Besides creating electricity, there are many potential industrial uses of magma:
"Magma serves as a heat source, replacing fuel in magma smelters, magma forges, magma glass furnaces, and magma kilns...Other uses for magma include obsidian farming, trap design, melting ice, igniting fires, and even garbage disposal." [1]
The problem with geothermal power is access. It's the reason why Iceland is almost entirely powered by renewables, and why the rest of the world isn't.
So if Iceland finds pockets of magma at 5km, it's only really a breakthrough if you can access magma at shallow depths in other regions.
Looking at per-capita energy utilization, you'll find that Nordic countries have markedly high consumption.
Another high per-capita energy-use country is Trinidad and Tobago, which puzzled me until I discovered it's a huge exporter of ammonia fertilizer -- the manufacturing process is hugely energy intensive.
There is, however, access in a number of regions where geothermal can be quite useful.
Iceland doesn't have a large population (332,000), but it's relatively close to Europe (or at least Ireland), and there have been proposals to link it via undersea transmission cables to the European grid.
Other significant resources exist around much of the Pacific Rim, including in Hawaii (limited population and a long way from nowhere), Japan (high population and critical energy resource ocnstraints), the Philippines, New Zealand, and the Pacific coast of the US. One of the largest present geothermal installations is The Geysers in California, with just under 1 GW of installed capacity. The largest geothermal resource within the US would be the Yellowstone supercaldera, and though this is presently protected from development, it represents a vast energy potential, as much as 20% of present US electric generating potential under some estimates. The National Park Status means that research is highly limited, so take with a very strong dose of salt.
Other significant resources exist in Kenya (another rift zone, as is New Zealand). Given Africa's status as a developing region, this is potentially hugely useful.
Geothermal has been significantly developed in many of these areas. I did some digging and apparently the Philippines has developed as much as 50% of its potential, where it provides 16% of the nation's electricity needs. Japan and the US have also done considerable development, as, of course, has Iceland.
Geothermal offers a number of very useful characteristics in a renewable / sustainable energy mix, including:
⚫ Base-load potential. Geothermal runs 24/7, is dispatchable (that is, you can throttle it up or down), and balances the nondispatchable nature of wind and solar energy.
⚫ Proven. Geothermal has been in active commercial production for decades. This is proven technology.
⚫ Relatively low local impacts. Plant footprints are small and local environmental disturbance fairly limited. Water needs and the possibility of locally-induced earthquakes (most minor) are possible concerns.
But it is still limited to specific locations for high yields. And if you're drawing sufficient amounts of thermal energy from even high-yield caldera, it can take a considerable period of time (decades) for a geothermal zone to recover. This is particularly a concern with "EGS" (enhanced geothermal systems) in which boreholes are drilled into otherwise only marginal zones. Often a single borehole's useful life is limited to a decade or two.
> there have been proposals to link it via undersea transmission cables to the European grid
A transmission cable is sometimes discussed, but so far Iceland has been taking advantage of the fact that aluminum smelting is a workable way to congeal cheap power into transportable money. Aluminum smelting is typically by electrolysis [1], and aluminum is light and compact relative to its value so easy to ship, so smelting aluminum and exporting it essentially allows you to "export electricity". Not at the same rates as you could sell actual electricity, but with easier transport/storage characteristics that makes it still attractive. The largest power plant in Iceland (a hydro one) is entirely purpose-built solely to power a smelter [2].
Right. Much as food production is an alternative to exporting water, aluminum (or fertilizer) productions are alternatives to exporting energy.
You'll typically find aluminium smelters where electricity is cheap. E.g., the Pacific Northwest / Western Canada, where ample hydroelectric resources exist.
> Much as food production is an alternative to exporting water
There's only very little water in exported food, so as long as you're not using non-replenishable sources (like fossil water) or limited sources (like rivers) for food production, the amount of water that is actually exported is negligibly small.
We don’t realize it as we sit down to a meal, but most crops require huge volumes of water to grow: 65 gallons to grow a pound of potatoes; 650 gallons for a pound of rice.
