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Mallen, I don't follow this very closely, but I’ve been thinking about the physics and there are a few points that you didn't mention. First, as you go down, the temperature rises, but the upward heat FLOW is pretty much the same, and the temperature GRADIENT (degrees Celsius per 100m downwards) is roughly the same. But once you take the heat out of the rock you cool it down, and it takes time to warm up again. So we may be talking about drilling lots of holes and “resting” them while they warm up again. However, this makes geo compatible with wind and solar because you can turn it off and then on again when there is a lull in those systems. Second, you didn’t mention fracking technology. Rock often has a grain, and sometimes the fractures spread more than a mile on one particular axis. So if you can drill two holes say 1.5 miles apart and create a “network of cross-cutting fractures” between them, you have a very good heat-exchanger. Fracking also involves creating elbows and drilling horizontally, which might be useful because the heat is coming up from below. Or it might be better to just go straight down to the higher temperatures - it’s not obvious (to me at least) which would be better. BTW one of those schemes is sponsored by Google - do you know which one?
All this & you didn't even mention Eavor?? What gives? Don't they count? If you found some companies I don't even know about, then you must have found Eavor and its "Eavor loop", right?
Any alternative to Wind and Solar is a good alternative to me! Just goes to show; if you want to solve real problems and make a difference, don't become an 'activist', become an engineer!
The world needs both, its normally the activists that push the funding in the right direction indirectly or not. Of course they're also responsible for many stupid political decisions and throwing good money at bad Ideas.
Yes! Engineering and science is what we need! However, not sure what your beef with wind and solar is, the enemy is oil, gas and coal (possible fission too) - There are MANY alternatives also including tidal, and other hydro related solutions, all have been around for a while. These alternatives, though, are measured by the cost of building and maintaining them verses the power we get and so, are not always the recommended option. Also electricity has a distribution issue that requires large infrastructure (cables, power hubs etc) which adds more cost. At the moment Money is the limiting factor here and currently fossil fuels are cheapest due to existing infrastructure etc. We need to prioritise more efficient technologies and the environment to secure our future.
@@gyrovids9462as an engineer with a career in supplying raw materials the fatal flaw in moving to renewables has been apparent for almost a decade. Even if they can completely eliminate ANY problem with CO2, there is not enough raw materials to build the renewable system in anything like the timeframes talked about. We will need centuries to thousands of years to provide the quantities of necessary metals at the fastest rates humans have been able to extract them. We need to find almost all of them as well, typically having less than 5% of the metals at Reserve status. If people talking about transitions are not talking about what needs to be done to gigantically increase mining, then they have no real answer to how the transition actually happens.
Nice to have an "unpoliticized" energy source in a time, when technology is "left" or "right". Thank you for picking that topic, very interesting and hopeful.
Obviously technologies themselves are not 'left' and 'right' - it's just people trying to make them so. Some people will no doubt try to do the same with geothermal.
Colour me unconvinced. Geothermal is notoriously difficult, and I'll give some of the main challenges. None of them are particularly related to how to create a hole, but the challenges are well known Steam turbines in power stations are about 70% efficient (steam power to shaft power). High pressure and temperature purified steam to be supplied at the turbine inlet - such as 300bar pressure (300 atmospheres) and 500degC temperature for a steam turbine driving a 250MW power generating unit. The turbine comprises many rows of blades which need to be smooth to stay aerodynamically efficient and to survive strong enough to withstand the immense forces of converting the steam flow into shaft power (about 30% more than the power of the generator mentioned above). If steam chemistry isn't carefully controlled, the turbine (and other parts of the steam pathway) will be quickly wrecked. You will always see whisps of steam near an operating steam turbine - this is called "boiler blowdown" as the steam needs to be steadily replaced to maintain chemistry. Sticking water down a deep hole to produce steam produces badly contaminated and corrosive steam as it picks up contaminants from the hot rocks at high pressure and temperature. It might be high temperature and pressure at the bottom of the hole, but energy is lost if the steam travels over long distances (cooling) and energy is lost as it is lifted hundreds of meters against gravity. Presenting lower pressure and/or temperature steam to a turbine means the turbine efficiency will be much lower and it then take greater mass flowrate to get the same power. Greater mass flow means faster rate of corrosion if the steam is chemically impure. To protect the turbine, we could have a heat exchanger between the primary source of steam (the hole) and the turbine , but this means more equipment (which is an additional cost) and more energy loss (heat exchangers are not perfect). Geothermal is not easy or cheap. That's why it's not common.
