For the right applications, geo-thermal beats solar and wind. At least it is always on. It doesn’t really scale into powering the grid or fueling the car.
He wants to drain precious heat from Mother Earth, endangering all life!
Does he have heat in his meat energy that can be put into the Grid?
I live in N Nevada-—east of Reno.
In pst years, there was heavy Geothermal drilling happening-—
“The wells would be connected & would serve the town of Fernley along I-80.
The drilling has stopped
All the equipment is gone from the yards.
THERE WAS NOTHING CONNECTED TO ANYTHING ELSE.
OBAOA pipe dreams-—
$$$ 98 MILLION down the drain.
I was thinking about the pedals below our feet.
Let us all pedal on stationary bikes and generate power that way!
Healthy, renewable!
He’s going to chill the earth! Ee’re gonna die!
From what I understand (After reading Jurassic Park around 40 years ago), geothermal energy is highly corrosive. They had to use equipment made of gold to harness it to power the park on Isla Nublar. Don’t know how accurate that is, though.
Wouldn’t matter to the commie Polis. Not HIS money.
Colorado ping.
“This guy is a complete buffoon. He needs to tell how we will replace everyday products are made from Oil..”.
You beat me to it. I bring that up at every opportunity.
It’s Eco-Profiteering plain and simple. Wonder which donors are in line to get their share of the millions Polis will hand out.
“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.
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