?
Edit: ah I see, world energy is in terawatt hours for an entire year, wheras planetary solar energy is terawatts in a single hour
The bigger question is whether we will heat up the surface top much, given that the energy would be produced by a heat engine.
(I suppose you could build a heat engine by using the temperature differentials of different underground layers, although I've never seen that proposed)
I can be wrong but that number sounds so low that it might mean the energy at the literal surface, in the same vein as how much solar heat energy reaches the planet’s surface.
I assume that the number is vastly greater if you measure the heat 1km below sea level for example.
The only mechanism we would have for significantly increasing the cooling of the Earth's core would involve heading the atmosphere well past the habitable band.
Ultimately if heat isn't radiating from the atmosphere, it isn't leaving the planet.
The idea of drilling deep geothermal to repurpose existing fossil plants is an elegant one. I imagine others have thought of this before, but it was new to me. Being able to take over the existing equipment (turbines, power transmission connections) seems appealing.
Of course, it all depends on how expensive the drilling process is vs. the existing capital asset in the turbines, but maybe you could hit a price point where the repurposed geothermal plant is way cheaper than new solar / gas builds in the 2030s? This would be a transitional tailwind, just when we need it. Down the road, these plants would become more expensive because you'd also need to build new turbines/transmission lines. And at that time maybe solar or fusion is a cheaper solution (or not, who knows). But this could really help with the transition away from fossil fuels, if it was delivered next decade or two.
A question - does deep drilling like this have any downsides, as fracking does? I'm guessing it's less bad since you're not pushing pressurized fluid into the bedrock, instead you're just making a pipe that contains the water.
It's also the drilling industry. There are millions of skill people and a worldwide supply chain already setup. As a bonus, these are the same companies and people who would lose their jobs when drilling for oil and gas is overtaken by geothermal.
It's worth noting that hydraulic fracturing itself is rarely the problem. Issues come from moving fluid volumes somewhere else during production: subsidence due to extraction from the place where the hydrocarbons are, or (most often) from injecting produced water into disposal wells, eventually triggering faults. Some of that produced water was introduced by the operations, but most of it was just in the ground with the oil & gas being produced.
It's possible to directly trigger small faults with while fracturing the rock, or to do something stupid like fracture into a freshwater zone other people are using, but that's not what's driving quakes in e.g. Oklahoma.
ENergy conversion equipment can't easily be re-purposed for geothermal. The temperatures are usually much lower, and the working fluids are often hydrocarbons instead of steam.
> “What we intend to do is go to existing power plants—it could be a coal power plant, it could be a gas power plant, any of the thousands of fossil-fired power plants that exists in the United States and around the world—and we will propose to them to create a small geothermal field around them, which is matched to the turbine specification of the power plant. What comes out of the ground is steam that feeds into the turbine, and the rest is what they’ve always done. The turbine creates electricity. The plant is already connected to the grid,”
There is a project for deep geothermal heat in Finland. They specifically chose to do it here as it is one of the worst places to do it (have to drill really deep to get anything useful also the first 4 to 5km is just pure bedrock instead of some softer material).
So they ended up making 6.4km deep holes where they got 121 degree (celcius) water. Once pumped up to ground level it cools down to 110 degrees but it is more then hot enough for district heating.
The original plan was to got 9km deep but it was already hot enough at 6.4km so they stopped there to save money.
> Meanwhile, the heat vitrifies the side of the hole, turning it essentially into a glass pipe
I think this is pretty essential and maybe even more important than the depth. Until now it was not economically feasible because the porous rock did swallow a lot of the circulated water in such a drilling. But this technique seems to solve that problem pretty effectively.
A lot of people like to talk about nuclear as a climate solution. Geothermal is the most gargantuous nuclear plant we can fathom, all we have to do is to extend a pipe and harvest it.
Here is the thing, a lot of that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape.
I think we have to start over with geothermal and look at it more like hydro electricity. We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up. I wish I'd get rich enough one day to devote my life to this.
> that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape.