Often, food supplies are only maintained at the expense of literally emptying some of the world’s great rivers, such as the Indus in Pakistan, the Yellow River in China and the Nile in Egypt. Elsewhere, underground reserves are being pumped dry.
But increasingly, countries are giving up on trying to feed their populations from their own resources and are switching to food imports. That means they are also importing the water embodied in the crops, or virtual water. Every ton of wheat arriving at a dockside carries with it, in virtual form, the thousand tons of water needed to grow it.
And if you're looking at meat, it's much higher -- about 2,500 gallons per pound of beef.
Similarly, it's not that you're going to get zapped by electricity when touching aluminum, but the amount of electricity required to extract that aluminum is vast.
Maybe you should have actually read my comment: I was explicitly excluding cases where river or fossil water is being used.
And the "65 gallons of water per pound of potatoes" is utter bullshit. Whether rain falls on untouched grass land or on potato plants does not matter to the water ecosystem.
I'd love to see an xkcd "What if" follow up to this article exploring the idea of pin-holing the planet with these vents, the peak PW output, and the effects of the resulting cooling.
I seem to be one of the few persons commenting so far who actually lives in the region and regularly reads local reporting on issues in North Dakota (a state neighboring my state). Western North Dakota, where the Bakken Shale oil boom is occurring, is very sparsely populated and historically had minimal infrastructure. It takes TIME to build pipelines to move the natural gas brought up by oil drilling operations to natural gas customers. Pipeline proposals are currently in regulatory review. There isn't even pipeline infrastructure in place yet for all of the petroleum production in North Dakota--much of the oil produced there is brought to broader markets in tanker trucks, and the truck traffic volumes are putting a lot of stress on highway roadbeds until the highways can be upgraded.
Right now there is a boom economy in western North Dakota, with extremely high wages, low unemployment, a shortage of single women,
and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.
Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.
I don't get it. If you don't have the capacity to transport what you are producing, you can't be producing. Or put very simply: you can not be allowed to burn off unwanted gas. The cost is certainly not zero, it is an enormous sum that dwarfs whatever profit they could hope to get from selling it, and it is failed states only that would allow this massive negative externality.
There seems to be no learning in the American midwest. Every other time some novel way of destroying the environment comes along, disenfranchised states quickly clear out all regulatory law to make place for the new boom, and when it's over they are left with unemployed single men with a bunch of new trucks and a wrecked environment while the companies made off with the profit.
Burning the gas as waste contributes CO2 to the atmosphere, but burning the gas for productive reasons still produces that same CO2.
If it were burned for productive reasons, some of the thermal energy released would be stored in chemical bonds formed by the manufacturing of any number of things, but most of it would ultimately still be released into the atmosphere as waste heat during some stage of its use.
There is the angle that if more natural gas were used to generate electricity, then less coal burning would be required. That certainly is an argument for getting and burning more natural gas in power plants, but barring that possibility in the present due to poor logistics, we will still be burning that coal whether the natural gas is burned off as waste, or whether it is never pumped up in the first place.
We could also spend money taking the gas and shoving it back where it came from, but that really is not practical.
The bigoted attitude towards the mid-west is uncalled for, even if you don't like what is going on in North Dakota.
> Burning the gas as waste contributes CO2 to the
> atmosphere, but burning the gas for productive
> reasons still produces that same CO2.
True, but if has to be burned, it may as well be productive. Moreover, if it's burned unproductively now, then presumably there is other productive CO2 being released now as well (unless we start accepting black-outs). There could be as much as two units of CO2 being released now, versus a single unit of CO2 otherwise. So that's more CO2 over a short time-scale.
There are time-scales over which releasing CO2 is more or less harmful; I don't pretend to know the critical ones. However, it seems self evident that if that rate of release can be slowed, then its consequences will be less harmful, even if the total amount of CO2 released by T_{infinity} is exactly the same.
> "Moreover, if it's burned unproductively now, then presumably there is other productive CO2 being released now as well (unless we start accepting black-outs). There could be as much as two units of CO2 being released now, versus a single unit of CO2 otherwise. So that's more CO2 over a short time-scale."
