Posted on 02/25/2022 11:11:06 AM PST by Red Badger
MIT spin-off Quaise says it's going to use hijacked fusion technology to drill the deepest holes in history, unlocking clean, virtually limitless, supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fuelled power plants all over the world.
The heat beneath our feet
Everyone knows the Earth's core is hot, but maybe the scale of it still has the power to surprise. Temperatures in the iron center of the core are estimated to be around 5,200 °C (9,392 °F), generated by heat from radioactive elements decaying combining with heat that still remains from the very formation of the planet – an event of cataclysmic violence when a swirling cloud of gas and dust was crushed into a ball by its own gravity.
Where there's access to heat, there's harvestable geothermal energy. And there's so much heat below the Earth's surface, according to Paul Woskov, a senior fusion research engineer at MIT, that tapping just 0.1 percent of it could supply the entire world's energy needs for more than 20 million years.
The problem is access. Where subterranean heat sources naturally occur close to the surface, easily accessible and close enough to a relevant power grid for economically viable transmission, geothermal becomes a rare example of totally reliable, round-the-clock green power generation. The Sun stops shining, the wind stops blowing, but the rock's always hot. Of course, these conditions are fairly rare, and as a result, geothermal currently supplies only around 0.3 percent of global energy consumption.
The deepest holes in human history are not deep enough If we could drill deep enough, we could put geothermal power stations just about anywhere we wanted them. But that's harder than it sounds. The Earth's crust varies in thickness between about 5-75 km (3-47 miles), the thinnest parts tending to be way out in deep ocean.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
Sometimes it’s ‘peaceful’ like in Hawaii.
Sometimes it violent, like Krakatoa..................
Interesting. Nothing is free. The heat deep in the Earth is largely due to the Moon’s tidal influences. If a system of tapping that energy is feasible and put into use it will to some tiny extent begin to slow the Moon’s orbital velocity.
No. Because, according to media orthodoxy, we'd produce far less carbon dioxide, so the earth would retain less solar energy.
Just tell Brandon that the quickest way to China is through the earth’s core. Oh - he’d screw it up anyway.
This is what will happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_World
I have always said someone can invent a technology that turns garbage and air pollution in to limitless energy for free and only exhaust pure water for the world and they would block it. The tree huggers don’t WANT any energy growth and they won’t allow this energy source. While this company spends time doing something practical, the Europeans are spending a few trillion building another boondoggle fusion test reactor.
Transmit plasma argon miles through a wave guide? Big step from blasting holes in basalt in a lab.
If there are mobile super critical fluids at depth, and there seem to be, get back to me on your pressure control plans. Every hole I ever drilled I saw as potentially opening Pandora’s Box of horrors if pressured fluids were not contained and controlled.
The deepest I have actually drilled, meaning doing the engineering and being project manager, is right at 30,000 feet so I guess my experience in this regard may not be relevant to the plans of these brilliant professors.
There is a passage in Genesis that has always caught my attention. Two of them actually. We think we actually know what all this means and some of the suggestions or implications about that understanding are just non-sensical.
Genesis 1:6-8
6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
Some think the Firmament is just the heavens, verse 8. I’m not so certain of that. I don’t think WE know.
And the account of the flood paraphrased but referenced here:
https://christiananswers.net/q-aig/aig-c010.html
The “fountains of the great deep” are mentioned before the “windows of heaven,” indicating either relative importance or the order of events.
What are the “fountains of the great deep?” This phrase is used only in Genesis 7:11. “Fountains of the deep” is used in Genesis 8:2, where it clearly refers to the same thing, and Proverbs 8:28, where the precise meaning is not clear. “The great deep” is used three other times: Isaiah 51:10, where it clearly refers to the ocean; Amos 7:4, where God’s fire of judgment is said to dry up the great deep, probably the oceans; and Psalm 36:6 where it is used metaphorically of the depth of God’s justice/judgment. “The deep” is used more often, and usually refers to the oceans (e.g., Genesis 1:2; Job 38:30, 41:32; Psalm 42:7, 104:6; Isaiah 51:10, 63:13; Ezekiel 26:19; Jonah 2:3), but sometimes to subterranean sources of water (Ezekiel 31:4, 15). The Hebrew word (mayan) translated “fountains” means “fountain, spring, well.”[1]
So, the “fountains of the great deep” are probably oceanic or possibly subterranean sources of water. In the context of the flood account, it could mean both.
“Uh, won’t ultra-deep geothermal DRILL POINTS cause EARTHQUAKES?”
If it’s cost effective, something will be wrong with it. Only if prohibitively expensive will the greens give it a pass.
We cannot challenge big wind and big solar.
And then after going through all the effort of “de-carbonization” it will be found that there is no difference in global temperatures.
Would be nice to stop digging huge holes in the ground to scrape out coal and just use energy from straight below the existing power plants.
Wiki --> "Project Mohole was an attempt in the early 1960s to drill through the Earth's crust to obtain samples of the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or Moho, the boundary between the Earth's crust and mantle. The project was intended to provide an earth science complement to the high-profile Space Race. While .
