Posted on 03/02/2022 12:30:38 PM PST by algore
Quaise Energy, a startup out of MIT, based in Boston and Houston, recently secured $40 million in funding to help it get the first drilling rig off the drawing board.
The system works by drilling down to base rock, then firing high-power millimeter waves into the ground, without the need for complex mechanical drills that are limited by the pressure and intense heat deep into the crust.
Regular metal drills get broken or just melt beyond a certain depth, when the heat and pressure becomes too much for them to handle.
The goal is to be able to repurpose existing fossil fuel power plants, replacing burning coal with 900F heat from miles below the surface of the Earth.
The firm hope to have the first drilling platform live by 2024, the first wells producing up to 100 megawatt of geothermal energy by 2026, and fossil power plants repurposed by 2028, delivering clean energy around the world.
Being able to tap into a globally available supply of geothermal energy requires drilling much deeper into the Earth than currently possible.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia holds the record for deepest produced hole, going down about seven miles, but even that isn't enough for Quaise Energy.
They suggest that drilling would need to go down to about 12 miles below the surface in order to reach rocks hot enough to power massive power plants
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If the pilot drill doesn’t pay for itself, the whole project will be abandoned.
IKR
No one has really slapped you yet, so consider this a save-the-planet Gibbsslap.
I have often considered geothermal energy to be a viable source. The cities of Grand Haven and Holland, Michigan have made use of it to keep the streets clear of ice and snow. Very expensive to install and maintain. It is certainly a finite source, but worth pursuing anyway.
OK, but, the question still stands... why?
For... uh... the same reason a dog licks his balls.
OK that makes more sense than drilling
Read the article. No pipe involved
Volcanoes are not typically located where we need the electricity in the US
Sometimes stuff is too good to be true, and sometimes stuff is just fun to read about.
https://www.rle.mit.edu/thz/news/
I keep monitoring this page for exciting darpa shark experiments, but all I get is lame airport scanning.
Cool laser experiments.
Myself, I prefer the ones I can do with a simple 3mW laser.
Transmutations induced by low power 3mW laser under hydrogen atmosphere
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4040250/posts
I had one of those helium neon lasers back in the 80s.
It seemed strange that a recent experiment would use one instead of a solid state emitter, but it seems they were trying to replicate a few earlier experiments, not trying to understand or expand the box.
and again I wish people would use Pt since I have a lot more of that than I do Pd
There’s nothing stopping you from doing the experiment with Pt or even Nickel & Lithium.
Properly measuring and interpreting results is the only problem.
As much as I would like to have an xrf, aas, icp-oes, icp-ms, with lots of lasers and some kind of fft device, unfortunately I only have access to few of these.
I dunno what those acronyms are. If they measure what elements were present before & after, they can measure the transmutation. It’s easy enough to buy a $10 3mW laser.
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