I assume that either way, we are going to eventually burn it until depletion. We can't keep it up forever, we will need to switch to renewable energy at some point and that renewable energy will be carbon neutral.
It's a shame that it is being wasted instead of used for something productive, but I am just not convinced that it is some sort of environmental disaster.
I don't think we will run out of gas before we switch to renewables. The supply of gas (as in, the amount of gas that can be produced per month) is limited and the demand for energy is always increasing, so prices are always going to go up. As new technology develops, and with economies of scale, renewables are getting cheaper. I think we'll get past the tipping point where renewable generation + storage is cheaper than fossil fuels well before we actually run out of gas. Being inefficient with our resources (like burning gas like this) means we'll be much worse off when that happens.
Why would converting deliquefication terminals make sense? By the time we convert them, wouldn't you expect technology transfer of fracking to have spread internationally (AND be much cheaper), making exporting less economically feasible?
The technology has spread but to date no other shale formation has been identified that has the same advantages of those in the US, namely a government friendly to drilling. France has some promising formations but they've banned the tech. There are other possibilities in Poland and Ukraine but there have been difficulties bringing them online.
It's not just about the technology, above-ground risk is in many ways the bigger problem.
But sure, it's a risk inherent in this sort of project. Cheniere Energy was building its Sabine Pass LNG facility in Louisiana to import gas until advances in fracking and horizontal drilling led to a glut of gas in the US market and importing ceased to make sense. Cheniere had to pull off a multi-billion dollar pivot to export instead, scrambling to raise billions and get approval to build the liquefaction trains required to export gas.
(OT: if anyone in Silicon Valley thinks theirs is the only industry ripe with crazy schemes, insane pivots and huge disruptions, read up on energy. The Prize by Daniel Yergin, Private Empire by Steve Coll and The Frackers by Gregory Zuckerman are the places to start)
The challenge with natural gas is capture and transport.
Gas is, well, a gas. It doesn't stay put, and it takes considerable infrastructure to convert it to a more manageable form (compressed or liquified). Both of which are states it doesn't particularly seem inclined to remain in.
There've been enough issues transporting oil from new drilling zones. Transporting gas (by truck, rail, or pipeline) is even more complex.
That's among the reasons oil (and coal) are so useful as fuels sources: they're very convenient. Oil most especially, though even coal can be moved in pipelines (as slurry).
Mind: for both environmental (AGW) and resource limitations (peak oil/gas) reasons we'll have to shift off of them. But the practicality of both coal and oil means that that transition will carry with it immense costs.
I don't think anybody disputes that it is expensive to capture and transport natural gas, but it's a solved problem. The state has taken a completely hands-off approach, letting oil companies operate in a manner that maximizes their immediate profits. Since it's cheaper to just burn off the gas, they do that, environmental consequences be damned. You don't see the rate of flaring in other states because other states have much stricter regulations about how long each well can do this.
North Dakota's leadership (which is generally from the eastern part of the state) is too busy counting money and patting themselves on the back for all the economic activity they 'created' to be concerned about the welfare of anybody who actually lives in or around the patch.
Burn it on site for electricity. Imagine it like distributed solar, just with natgas as the power source. Power lines, even low voltage (120-480V), are everywhere.
Worried about cost? Sell carbon credits for the destruction of the greenhouse gas, and use the funds to pay for the generation equipment.
Want someone to manage this huge distributed system of generators? Call SolarCity. They already manage an enormous fleet for distributed solar generation installations.
You will need a deep pocket. I suspect the cash flow hole between turning a flare into feedstock for electricity generation or any other potentially productive use and getting paid for that product is wide and deep.
For many years I imagined that space faring future humans would depend on hydrogen gas clouds as the source of their energy. Think: intergalactic highways with gas-stations at such formations. But this brings another resource to mind: In the future, we might view planets, not merely for their mineral resources, but also for the heat that may be trapped within them (AFAIK not all planets have a hot, molten core).
