Science
Related: About this forumRadical Plan to Make Earth's Deepest Hole Could Unleash Limitless Energy
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth's crust than anybody has dug before.
Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start that could potentially make geothermal power accessible to more populations around the world.
https://www.sciencealert.com/confidence-grows-in-mit-spin-off-aiming-to-make-the-deepest-hole-for-limitless-energy
Still highly speculative at this point, but non mechanical drilling could make geothermal energy accessible everywhere.
Right now, it's possible only in active systems, the main problem being "active." Pockets of high pressure gases can exist near magma intrusions and be highly unpleasant or even catastrophic.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536.8456&rep=rep1&type=pdf
COL Mustard
(5,782 posts)Unleash the Kraken!
old as dirt
(1,972 posts)Chainfire
(17,305 posts)What could go wrong, right? What if the Devil escapes??????
WhiteTara
(29,676 posts)with all his minions.
Maybe if we open the hole to the center of the world, they will slither back.
Wounded Bear
(58,437 posts)IbogaProject
(2,692 posts)Put them all over the North and the edges of Antarctica to power snowmaking to increase the earth's reflectivity for longer parts of the year. Maybe even to replenish glaciers like in Nepal, and on Kilimanjaro.
2naSalit
(86,040 posts)Is how they plan to contain the amount of pressure such and opening, no matter how small, will be issuing. I suspect there isn't a pressure valve system that could handle volcanic and pressure simultaneously.
Just sayin', I mean, I live on a big volcano and I don't expect to survive the next time the caldera opens up.
Warpy
(110,900 posts)via water injection in order to drive generators. This is what ultra deep bores in non volcanic areas would accmplish.
Icealand is actally working on harnessing their "oopsie."
SCantiGOP
(13,855 posts)These are the types of innovative ideas we need.
NNadir
(33,368 posts)It never really ends, does it?
Warpy
(110,900 posts)whatta gonna do?
NNadir
(33,368 posts)...energy schemes, from nuclear fusion, to solar, to wind, to various geothermal schemes of which this represents yet another entry, that there's nothing left to do but sigh.
I know very little about turtles, but I do know what the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere is, and to what it has risen while people spent my entire lifetime chasing the magic limitless energy fairy.
I suppose this search for the fairy has precluded focusing our attention on stuff that actually works.
Again, all I have is a sigh.
Warpy
(110,900 posts)Last edited Sat Mar 12, 2022, 04:23 PM - Edit history (1)
and the ambient temperature is 140F Rocks are hot enough to blister exposed skin that comes into contact with them. Plans are to extend it down to 4.2 meters. They're pretty much at the limit of human endurance where they are, but that's the kid of temperature rise we'd see in a bore hole in a geologically stable area.
Even if they can find a way to drill down 5 km or so, figuring a way to inject water without making the area geologically unstable might be the impossible part of the dream. We know they can drill down that far, it's about half as far as the Kola Superdeep Bore.
I still found the idea interesting enough to post, even though there are too many "ifs" at present to make it ready for prime time.
There have been noises made about geothermal plants here in NM, there are plenty of areas to choose from. It's unlikely that anyone will cough up the $$ for it until/unless the big coal fired plant in the Four Corners is forced to shut down.
NNadir
(33,368 posts)The concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide on this planet is currently around 419 ppm in the planetary atmosphere.
I'm not criticizing you for posting this; most people repeat what they see because most people take press releases and their titles seriously. For many years, I did so as well. We want to believe in things that might be good. It's called "optimism." It only becomes dangerous when it is "over-optimism." Famously, in very recent times, a fellow named "Putin" was overly optimistic about the strength of his army, for example. Pretty much everyone on the planet was overly optimistic that solar and wind energy would save the day.
This may come as a surprise, but when I joined DU in 2002, I was actually a fan of so called "renewable energy," as well as nuclear energy. I, of course, have changed my mind about so called "renewable energy" because all of the glib statements made about it in comparison to the results obtained when this pernicious idea, that so called "renewable energy" was viable and sustainable and a great idea, went mainstream. The results are in.