Nuclear power plants, coal fired plants, gas fired plants all revolve around steam turbines to turn the generators. Steam turbines are not new technology
@@myme5615 Yes. Steam turbines may be well known technology, and it it is well known that steam chemistry is critical for their health and effective operation. All of those technologies have water treatment plants to ensure the chemistry of the steam going through the boilers and turbines stay within the tight limits on chemistry. At these plants, you will see whisps of that "boiler blowdown" I mentioned, as the boiler feedwater is steadily replaced with a fresh top-up to keep within tight boiler chemistry limits. If you put contaminated steam (straight from a geothermal well) into a steam turbine, see what happens! There is a reason why geothermal is not cheap and not common.
Thanks for your time to put this together. I’m a graduate chemist (many years ago). And you reminded me I should have been able to do your kind of thinking😳😂. Healthy skepticism seems to be the best mental state to be in when we are unclear of details that may have a profound effect on the efficiency/effectiveness of any system.
Well done. Thanks! I think that geothermal has a real future. My hope is that our power grid will become decentralized with many sources of production.
In the 90's here in Texas, geothermal in situ for high end homes was available. Negatives being lost efficiency to do shifting soil and the need for a water source to maintain a gradient. You made a lot of good points. I'll add it's very scalable.
@@gregorymalchuk272 It's comparable to a solar power farm and a solar panels in one's backyard, a large nuclear reactor vs a small nuclear generator in your backyard. You missed my point.
Geothermal could be the best 24/7 power source with a small land footprint and can be used on old Coal and Gas Power plant plants using their turbines and Grid Connections! Cost of drilling is the hold back!
Tidal & Geo Thermal are way under invested, but geothermal has very similar infrastructure & expertise to oil, at least in part. Ive been advocating for it in "Green Realsim" circles for years. District heating & industrial neighbours are need to be integrated in the any plans for max usefulness to local communities. Thanks for highlighting it in your inimitable very reasonable balanced style⚖
We are blessed in NZ with large volcanic areas that we tap for energy. This is a growth industry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealand
Nicely researched. Thank you. The potential for geothermal energy has been there for a long time, but there has never been a significant change to make it a serious contender for large scale energy production. Has this one got what it takes? I hope it does, and that it isn’t scuttled by Governments and energy companies.
If we can get geothermal to work in this way then one of the great benefits will be the equality of energy production. Oil and gas has centred in a few geographical locations causing political upheaval and even wars. Solar and wind are not only intermittent they are not suitable for many countries and do not provide for heat in winter. Nuclear is not only expensive but the number of nuclear power stations globally would be completely impractical and the fuel they use would soon run out when scaled up.
@@p.n.gwynne It's much easier in volcanic areas because the wells are shallower as Nd so operate at lower pressure and often the temperatures are higher.
I saw this tried in the Cooper Basin in Australia by a companycalled Geodynamics. Quite deep wells and very tricky geology. Drill stem kept jamming. They went bust.
There are people talking about geothermal. Mr Volts (David Roberts) has covered it on his podcast a couple of times in the last year, noting the step-change that Fervo Energy's work represents, and the Energy gang looked at Quaise and Fervo in Spring 2023. I agree with you that not enough people have yet noticed that this is probably going to a _much_ bigger deal in the future. It could be absolutely massive depending on how the costs and practicalities work out.
Thank you. Lord Kelvin tried to approximate the age of the Earth purely by thermal dynamic reduction estimates. he came up with about 1 million years. He had no idea about heat from radioactive decay, even though he had met the Curies.
@@davidrossi1486 ... True. Kelvin sorta proved not enough time to evolution to occur, haha, it earth was just well under 10 million years old say... to be fair he knew he didn't know all factors, maybe the sun was sending heat deep into the earth using x-rays or something , Kelvin just said assuming no other factors the earth should be solid after 10m years or so..... He was right..
@@jeffjwatts Well, you see, how expensive something is depends on how much investment there is in R&D, and so how much development of the technology there is, its scale of production and so on, and these are a matter of a decision made in advance. This argument can be applied to almost any technology, but once it has been decided that it must or should be done, then cost effective ways of doing it are found. Practically all technologies are not cost effective till a mass of R&D has been invested in them. Look at Musk and the Tesla cars. I would say Musk is imitating the Koreans in his approach, "debt-led leap frogging". People simply do not realise the vast amounts of money Musk sank into all his companies, and how massively in debt he was for so long, and how little profit he was getting back for many, many years. This was extremely risky. It is like once you have committed yourself, you have to keep going till you finally reach some kind of break-even point. To do this you need to skip a generation in technology compared with your competitors. This is exactly how the South Korean Chaebol achieved Korea's industrial revolution.