I think coal and most other mineral extraction industries would love to have the relatively good environmental record of oil and gas companies. One small opening at the surface, no need to send hundreds of people in. Pretty small and quiet facility above ground where all the work gets done, etc. As terrible as an oil spill is, they're not very common.
No, I mean we should use the motion of the water, not its heat. Like in hydroelectricity where water spins a turbine instead we are using a steam generator like gas fired plants
There's no reason to drill for this, and 6 miles down at 1000C presets less than ideal operating conditions for a turbine.
Any peak over about 2000ft should be sufficient for an atmospheric water generation plant to produce enough water for a down hill hydroelectric plant to power the atmospheric water generation plant with single digit ambient RH, and much lower elevations can be used in high RH climes.
I would recommend orienting collectors to the windward side to exploit the local humidity gain, in lower RH climes.
One of my projects is actually a water condensation, hydroelectric and gas liquefaction combined cycle plant.
That said, bores in areas with deep ground water do present an interesting opportunity for pumped storage, with the caveat that the turbomachinery is back in the bore hole and that's a really inconvenient place to fix it when it breaks.
A steam turbine essentially _does_ use the motion of the water.
In conventional hydroelectricity, gravity causes the motion through the energy differential of the waters' height.
In a steam turbine, the potential energy is from the high temperature of the water, and the energy input to rotate the turbine comes from the temperature differential of the steam cooling.
In theory you could capture the hydroelectric energy of the water on its way down a 12 mile hole, but that gravitic potential energy is negligable compared to the energy difference between superheated steam and water.
There’s no need to drill down ultra deep if you leverage recent advances in horizontal drilling to creat a series of looping branches off of a central trunk, as it were. Can run a closed loop of circulating fluid too, which offers numerous advantages and obviates risk of fracking related earthquakes, as well as avoiding the corrosion challenges problematic with legacy approaches.
Conservation of energy. You could collect the energy that gravity generates, but then you end up with water/mass at the bottom and need to figure out how to bring it back up... Leading to net zero or negative gain due to other losses.
Somewhat related, I used to think that residential geothermal heating was basically harvesting the steaming heat from the soil to your house. I figured that would require seating on a volcano.
In fact it's using a heat pump, and liquid circulating in pipes burried a few feet underground to act as a thermal sink, to either heat or cool down a house. This works well because the temperature in the ground doesn't fluctuate much past 3ft. Pretty neat, and does not require to go down miles (though it's moving energy to/from ground rather than harvesting it and you still need an energy source for the pump)
A ground-source heat pump is technically not geothermal, because the bulk of the heat comes not from the earth but from the sun. You are basically using the soil as an enormous thermal battery which charges up in the summer and stays warm (relative to the air) through the winter. Real geothermal power plants are actually indirectly harvesting heat from the molten inner layers of the earth, which is mostly leftover from the the formation of the planet.
How much energy is in the core of the Earth? What happens if we cooled the core to the point that it became solid? I’m guessing that would be bad, but is it something that’s not conceivably possible on any human timescale?
Do you think we drill to the very core to get thermal energy? Well, I have disappointing news for you: The earths radius is 6,371 km; for thermal plants, we dig like 5 km.
While the core is 5000 degrees celcius, the point we dig to is more like 150. Concentrated solar power can generate 1000 degree celcius. If we pump this down when we have excess, the area remains hotter than it would otherwise be... letting us use it when the sun sets. This can also work through much longer timescales, like you could dump energy heat down in the summer and harvest it in the winter.
The post I was replying to was worried about gradual loss of core heat. This will be minimized if we pump heat in.
> The microwave beam is hot enough to evaporate rock, and the vaporized rock is pumped back to the surface.
Is this part harder than it sounds? Do you need to keep it as hot vapor until it gets to the surface? What do you do with it then? Presumably a 12 mile column of rock turns into a whole lot of vapor. Is it toxic? When vaporized rock cools, does it become just sand, or are there interesting/concerning chemicals left over?
As a lay person, I'm never sure when I read about new tech to address environmental issues whether we're creating a new problem. We've spent generations aggressively pumping carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Would a move towards rock-vaporizing drilling just mean aggressively pumping a bunch of silicon, iron, etc out of the ground and into the atmosphere?