I was aided in seeing through the wild assumptions about so called "renewable energy" because its advocates were not concerned about attacking dangerous fossil fuels so much as attacking nuclear energy. Again, in environmental hellholes like Germany where such rhetoric was put into practice, the results are in. (Putin, I'm sure thanks Germany for all the Euros anti-nukism brought; he was so happy he hired Ex-Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder to run Gazprom.)
When I joined DU in late November 2002, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere was 372.68 ppm. Here we are, only 19 years later.
Now let's be clear on something. It was far easier for me to decide that so called "renewable energy" is garbage than it would be for most people. I have excellent access to the primary scientific literature. I was already a fan of nuclear energy because at that time, as a result of my study in that literature, of the Chernobyl event, which took place when I myself was a dumb assed anti-nuke. When the Chernobyl reactor underwent a steam explosion and the decay heat in it caused the graphite to ignite and burn for weeks, I was absolutely sure that millions of people would lose their lives. Why? Because I had been "educated" by uneducated people in a great circle of ignorance.
The deeper I looked, the more I was forced to check my assumptions, and when I was done, I felt like a fool.
Geothermal energy, widely employed in places like Iceland, where it is a major source of energy, releases significant quantities of geological - can we call it "pre-sequestered" - carbon dioxide. Volcanoes release carbon dioxide. Depending on where geothermal energy is employed, it can be relatively modest - the 2014 IPCC reports roughly 40 g CO2/kwh - but it is not clear that this holds everywhere.
Icelandic basalts have been thoroughly degassed; the carbon dioxide in them has already been released from the atmosphere, nonetheless there is still a CO2 flux resulting from the mantle of the earth: P.H. Barry, D.R. Hilton, E. Füri, S.A. Halldórsson, K. Grönvold, Carbon isotope and abundance systematics of Icelandic geothermal gases, fluids and subglacial basalts with implications for mantle plume-related CO2 fluxes, Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Volume 134, 2014, Pages 74-99. Reportedly at one vent discussed in the paper (Vonarskarð) (table 1 therein), the concentration of CO2 was 5.52 mmol CO2/kg H2O, roughly double that of seawater under the current conditions of rising dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere.
Recently I attended a lecture by Professor Paul Falkowski at which he made several points on the role of "presequestration," of carbon in geological formations in which he asserted that if the carbon were not so sequestered, life on this planet would have never evolved, in particular, free oxygen would be impossible.
We are already drilling and mining the shit out of this planet; the damage done structurally may not be geologically repaired for millions, if not hundreds of millions, of years. To run all these drills, these mines, to build the structures involved, the pipes, the machinery, involves huge amounts of embodied energy, involves huge fresh water demand, for what?
If humanity comes to its senses at Four Corners and shuts the deadly coal plant, I recommend replacing it with a nuclear plant, perhaps air cooled given the water restraints. It will be cleaner and more sustainable.
Again, I am not criticizing you so much as I am remembering criticisms that may have well been applied to me when I was a young man. Here's my advice which you may either accept or reject without any implication for your intelligence or your good will: Consider that any headline featuring the words "limitless energy" is almost 99% sure to involve wishful and sloppy thinking.
Even nuclear energy, which I support vociferously as our last best hope, is not risk free, nor is it (obviously) without environmental impact. The case is only that the impact is the smallest possible, not that it doesn't exist. It's "safety" is not absolute; it is merely safer than all other options, including those that currently supply almost all of the energy on Earth, despite much jawboning and wishful thinking.
Warpy
(110,900 posts)and my crack about "turtles, all the way down" covered the type of magical thinking that has driven perpetual motion and limitless energy scams for years. The OPEC oil shocks of the 70s drove all sorts of kit that would raise your gas mileage to 100 MPG (suppressed by Detroit, natch). I had the sense to shrug and shoehorn myself onto a crowded subway car, instead.
However, non volcanic geothermal energy probably has sturdier legs than things like cold fusion. We already have part of the technology. We just have to figure out what to do with that 5 KM deep hole when we get it. That's the iffy bit.