Mallen, driling a hole to reach that thermal energy is one thing. Assuming you want to use that heat to generate electrcity in any quantity requires both a large volume and a large heat value at the surface. Steam generation requires several hundred degees to be effective. The deeper the hole the higher the heat loss and how many or what capacity of hole is a fundamental requirement. While the potential is there it is not such a breakthrough as you suggest. There are many hurdles to overcome and may well be unviable in the medium term. Wind and solar are a dead end, nuclear is by far the most viable and effective source of electricity as a replacement for some fossil fuel generation. That replacement is a means of using that fossil fuel reserves for other uses.
The big advantage of enhanced geothermal is that it comes with a free battery. The well can be but under pressure in the daytime, when there is an abundance of renewable energy, and discharged in the evening when demand is high. It would be the perfect addition to stabilize the energy grid. And the total amount of energy that comes out of a fracked geothermal well during its entire lifetime, is more than the energy that comes out of a fracked oil well. So it's more profitable for oil companies to drill for heat. Especially because they can make extra money by functioning as a battery for the RE industry.
One of the biggest issues with geothermal is that the slow transfer of heat through the rock - it's surprisingly slow. So the heat extraction has to be balanced with the collection area/type of rock/heat available. Over extraction will give more power for a while, but it will take years for that heat to return to the bore area. That heat almost always comes from below, so is an area issue, whereas the extraction is usually through multiple pipes in different layers, so is a volume issue. It's great technology, but like wind or solar, it's quite a diffuse power source so it becomes less economical to produce large single power plants.
In the Netherlands half of the warehouses farmers are using it to warm their warehouses. That’s why I watched the video. I’m curious about it. Funny thing is that those warehouses are in the higher part of the country. Dutch farmers are used to science based farming. So we will profit in the future from their experiences with this energy source.
In most places you do not need 20 km for decent geothermal heat. In Iceland it is 2 to 3 km. In many places 5 to 6 km is plenty. If you do not want to go that deep, you can also go for binary cycle power plants. For that you need something above 100°C. The temperature gradient of the earth is about 25 to 30°C per km depth. So you get even in cold areas 100°C after drilling 4 km. One has not to invent anything today to exploit geothermal energy, but everything new can help.
Geo thermal that is mainly used in todays system has a problem of mineralization of components i I believe that drilling down to a temp of 600 degrees C and pumping distilled water down and having it in an enclosed system would work better than using ground water
Geothermal is technically fission energy, as primordial heat is supplemented by radioactive decay, so Earth's temperature is more than just the residue of heat of formation. Otherwise, great points. Enhanced geothermal can not just supply essentially limitless electric power to practically any market economically and cleanly, but it acts as energy storage because any heat pumped into the drill holes must come out as steam to drive generators.
Very interesting. I hope these new techniques can provide practical demonstration plants soon. Although there may be some engineering problems to overcome, I'm assuming the regulatory problems are not as restricting as they are for 4th generation nuclear.
I've not looked into it at all, but there is a vast difference between using a lazer to vaporise something on a desk and using it to vaporise rock 10km down which then needs to be baught back up to the surface The thing you vaporise the rocks will only remain in a gas state at extrmeely high temperatures. It doesn't seem reasonable to assume this is an easy challenge What I know for sure is that there are many higher value holes that the world digs. For example, to lay eletricity lines across a city If some evolutionary lazer is going to work for geothermal itll be in use many years before that for things like drilling holes for gas eletricity water sewerage etc and sincd this tech isnt being used for that i wont hold my breath
I'd love to know more details on how the rock vapor gets out of the hole. It will re-condense into a liquid or solid as soon as it cools enough; how do they make sure this happens in mid-flight more than on the sides of the hole? Or that the re-solidified particles are small enough for a blast of gas to lift them several km above the bottom of the hole? Is it a continuous process, or do they alternate between zapping and exhausting?
geothermal? - “In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can deliver sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future” (2017).
You are forgetting of course the technology development requirements for enormous robots to fight the inevitably released giant monsters, what about that factor?