I don't really know, so take my answer with a grain of salt, but my lay understanding of chemistry and physics tells me:
* Typically vaporized solids a fine powder they cools down in air, or otherwise deposit on cool surfaces
* Fine rock powder could be hazard to lungs, but it shouldn't be too hard filter it out of the air that leaves the hole
* Some rock materials contain sulfates or phosphates; letting those escape into the atmosphere in large quantities would be bad; but you could always let it recombine with the rest of the evaporated rock, rendering it inert. Such a process wouldn't be 100%, so this is something worth looking out for.
Most wealthy countries require an environmental impact assessment before any such operation, so there's hope such things would be caught before they become a big problem.
Independence is a pipe-dream. You always depend on others and physical resources. If you install a solar panel to "become independent from centralized energy systems", you're moving from a dependence to established energy networks to another type of dependence. You now depend on people making, delivering, maintaining panels for you. As well as the batteries to store the energy.
No-one can make or repair this take themselves. You just moved the dependence from one system to another. The current system is also battle-tested and mutualized. Outage see lots of people on deck to fix things. If your solar installation panel breaks it's your individual problem and it will quickly reveal just how dependent you actually are.
The only way to be independent of other humans would be to live a lifestyle which requires only rudimentary knowledge, and the muscles of your body. Probably only hunter-gatherer. Anything beyond that means you rely on knowledge, skills, and muscles of other, and dependent on them for your life.
Maybe you knew all this, but it may still be useful for other readers to realize since these days we hear a lot of prophets telling us how we should increase our independence by installing solar panels or wind turbines. And people don't think twice about where these come from, and who will maintain them.
> If you install a solar panel to "become independent from centralized energy systems", you're moving from a dependence to established energy networks to another type of dependence. You now depend on people making, delivering, maintaining panels for you. As well as the batteries to store the energy.
Thank you. People claim they are independent because they are off-grid and using solar panels. But are they really? Solar panels last about 10 years and then what? Of course they are dependent on the grid that provides them the solar panels and batteries.
I hope that investors did the math to ensure that the energy used to dig such a deep hole with microwaves doesn't end up consuming more energy than the hole will generate over its lifetime... Will the hole crack irreparably after a few months?
Nowadays, there seems to be an epidemic of engineering neglect in terms of capital allocation. A lot of wealthy individuals who have the capital to invest in such projects do not seem to have the engineering mindset (or no longer do) to see through greenwashing BS.
"It's all about the people" is BS. These days, there are charlatans everywhere and they seem to have monopolized all the billionaires.
I can't imagine it takes more than a few circuits of water through the bore to recover all of the energy, the static column of water alone would contain a non-trivial fraction of the energy required to drill the bore after equilibrating.
I suggested an idea for a backyard geothermal generator in a comment a few months ago and got shut down because it would be too costly to drill the hole. But hey now! This microwave drill might do the trick!
Hmm. Are magnetrons and gyrotrons the same thing? Probably not. So we can't rip apart an old microwave oven and start drilling holes out back just yet. Damn.
Anyone thinking about earthquakes when going that deep?
In Switzerland they had to stop some geothermal projects after triggering earthquakes while drilling deep.
The geothermal projects in Switzerland (and South Korea) used pressurized water to form cracks within the rock (similar to fracking). Also typical geothermal projects need to be near fault lines since that is where the low hanging fruit is. Since this method will forgo those steps you should greatly minimize the likelihood of triggering an earthquake.
You just don't "use" heat to make electricity. You need some sort of heat engine running a cycle. All those require temperature differential. This is basic thermodynamics and isn't going to change with new technology. This temp differential is what is required to extract useful energy. So I don't understand why they talk about material at a certain temp having energy compared to oil. If we lived on a planet that is uniformly 1000 deg F, it wouldn't help us because we don't have a temp differential to convert thermal energy to electric.
Nowhere in the article did I see them mention temp differential and where they are going to dump the waste heat? Nuclear plants get crapped on because they dump heat into adjacent water bodies, how is this different?
