Colorado governor advances statewide efforts to harness ‘the heat beneath our feet’

Colorado has long drawn on its high-altitude sunshine and wintry winds for energy. Now Gov. Jared Polis (D) is determined to tap into another renewable resource: one simmering under the Centennial State’s surface.

“The low-cost workhorses of the clean energy economy will always be solar and wind energy, especially in places like Colorado that have great wind and great sun,” Polis told The Hill in a Zoom interview this week.

But as states strive to cut down on fossil fuels like coal and natural gas, they are left with an incomplete solution to the energy transition puzzle and need to find a way to “provide that reliable, 24/7 piece,” the governor noted.

For Polis, that missing piece could be geothermal energy: an underground renewable resource literally defined as “heat within the Earth,” per the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

“This guy is a complete buffoon. He needs to tell how we will replace everyday products are made from Oil...”

You just answered why humans should stop burning liquids hydrocarbons to the sky. They are way to precious and limited to use them as fuel. They should be reserved exclusively for petrochemicals, medications, lubricants, polymers, fertilizer and be used only to make durable recyclable and reusable , steel, aluminum, and concrete, copper ect. Using those products you then make energy harvesting devices that return multiple times as much energy as it took in raw materials to make them. Wind is 40 to 100+ to one EROI , polysilicon solar panels are 50 to 100+ to one. Nuclear power plants are well over 1000 to 1. Geothermal what this article is about is also like nuclear over 1000 to 1 when you look at the steel pipes, stainless steel turbines needw for expensive super alloy turbines when the temps of geothermal are 300C. There is a million plus times as much energy flowing out of the earth’s core than all of humanity uses on a yearly basis it’s unlimited and inexhaustible.

The cost to drill hard rock is the stumbling block but modern drilling tech changes that. Specifically three technologies one of them as a multiple decade geologist I personally have worked on. The most promising is thermal shock drilling using lasers, millimeter waves or supersonic 5000+ degree hydrogen oxygen flames to literally explode the rock face into micron sized dust. The second is using cavitation bubbles produced by sonic emitters to do the same thing as the bubbles collapse in proximity to the rock face they produce shockwaves on par with dynamite detonations the rock just come apart into micron sized particles. The third is supercritical gas plasma to either melt the rock into magma and case the well as to push through it or again shock the rock into fracture and then splay the rock face. Any of these three will eat hundreds of feet per hour through the hardest rocks on earth. Geothermal is everywhere below our feet at 5km or more depth shallower in Colorado or California where magma is chambered below the continental crust. If you go deep enough anywhere on earth you hit 300C rocks then you use supercritical CO2 to frack the grantic rocks just like a shale well but on a larger area. Water strips too much minerals unless you want them such as uranium the better choice is supercritical co2 which picks up the heat and leaves the minerals behind. Loop that up spin a supercritical CO2 turbine and send it back down again.

For added grins you can pair engineered geothermal reservoirs with thermal energy storage if you heat that down going CO2 hotter than the reservoir’s downbore temps you heat the rocks up then rock thermal mass and inertia stores that energy for not months but years or decades. That heat is fully recoverable you already have the pipes and turbines up top. That heat storage is one hundred or more times cheaper than battery storage of any technology and the magnitude of geobattery storage is measured in thousands of gigawatt hours your geo battery measured in cubic kilometers of thermal mass between multiple wellbores. Where do you get the heat you ask? First choice is fast spectrum nuclear reactors in the gigawatt range they run at 550C outlet temps you have then a 250C delta T to store in your engineered geothermal reservoir. A cubic kilometer would store thousands of GWh. Second choice is curtailment power from solar or wind which is use it or lose it now. Joule heaters are dirt cheap wrap some Nichrome around the down going ppipes and insulate around that heating the CO2directly is also an option using electrodes inside the wellbore and the Bellmore itself as joule elements supercritical CO2 is barely conductive it’s resistance value is high making joule heating very efficient. You could dump hundreds of megawatts of AC current at high voltages directly into supercritical CO2 heating it to 700C before it starts to disassociate to C and CO again you only need to be above the 300C of the reservoir.

“It has its drawbacks. Eventually, the pipes get clogged and the system fails.”

With water yes mineralization is a key issue it’s solvable with acid treatments. The best choice is new since we will have literally craptonnes<< a new word :) of supercritical CO2 due to CCS technology and the mandate to use it. All that CO2 will be $50 per tonne or less. It’s the ideal crack fluid and also working fluid for engineered geothermal reservoirs. CO2 doesn’t pick up minerals like hot H2O does. And it’s easy to separate completely the tiny fraction it does should your reservoir contain those .. you flash the CO2 to gas and the minerals precipitate out as solids in your cyclone traps.

I am a geologist and have worked in this very field for a couple of years now off and on contract. Geothermal energy storage is also going to be huge it’s the drilling tech to get down to 3 to 5 km that’s the breakthrough eating up PCD million dollar bits is never going to be economical at those depths. Thermal fracture drilling is ten times as fast and nothing to wear out it’s contact less. You can drill quartzite the hardest rocks on earth that only diamonds can drill at feet per minute using millimeter waves, or supersonic rocket exhaust which is what the burners are modeled after mini hydrogen oxygen 5000 degree rockets that heat and then blast away the rock dust leaving a perfect hole behind. Once humans decide that liquid hydrocarbons are too valuable to burn to the sky given there are 8 billion of us the powers that be have made that choice before resource depletion causes global conflicts. The real choice is move from liquid hydrocarbons as primary energy into using them as only material processes for all 8 billion or the standard of living crashes in 45 or so years for everyone when depletion happens. Humans have burnt 400+ million years of fossil sunshine in just under 200 and with 8 billion the last half will go not in 200 bit 50 or under. This is why global government has said transition they can’t tell people hey you have to reduce your standard of living so the 6 billion living in poverty can have access to burn out all those resources then what? The whole planet suffers including the elities. So the plan is make the pain over a transition period and move to a system that is sustainable for all 8 billion. Only nuclear, geothermal,solar and in some places wind can power 8 billion at somewhat of a middle class standard of living for centuries not just 50 years or less. Repeat all EIGHT BILLION not 5% of the world’s population using 25% of its resources every year. You don’t have to like it but the transition is in progress and won’t be stopped as a species we can’t and the world leaders know this. Largely it not up to the plebs never was most in the world are useless eaters how many bureaucrats,lawyers or peasant farmers do a species need? One engineer is worth a thousand of any of those prior three. Same for scientists or research doctors.

This is the shallower storage only version not the deeper hybrid system I have been privy to. Note that a 500x500 meter sized geo-battery that’s already in technical feasibility due to oil fracing hold a gigawatt year thermal or more of energy. Thats one gigawatt of heat 24/7/365. They also are only using 250C to 50C delta T. Which means they are not getting great Carnot eff.

The deeper versions can use 550 to 200C that multiples you storage per cubic meter an other of magnitude as it’s logarithmic with delta temperature and you use supercritical CO2 turbines that are 45%+ eff. Double what steam turbines are due to the nature of compression energy and supercritical fluids.

This is how you stop burning coal and natural gas foolishly once to the sky and instead use those to make the concrete and, steel for reactors that give back 1000 times the energy you burnt to mine and make the raw materials for them. Even wind or solar EROI are 40+ that’s forty times or more energy back vs burning it once to the sky. This extends the use period for those resources into the centuries mark for all 8+ billion at that point.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/75125

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