@@myme5615 a number of high cost experiments were done in Australia. They all failed for two main reasons 1. the heat was low grade requiring very high flows, and 2. the recovered hot water was highly corrosive wrecking both the downhole and well head equipment. The reality is solar, wind, hydro and even nuclear are cheaper and more reliable.
Geothermal has been a notorious money waster. It works in very specific areas where geology makes heat sources close to the surface, like Iceland or along major fault lines, but in other areas has been the method to dash dreams and fortunes. It is also curious how people who are completely against fracking for gas, are suddenly completely comfortable with those same methods and issues for geothermal.
Those things are only a problem when using that technology for gas production. If it’s renewables those issues are suddenly non existent, or really easy to fix.
Rather than hot air talking for solar panels for new houses for 15 years…. They started last year….. this simple improvement could have had us energy neutral years ago.
Not on a global scale though. Renewables are not even meeting the increase in energy demand, let alone transitioning anything. From the 2023 IEA Wirld Energy Review, the increase in energy over the latest 20 year period saw renewables add 39EJ, but fossil fuels added 120EJ of supplied energy.
Thanks Mallen GT does and will work in volcanic precincts. Not so much elsewhere. Lots of experiments with deep GT have been done. They have proven very costly and had very little success mainly because the heat energy generated this way is 'low grade'. Of course we also have no real idea of the long term environmental consequences of interfering with thermal cycle of the Earth's mantle. If we jiggered the Earth's magnetic field for example, it could be all over red rover as radiation flooded in from space. I would much prefer to take my chances with nuclear fission, fusion, wind and solar thankyou. These are pretty much known quantities.
If you bleed off all that energy from the Core, tell me HOW IS IT REPLACED? I'm curious! I'm also curious as to what replaces Oil when it's pumped out? Any thoughts!
The amount you can possibly use compared to the supply is so tiny it's simply not an issue. No more than someone taking samples of sea water a thimblefull at a time is in danger of draining the ocean.
FYI the ddepest hole dug thus far is in the Kola peninsula, not siberia ... they arent even close, just in the same country ... the largest country in the world
It is an open question whether Quaise Energy or Eavor Technology will have the superior technology. GA drilling's plasmabit has an advantage in that it is directional so would work with Eavor's system. Eavor drilled a deep bore in New Mexico and reached 250° C rock. When they get to 400° C rock their closed loop system will be a game changer.
Have Houston innovators with high temp water dissolvable geothermal tooling. Testing fracing balls in next few months at geothermal testing well. Stay tuned!
I've always wondered about Peltier modules, they are solid state and will not break down, they produce current from thermal differential so can in theory still work at night.
You're thinking of the Seebeck Effect, which is how a thermocouple works. The Peltier Effect is the reciprocal phenomenon though, so it is related. Trouble is, Seebeck is nothing like efficient enough to generate power of any significant magnitude for the same reason that Peltier coolers require a very large amount of current to move any significant amount of heat, which is why CPU water cooling is preferred over Peltier devices. Solid state devices can and do break down by a variety of mechanisms, including dopant diffusion and dislocations of the base element of the semiconductor's crystal lattice.
@@StrixTechnica Thanks for the reply, I'm just a hobbyist in terms of electronics. Question: Is the inverse relative for the Seebeck effect, as your example of a CPU cooler? If so, then I would be inclined to think it may be potentially viable. As far as I have read, which I admit is little, break downs are relatively rare.
@@JustIn-mu3nl I'm not quite sure what you're asking. You can use a Peltier module as a Seebeck element, but then it's still the Seebeck effect involved. A thermocouple (which is, to be fair a single junction of dissimilar metals rather than a semiconductor) produces about 50µV/°C, so you'd need about a thousand such junctions to produce 1 volt with a ΔT of 20°. These things don't scale linearly, though, because of the Thompson effect which says that the Peltier-Seebeck coefficient depends on temperature. How much current (and therefore power) you get depends on surface area. Yes, you can generate electricity this way and, yes, you can use geothermal source for that source temperature gradient - but it wouldn't be cost effective or commercially viable to produce electrical energy that way at grid scale.
Great if you live in the pacific “ring of fire”. Even if there it is very expensive and in remote areas. It’s a very big diameter hole, nothing like O&G. Nuclear is a better universal option.
Here's the problem. Once you have your superdeep hole you still need power to pump your working fluid down there and back up. You use high grade power to get low grade power (heat). There's a reason oil rigs don't try to recover power from hot drilling fluids.