Heat exchangers running in ocean water are very difficult because they build up algae and other debris that can significantly reduce their efficiency.
None of this is rocket science, it is all well known to anyone who actually wants to do some research. Unfortunately, it seems like the people most vocal about energy are generally the least informed.
I took a class with da Rosa and at the time this book was still in draft form, but nonetheless, excellent and easy to read. There appear to be new editions, don't know the differences.
However, my previous comment is technically correct. You still haven't raised any valid technical concerns with my solution.
If Mike Hughes (1) were still alive, I'm sure he'd be willing to be hired to prove me correct.
(1) The steam powered rocket guy that coincidentally became a flat earther after running out of money. The flat earthers ended up funding his (mostly) successful steam rocket.
Everyone knows the footage from NASA and the rest of the aerospace-round-earth-industrial-military-complex is all faked. Helium and Hydrogen are the devil's gas, so weather balloons also won't work.
I hope the flat earthers find some other mad scientist to replace him soon.
(Edit: I enjoyed the textbook "energy", but I've forgotten the author's name. Sadly, it's not really findable with search engines. It took a whole systems approach (including raw material extraction and maintenance)
Your point is well made. If all it took was heat, then climate change would probably be the best thing ever. More heat captured from the sun would give us more energy.
Open challenge: Getting an elected US politician to seriously propose a space heat sink as a solution to climate change.
There were some people seriously proposing big convection tubes that'd bootstrap columns of hot air, then passively pull surface air into the upper atmosphere. I can't find a link, but those wouldn't get to low earth orbit, so not a "space" technology.
I've heard of launching some large mirrors into orbit, or a bunch of small mirrors that can link together in orbit. Then you use them to reflect some sunlight off into space. I have no idea how practical this is. The bigger concern would be if something goes wrong, you need to make the mirrors deorbit quickly.
I believe this is also the Achilles heel of nuclear too. It's an amazing, cheap, and sustainable way of creating concentrated heat, but an absolute pill of complexity and labor needed to turn that heat into spinning turbines. Nuclear's future should be in town heat & high temperature industry, not electricity.
The Altarock energy site is currently showing a 503. Altarock from Seattle won the arpa grant and were noted as an “affiliate” of Quais in the ieee article.
Assuming this works, tech still won't save us alone.
Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo.
Ecosystems are still being obliterated for cattle and mining.
All ghg free electricity will do is buy a few decades to end (and in the west, reverse) growth. Possibly the only thing that will give civilisation a chance to find a solution, but not a solution.
We should be finding ways for people in the west to live more like developing nations and still thrive, not trying to turn developing nations into the west.
> right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo.
That's a big if. In fact things like deforestation increase albedo. And when we get closer to that point, we can start requiring actively increasing albedo of all human structures.
Projecting out our current habits along a trend line all the way to our doom is utterly naive... It's a bit like a lumberjack hundreds of years ago complaining that if we keep building log cabins, we'll run out of lumber. What actually happens is, when resources start to become constraints, THEN we suddenly start finding ways to conserve them, NOT before. And before it happens, it's not obvious to those looking ahead just how it can and will be dealt with.
> We should be finding ways for people in the west to live more like developing nations and still thrive, not trying to turn developing nations into the west.
"Developing nations" are among the worst polluters. That's probably not what you mean. Poor, underdeveloped nations have relatively small global environmental impacts, but very intense local impacts... Local deforestation and other resource exhaustion, for example. That's not a good model to copy, either.
There are possible technological solutions to deal with our impact, and on the time-scales we're talking about, possibilities like colonization of other worlds, and gradually towing the Earth out to a wider (and cooler) orbit.
Taking just a step back and looking at our societies, I can't help but agree with this viewpoint.
Our psychic and material conditions are poised to get worse as we rapaciously exploit the natural resources of the planet and destroy the fabric of life across it (not just the casual culprits like extinction, but the general accruing debt of pollution and degradation across the biosphere). Further,our global civilization and the supply lines that enable it (gas, water + sewage, electricity, connectivity) exist in an equilibrium we're actively disrupting.