Autonomous planetary settlement bots; colonizers of planets. Harnessing the energy trapped within the planet to refine minerals on the surface or terraform the surface.
Sufficiently large planets are dual gravitational + fission plants. There's pretty good reason to believe there may be active natural sustained chain reaction fission reactors within the Earth's inner mantel / outer core (for reasons the geologists / geophysicists are better able to explain, apparently not in the core itself). There's also considerable latent heat from formation -- even after 4.5 billion years (rock is a good insulator).
But not all planets have molten interiors (Mars doesn't). And many aren't particularly accessible: Venus has that little atmosphere problem, Mercury's a tad toasty, and gas giants don't give your legs a leg to stand on. Plus gravity.
Visions of spacefaring humans are, I suspect, mostly strongly fantastical:
I don't buy it. Those articles just make it sound like any truly future craft needs to include a biome and fission reactor; in short, an aircraft carrier with Wisconsin fast plants. But sci-fi has been pointing us in this direction for ages. The Apollo missions were amazing, Space-X is amazing, but they are very much more like knarrs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knarr) than the caravels (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caravel) that came later and found the new world.
Oceans are capable of being crossed by little more than someone clinging to or sitting on a log (not with a particularly high survival rate, mind). Or bundles of papyrus reeds or balsawood rafts, as Thor Heyerdahl demonstrated. I personally know several people who've rowed across oceans. Some of them multiple times and/or multiple oceans.
The odds of rowing to Ceres or Alpha Centauri, let alone the Andromeda Galaxy, on a log raft, are rather slim.
Tom Murphy has an ax to grind. He fancies himself a modern day Paul Revere shouting the urgent message "Peak Oil is coming! Peak Oil is coming!". Anything that might lead us to complacency he attempts to debunk. So of course he will slam the possibility of space resources. But his "math" is wrong. See http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2012/02/in-his-blog-strande...
Outer space clouds and/or nebulas would have extremely low density I think. Imagine the vastness of sail collectors (or similar) needed to yield significant amounts!
It's not clear the magnetic ramscoop arrangement is particularly viable from the calculations, nor particularly efficient.
Given the absurd amounts of power available from stars when you start thinking about building such a ship, a lot of other options start to make more sense.
Antimatter synthesis isn't so unreasonable then you can magnetically divert the solar window to setup the brightest luminosity particle accelerator ever to make anti-hydrogen.
It sounds like they didn't intend to drill into magma, but is it possible to survey the land and intentionally find magma near the surface to exploit in this manner?
If not, isn't the question of whether you can effectively harness the energy or not moot?
I see what you are saying, if you can't find it, why do we care?
Two reasons, as the article states, it has been found, twice in fact. Once in Hawaii and now in Iceland. The Icelandic team is drilling another hole near the existing hole to investigate further. Maybe the same can be done in Hawaii.
The other reason we care is that perhaps technology doesn't exist yet to easily find these near surface reservoirs, but maybe it will in the future. If they determine this hole can be utilized, it will drive research into finding these reservoirs.
I think that there is probably some catch up that surveying needs to do to make this more practical, but it's probably more an effect of not having wanted to find magma before. A quick Google search turns up the following page about remote sensing for volcanic activity.
If there's money in finding magma, research will follow. 36 - 50 MW of non-carbon energy is good news. Geothermal is already competitive with coal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#U...) and with recent improvements in drilling technology, magma is within reach. The borehole mentioned above had a depth of 2,100 m. Deepwater Horizon drilled to more than 10,000 m (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon).
Not going to say its easy. But you can pretty accurately map magma under the surface using seismology. I believe it requires an earthquake and having the correct equipment in place, so its far from ideal. But it does work well.
It's really easy! Seismic surveys are key to the oil & gas industry, and can be used for other resources as well. We use thumper trucks instead of waiting for earthquakes.
It's been awhile since I've sat in on geology, but I seem to recall that they can use short-range seismic signals (by firing a shotgun shell into the ground). I'm not sure as to the resolution -- one could imagine getting better resolution firing multiple shells simultaneously over a certain area. My $.02
"39 explosions for the purpose of geological exploration (trying to find new natural gas deposits by studying seismic waves produced by small nuclear explosions)"
I do wonder to what extent we can mitigate potential future volcanic activity by preemptively pulling energy out of hot spots like this.