Led by a group of scientists called the American Miscellaneous Society with funding from the National Science Foundation, the project suffered from political and scientific opposition, mismanagement, and cost overruns. The U.S. House of Representatives defunded it in 1966. By then a program of sediment drilling had branched from Project Mohole to become the Deep Sea Drilling Project of the National Science Foundation."
I agree. The EnviroTards worship Gaia and they want to get rid of most of the population and live like primitive peoples. And I do mean primitive. As in living in huts and digging roots in the woods for food.
An excellent source of energy if it can be done…will take a long time to cool the earth’s core by removing heat/energy…we won’t have to worry about that…the sun will engulf and burn earth to a cinder before that happens…
The big trick is to keep the drilling equipment and heat processing equipment from melting .... doubt that the hardest steel or alloys can stand million degree heat.
No need for million degree heat tolerance the earth core is under 10,000 degrees in whatever scale you use. Thats 6000+ km to the inner core no need to go anywhere near that deep. Depending on where you are on the planet 400C degree heat is “only” 3 to 10km deep a tiny fraction of that distance.
Here is the geothermal map for the USA all those red areas are 3km or less to power plant turbine grade heat as in 400C at those temps go supercritical turbines for water its 380C , CO2 is 300C either will pull 10 to 20 times the heat up a bore hole due to lack of phase change having the density of a fluid but the free flow of a gas. Using CO2 removes the leeching of water soluble minerals from the host rock and also has a lower pump energy to move a given volume of heat per fluid flow velocity.
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geothermal-energy-resource-US
It would be a massive breakthrough to have 200+ feet per hour penetration rates in crystalline basement rocks that eat up diamond bits like candy. The earth is hot at depth due to the decay of radioactive material in the core and mantle rocks plus gravitational collapse energy from the formation of the planet. While there is only 4ppm on average of uranium in crust level rocks the core is believed to be loaded with uranium as it’s one of the densest naturally occurring elements nearly all of it in the original molten earth at formation would have density separated like the iron nickel of the inner core did at the same time. The earth produces neutrinos at a substantial rate indicating that either radioactive decay or active fission is occurring continuously in the inner part of the planet. Simply put there is no way humans could ever use this amount of energy its Billions of times what humans use in a given year. The authors are right 0.1% would supply all of humanity energy needs for tens of millions of years the amounts of energy is effectively limitless from a human time scale or usage amounts. Its like looking at the sun and saying humans can exhaust that source. The sun also supplies millions of times what all of humanity uses over the surface of the earth every year. So much so that ome hour of sunlight is enough to power humanity for more than a year. When you start talking planetary science level systems the amounts are beyond what most people can comprehend.
Personally hate wiki but this one is pretty well written and has solid references.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
https://phys.org/news/2011-10-vast-amounts-solar-energy-earth.html
Lunar tidal heating is minimal compared to radioactive decay and primordial gravitational collapse energy. The outward flow of geothermal heat is tiny compared to the incoming solar flux.
37 TW geothermal vs 117,000+ TW solar not even a rounding error. Humans could power our entire race with geothermal and not touch the heat balance of the planet. These are Terawatt seconds not hours so you have to convert to terawatt hours then multiplied to a full day to have an accurate comparison.
In kilowatt hours geothermal flows are
3,196,800 terawatt hours per day and solar is a mind boggling 14,947,200,000 terawatt hours per day.
Humans use on avg 58kWh per day when averaged over 7.7 billion people that’s
58kWh times all 7.7 billion of us is
446,600,000,000 kilowatt hours per day or 446.6 terawatt hours per day. There is zero way we could even hope to alter the heat balance of the planet powering our species with geothermal energy. The sun dwarfs anything humans will ever do.
https://home.uni-leipzig.de/energy/energy-fundamentals/04.htm
Yes. I know it wouldn’t have much of an effect. It’s mainly an exercise in “what if”. But I remember a professor I had in physics class lecturing on it and it was amusing to consider.
Rest assured that the “greens” will still try to say it will contribute to global warming because puts heat into the atmosphere faster than it would naturally seep out of the lithosphere. The numbers as I show are trivial compared to the solar influx but that’s not the point. Limiting standards of living for people they don’t consider their peers is the point. Its punishment for not seeing them as your betters. That said humans need to figure out sooner than later how to power 8+ billion people at somewhere near western consumption levels without liquid hydrocarbons which will run out at current consumption levels in under 50 years. This is at 58kWh per day avg over 7.7 billion if China and India grow their middle class and Africa too then it goes faster. China is at 77kWh per day catching up fast to the EU but not near the USA 200+ which if the whole world lived like that 47 years becomes 10 there is a finite amount of liquid hydrocarbons in the ground. I have spent 20 years on 6 of 7 continents chasing them as a geologist there are not anymore mega fields to find the basins have been categorized,3D seismic and geophysical analysis done for decades. We are not going after the source rocks with shale oil and hydrologic stimulation plus heavy oil, bitumen and tar sands even with those there is only 1.4 trillion bbls recoverable left and the last of those are going to be $100+ to get at or more.
Grrr autocorrect we as in the oil industry is now going after the source rocks with shale oil and hydrologic stimulation.
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