Another thing to consider is that our biology has adapted for a vastly different experience of environment and society than those we inhabit.
The patterns of human civilization need to change drastically for it to be extant and thriving in 100 years.
> Pure thermal (ie. just energy, no GHG) climate change is right around the corner if energy use keeps going up exponentially and we keep reducing earth's albedo.
What makes you think so? What growth rates are you assuming? How long is your time horizon?
If and when we get to that point various theoretical methods are available for bleeding off surplus heat; one of them is aiming a neutron beam at the moon. One upside of all this learning the hard way via profligate energy generation and accidental geoengineering taking place since the industrial revolution is that it opens the door to possibilities of regulating the impact of Milankovitch cycles on our civilization and biosphere.
My comment was written with precisely the second law of thermodynamics in mind. If you’re generating energy at a rate greater than you have a use for, to the point that you have a problem, yet also able to harvest it, then you want to radiate it back into space, yes. Neutron beams would be a cool, perhaps fanciful yet potentially practical way of doing that in a concentrated manner.
Either I completely misunderstand you, or you don't understand thermodynamics at all.
Do you know how the Carnot cycle works, and more importantly, why no process to generate electricity from heat can be more efficient?
> If you’re generating energy at a rate greater than you have a use for,
Huh? Why would anyone do this? Just turn off the excess capacity.
(Do keep in mind that when we produce electricity, we necessarily have waste heat. That waste heat has energy, but it's not energy we can use.)
Any kind of heat engine essentially works like a water wheel: you take heat from a high temperature source (water from a source at big height), you send it through your apparatus, and out comes heat at a lower temperature (water at a lower height) on one side, and some electricity on the other.
> ... then you want to radiate it back into space, yes. Neutron beams would be a cool, perhaps fanciful yet potentially practical way of doing that in a concentrated manner.
Huh? If you can concentrate the waste energy, it's not waste heat. You'd want to use it instead of just bleeding it into space. Do you understand that?
You'd use that concentrated form to run another engine.
Pure thermal caused by non fossil fuel human energy use? I've never heard that as a thing. But ghg climate change causing ice and snow melt, thereby reducing albedo and causing thermal effects, yes scary.
Data or it didn't happen. A statement as extreme as "a few decades to end growth" without a citation is best treated as a hysterical opinion than a fact.
> The problem is it has only been practical in volcanic regions or near the edges of tectonic plates, where cracks in the Earth's crust allow steam to form close to the surface like in Iceland or the geysers in California.
Incredibly, California has managed to kill its geysers. Apparently when Geyserville was settled there were puffs of steam coming out all over the place. Now the geothermal plant there injects wastewater into the rock and then drives its turbine with the steam that comes back.
This sounds like cool tech, and the re-use of the existing generation assets is clever, but just running costs of the steam part of an existing plant struggles to compete on a financial basis with wind turbines and solar PV so it'll probably only ever be a niche thing.
Shared ground loops connected to heat pumps are a more boring tech with more potential to have a global scale impact.
Assuming that people commit to buying 24/7 carbon-free energy at any price, on-demand generation like geothermal will be quite valuable during the times when wind and solar are underperforming.
So geothermal will mainly compete with nuclear and storage, not wind and solar.
Yep, and like nuclear, it has a high up front cost that needs to be amortized over near constant use to be viable which means it prices itself out of that role pretty quickly compared with say green ammonia fired peaker plants that mostly incur costs when actually used and also use the green energy being produced in large quantities.
I wasn't even counting the combustion part, just the heat to steam to electricity part (common to coal and nuclear plants).
I had assumed they would need to transfer the heat rather than pipe geothermal steam directly into the turbine, but either way, solar and wind is very cheap and hard to compete with. Even magical free energy connected to a steam turbine struggles when you do the sums, which is the baseline before you start including cost and risk from super deep drilling.
Drilling is not the problem which stands in the way for using earth warmth.
It is pollution of ground water, risk of earth quakes, transportation of the heat, local cool down and having to drill new wholes.
In Europe we have tried, and tested with wholes up to 1km depth but it is not as ideal as one might think. Otherwise it would have been used on a large scale already.