The odds are low, but a supervolcanic detonation in Yellowstone would be one of the most serious threats to the United States (or even the planet), so if we can mitigate it slightly while actually profiting from the process that seems worth pursuing.
Power is a measure of... power, not energy. MW/year is a silly unit. In the US energy production on an annual basis is given in BTUs, or Joules (usually quadrillions of BTUs, depending on the scale). Perhaps the article meant 10.7 GW of installed production capacity. Regardless, that's about 0.3 quadrillion BTUs per year, which is a blip compared to the world's energy consumption.
> Perhaps the article meant 10.7 GW of installed production capacity.
The original report does indeed, the article misquoted (and possibly misunderstood) it. Here is the exact quote and its surrounding paragraph:
> In 2005, there were 8,933 MW of installed power capacity in 24 countries, generating 55,709 GWh per year of green power, according to the International Geothermal Association. IGA reports in 2010 that 10,715 MW is on line generating 67,246 GWh. This represents a 20% increase in geothermal power on line between 2005 and 2010. IGA projects this will grow to 18,500 MW by 2015, which based upon the large number of projects under consideration appears reasonable if not conservative.
> Regardless, that's about 0.3 quadrillion BTUs per year, which is a blip compared to the world's energy consumption.
note that the quote is about electricity generation, not power consumption in general.
Still a blip though, in 2008 global electricity generation was estimated at 20261 TWh, geothermal production thus accounting for ~0.3% of global production.
A few select countries have fairly high geo ratios though: Iceland's at 30% geothermal, the Philippines at 27%, El Salvador 25%, Costa Rica at 14% and Kenya at 11.2% (2010 numbers).
The US are the biggest producer of geothermal electricity (29% of global production, #2 is the philippines at 18%) but the ratio matches global, geothermal is 0.3% of the US's electricity production.
Old trick. The USSR built geothermal power plants since 1966. But this tech is only available in very specific geological conditions. What is more energetically interesting in Scandinavia is their experimental thorium reactor.
The short answer is, we don't know. The longer answer involves a lot of evidence that we can't hurt it that much. But then again, in the 1900's farmers were forced by law to dump their waste ag chemicals into the Atlantic ocean, so wait 100 years and we'll see.
More importantly are the subtle differences to ground water temperature when wells are drilled close together in densely populated areas. This is a bit off-topic for the OP, but I went to an alt-energy talk where someone was all jazzed about geo-thermal. I asked if anyone's done any research about what the cold water pumped into the well does to the water table, or whether you could trigger fungal blooms underground and render otherwise potable water undrinkable. They, as you can guess, didn't have an answer.
Alt-energy is all exciting and holds such potential until you realize that bituminous coal was once the miracle solution to having everyone burn wood.
How would you rank the danger of all our energy sources?
edit:// The parent comment was saying that as someone who doesn't know much about it, geothermal sounded potentially more dangerous than nuclear. I was hoping to make the point that nuclear is pretty safe, even when you include recent disasters.
I guess large-scale geothermal power plants are an unproven concept, but isn't the risk of volcanic eruptions completely independent of whether we tap it for energy or not?
Perhaps there could be a scenario where the sudden cooling of a region in the magma pocket could lead to clogging and local overpressure. OTOH releasing magma in a controlled manner could just as well decrease overall pressure.
> I guess large-scale geothermal power plants are an unproven concept
Depends on the definition of large-scale, the biggest plant in the world is the 300MWe Hellisheiði power station in Iceland, and the largest geothermal field (a single "location" hosting multiple plants) is The Geysers in California, with 1500MWe over 22 plants.
"Magma serves as a heat source, replacing fuel in magma smelters, magma forges, magma glass furnaces, and magma kilns...Other uses for magma include obsidian farming, trap design, melting ice, igniting fires, and even garbage disposal." [1]
[1] http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Magma