The fundamental problems are the impermeability of the rock and especially the extremely high fugitive water rates in dry areas. Geothermal power really only works in wet, permeable formations.
@@Tim_Smallpotentially avoided. Engineering in these types of conditions can succeed or fail on very small deviations from plan. Ask all the fabulous geothermal opportunities around the world which have failed over the last few decades.
Noch billiger wäre, per STIRLING MOTOR Wärmeenergie in massenhafte Mengen von Wärme Differenzen zu performen. In der Umkehrung dessen erzeugte folgend der STIRLING GENERATOR aus Wärmedifferenzen Elektoenergie. Da genug Sonnenenergie simpelst nutzbar zur Erde gelangt, könnte die dann hoch auf Weißglut konzentriert sogar den Wärme Differenzierungsprozess verüberflüssigen. Bliebe nur noch der STIRLING GENERATOR in Multi Schwärmen einzusetzen. Spart jegliches Bohren irgendwelcher MONSTERLÖCHER und wäre trotzdem Geothermalenergie Nutzung, Energie, die hier auf der GEO Erde ankommt, eintrifft.
DRILLING AT WRONG SCALE To be part of an effective green energy revolution, rather than a small supplement, we need new smaller scale drilling technology. Instead of geothermal, I am talking residential scale vertical groundsource heatpumps where currently the economics are just out of reach because all the drills and drilling services are designed for much, much bigger projects. The current typical groundsource systems require too much land and disruption to be viable as a mass market option. Air-source heatpumps have many issues but are currently what is pushed by governments as it is easier than encouraging development of a better solution.
Nope geothermal will always only ever be a bit player in energy, to understand why requires a little bit of physics knowledge. In the book "Without The Hot Air" by David Mackay, there is a good section on geothermal and what its limits are. The only true source of energy that can best fossil fuel use is nuclear, preferably Molten Salt reactors. Some facts, US per capita energy use is about 10KW of primary energy or same as 300GJ per yr. The EU is about 2/3 of that per capita. see LLNL Energy Flow Graph, see Wikipedia Per capita Energy Use, see the book above, all free to peruse at leasure
Not hot plasma not in any way. Geothermal is the way forward until space based solar. Also, drilling a 4 mile oil well is common. The big issues is materials science. And microwave drills are bullshit, you think dumb has issues drilling that hot, seems bit much to put electronics in that environment.
No. I think geothermal for electrical generation in this country is a non starter. The energy density is far too low. Ground source heat for heat pumps is useful. Geothermal was tried in Cornwall 40 years ago. Heat generated in radioactive granite formations was to be the source. However, the granite did not lend itself to effective fracking and insufficient heat was recovered to sustain steam production needed for electricity generation.
To state the obvious, we have wind and solar and can pump water up a water tower to store the energy, yes it'll cost $1/kwh so power go from $1000 to $10,000 a year which would be burden but now unbearable.. Pollution solved. Now they're just trying to find low cost green option, equal to gas, which aint gonna happen, nothing will get close to fossil fuels if include storage.
Nuclear electricity is grid electricity. Nuclear electricity cashflow is screwed as customers go offgrid daily when the sunshines 🌞 Nuclear electricity doesn't work part time, grow up. Nuclear is an economic disaster. Heavy on cashflow demand. Weak on flexibility. Limited by grid capacity to 10% of all energy used. 1gW generation needs 640,000 buildings grid connected, customers, and 40,000km of poles and wires and transformers and switch yards and transmission lines. $40billion in grid infrastructure. Same for geothermal. Construction Engineer for decades, am I wasting my breath and talking to idiots.????
Digging big holes in the ground, what could possibly go wrong? It's not as if they do it near volcanoes or fault lines, they are too careful for that, right? It's not as if fracking and other oil and gas exploration hasn't shown why digging big holes in the ground can lead to problems. Nope, everything will be fine, hurray for the cheaper energy we've been promised for the last decade that is always coming soon
Normal land crust is 40km thick, or 20km in bits, so by definition they have to find rare area where something weird is going on underground so hi heat comes up to 1km. They have no idea what is the weirdness, they just smile and say heat is shallow let's pump steam and water in... It terrifies me, to make a buck we risk a metro having earthquakes or new volcano.. this is definition of playing with fire.
Nuclear isn't hugely costly in Russia, China or Korea. So it's not really an issue with Nuclear, it's an issue with politics. Fuel is the majority of energy use, this hasn't changed. Iceland doesn't export energy, geothermal is a dead end.