In regards to the deeper drilling... wasn't there an article recently that the core is cooling faster than previously thought? Do we know how it could affect the earth if we are doing this at a large scale? Are we going to cause problems further down the road because we don't know enough.
What would happen if literally everyone switched to geothermal tomorrow? Would we affect the core of the earth by extracting it’s heat at our current global usage? At double or triple our usage as the world gorges itself on this new source of clean power?
They can keep the microwave beam that tightly focused that the energy goes into making the hole deeper and not wider when the bottom is a target 6 inches across and 12 miles down? Wouldn’t it spread out and just absorb into the walls? This feels wildly implausible.
Converting existing fossil fuel plants sounds awesome. But they haven't actually drilled any deep holes with this new technology yet, right? They're going to go from nothing to drilling almost twice as deep as the deepest hole ever drilled by humans, in four years?
A few Lithuanian names there. They’ve apparently tried geothermal in Klaipeda but faced salt water which was hard to handle.
Generally Eastern European cities with centralised heating are very suited for geothermal. Except they’ll loose all that sweet sweet kickback from Russian oil dealer.
I've always wondered, but geothermal plants are basically huge radiators. If Humanity taps into this energy in industrial scale for centuries, would we cool the planet's mantle and core enough to have repercussions on the magnetic field for example?
Wonder if one day we find out that thermal energy is cooling down earth too much. Reducing magnetic field around the earth which causes a huge reduction of our ozone layer and eventually even the entire atmosphere.
Conventionally you fill the hole with mud with the same density as the rock, avoiding this problem. You couldn’t drill into the inner core that way because it’s liquid, and maybe at some shallower depth you’d run out of candidate mud materials that will stay liquid at the relevant temperature, but given the right mud I think you could pass the Moho. So far, though, the problem is breaking drill strings.
Reminder: few energy sources do not add heating to the atmosphere during the whole energy lifecycle!
It's the ones that *subtract* energy from the environment in the first place: solar, wind, dams, tidal energy.
Other sources (including geothermal, nuclear, oil ...), even if we could produce a 100% efficient power plant, are still extracting energy that would otherwise stayed "locked-in" somewhere.
Keep in mind that virtually all electrical energy produced turns into heat released in the atmosphere.
I think one relevant question is: how does that amount of energy compare to the energy that the earth is bombarded with by the sun anyways? If it is miniscule (say less than 1%) in comparison, will that have a significant impact on global warming?
>A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use.
So even if we get all of our current energy needs from these sources, that is less than 0.01% of the energy earth gets from the sun. Is that going to have a significant effect on the temperature of the earth?
Energy from heat is never discussed with climate change, only energy from the greenhouse effect. Do you know what percentage of each (roughly) human activity is causing?
sorry, I couldn't read the article without solving the question of energy cycle in my mind. renewable sources like solar, wind are kind of taking energy from outside, so in case of geo-thermal, if we keep using that, there is nothing thats balancing the equation.
You are right, this tech would cause the core to lose temperature at a slightly higher rate than otherwise. At the moment the earths core is cooling at the rate of 0.1 °C per million years from the current temperature of about 5,100 °C, interspersed with periods where the temperature loss is stopped or reversed because of gravity forces [0]. But any conceivable number of deep geothermic wells would not affect that rate in any measurable way.
GA Drilling was pushing plasma drilling back in 2018.[2] They're still pushing it, but not making holes.
The University of Minnesota was pushing electro-pulse boring in 2015.[3] Again, no deep holes.
There's something called ThermoDrilling, which, despite the name, is more like a water jet cutter.[4]
Successful projects are still using mechanical drilling.[5]
So there are a lot of deep hole drilling approaches being studied. Anything that works would be used by the oil and gas industry, and if they're not trying it, one suspects it might not be working.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270653673_Microwave...
[2] https://www.gadrilling.com/
[3] https://experts.umn.edu/en/publications/electro-pulse-boring...
[4] https://www.geodrillinginternational.com/deep-geothermal/new...
[5] https://geothermalengineering.co.uk/united-downs/