Iceland Seeking 'Supercritical Steam' For Power Source (bbc.com) 160
New submitter FatdogHaiku writes: Already getting over 25% of its electrical power from geothermal sources, Iceland hopes to break new ground using "supercritical steam" from a 5 km deep borehole. Is it just me, or does this sound like the start of a movie where everything that can go wrong does in fact go wrong? It's not like they are new to the tech, but working with geologic sources at 450C to ~600C is a new ball game for anyone. It should be noted that Iceland also uses direct geothermal for most of its space heating. "In this area at Reykjanes, we typically drill to 2km or 3km depth to harness the steam, to run power plants and produce clean, renewable electricity," explained Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP). "We want to see if the resources go deeper than that." The "supercritical steam" holds more energy than a liquid or a gas. The team wants to bring it up to the surface to convert into electricity, as they believe it could produce up to 10 times as much energy as the steam from conventional geothermal wells.
Global warming (Score:2)
Why deal with the middle man?
anyone know.. (Score:4, Interesting)
what kind of pipe they use for this kinda thing, im thinking some kind of ceramic metal hybrid?? Temps and sulfer corrosion must be a major PITA to deal with.
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PVC schedule 40
Re:anyone know.. (Score:5, Informative)
what kind of pipe they use for this kinda thing, im thinking some kind of ceramic metal hybrid??
A few articles I've found on it, state it's 6-layered titanium. Makes sense when you think about it, since titanium has a very high rating against corrosion, buildup resistance against materials on the surface and inside of it and very high resistances to temperatures depending on the "mix" that's used when the tubing manufactured.
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They have done this before, claiming to have hit mantle pockets ( possible as they are in a general rift area and don't have to drill as far ) and had been producing steam from it.
Unfortunately, as you point out, the steam is extremely corrosive. The last time they did this ( several years ago ) several valves completely corroded and they had to abandon the well rather than try to replace the valves and corroded piping.
Re:anyone know.. (Score:4, Informative)
But these days we do have metallurgical solutions.
During 1979-1980 I was involved in the testing of steam wells near the Vesuvius volcano in Italy.
The tapped reservoirs were between ~1200 and ~1800 meters deep and the bottom hole temperature was close to 350degC, on full flow around 250 degC at the wellhead..
Producing them caused a hellish noise and a lot of steam, we calculated the gross output of a single well was around 50MW.
After a while the measurements showed a rather serious problem, lot's of sulphur, heavy metals and other nasty minerals were included in the steam and eventually in the condensed water.
Cleaning this up would leave around 15MW of energy but it would be hugely expensive.
Although the wells still exist they have never again been produced.
Back to your question about the pipes used, in the day they were some Chrome alloy suitable for the expected temperatures and pressures but any serious corrosion would have a time factor.
I found it interesting that starting up the wells (very slowly and controlled) caused the wellhead to rise some 3 meters due to the heat driven expansion of the pipes. Shutting them down required the same kind of care.
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That issue happens with open cycle, this project is closed cycle, so there is nowhere for the heavy metals to enter to piping.
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The only people I don't want to see "brought here" are racists like you.
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The only people I don't want to see "brought here" are racists like you.
Hardly relevant ass-face because I'm where I belong.
Interesting... (Score:1)
If the drill does hit magma, because it is under pressure, it would be likely to come to the surface rapidly, he explained. "It would come out rather like lancing a boil or popping a spot. It would cause huge problems for the drilling operation itself, but it is unlikely to cause anything more significant than that."
Would not want to be on that drill crew. Falling into lava or getting splashed with lava is just about the worst way I can imagine to die.
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Informative)
We've hit magma before (drilling at Krafla) - only the second time in the world that it happened. Totally by accident. The magma backed a couple dozen meters up the borehole, then stopped.
The first time anyone ever accidentally drilled into a magma chamber was in Hawaii; they immediately sealed up the borehole as a result. Here they just decided "what the heck..." and started pumping water down it to see if they could turn it into a production well. And the performance turned out to be superb.
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Yeah, better be careful out there. They've hit magma in Iceland before.
http://www.livescience.com/301... [livescience.com]
And elsewhere they're doing it intentionally! That's the kind of thing that makes me nervous.
https://science.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
I'm surprised to hear of them pumping water down a well with a magma chamber and having it work out so well!
https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Hitting mud can be just as bad:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Would not want to be on that drill crew. Falling into lava or getting splashed with lava is just about the worst way I can imagine to die.
I'd think falling into 1000C melted rock would make you pass out pretty much instantly, anything that kills me in under a minute would at least be over pretty quick. The worst kinds of dying seem to be where your body or mind is slowly falling apart with increasing pain and incapacitation while taking a really long time to actually kill you. That some of them long for a quick death to the point of wanting assisted suicide says a lot. What's worse than losing your life is having a life not worth living.
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>Yet I see no serious research into what aging is and how to stop or reverse it.
Then you haven't been paying attention. There's quite a bit of research in the area, and some impressive results in animal models (e.g. more than doubling the lifespan of roundworms, with a corresponding slowing of the aging process). But aging is rather complicated, and the benefits of the research are unlikely to substantially benefit anyone already feeling the bite of mortality. Many of the potential solutions would requ
personally, I'd prefer to avoid either (Score:2)
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I was on fire once, there's a limit to how much pain registers, lava would be over the limit really quick.
Big whoop! Supercritical steam! I'm sooo afraid. (Score:3)
Or not.
"supercritical steam" just means steam at above the boiling point of water at whatever pressure applies. More specific heat than "saturated steam" (steam at the boiling point of water at the applicable pressure), but otherwise pretty much the same as any other steam....
Re:Big whoop! Supercritical steam! I'm sooo afraid (Score:5, Informative)
Or not.
"supercritical steam" just means steam at above the boiling point of water at whatever pressure applies. More specific heat than "saturated steam" (steam at the boiling point of water at the applicable pressure), but otherwise pretty much the same as any other steam....
That would be superheated steam as opposed to saturated steam. Supercritical steam would be steam that is at pressure higher than water can exist as a vapor and temperature higher than water can exist as a liquid. For water this is above 3200 psia and above 705F.
Re:Big whoop! Supercritical steam! I'm sooo afraid (Score:5, Informative)
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Thanks.
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In real world units around 375 degC and 220 Bar.
That would be 22MPa in the real metric system.
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Re: Big whoop! Supercritical steam! I'm sooo afrai (Score:2)
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It would be crazy to use the geothermal steam directly and not use a secondary boiler.
Crack in the World 1965 (Score:1)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/
What about quakes? (Score:1)
Have they done anything to address the issue of the earthquakes this can produce? [npr.org] Earthquakes (especially large numbers of microearthquakes) are why geothermal energy is off the table because it damages all of your buildings and infrastructure. To make things worse, the effects of lots of earthquakes on wildlife isn't well understood.
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Cocaine ravaged ex-DJs go on like that but do you really want to come across the same way? I don't think you have actual brain damage as an excuse.
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that confusion of scale is like comparing a pond ripple to a tsunami.
A drop of water won't damage a rock but a drop of water per second will quickly wear away a rock. In the same way, damage isn't caused by one microeathquake, it's the cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of them over years.
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Sorry you come across as the same sort of loonie as the "one windmill will change the climate" guys. You may want to explain your reasoning behind your odd statement or it will be assumed that no reasoning was applied at all.
Why will these wells change things when millions of other wells drilled for different purposes have not?
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We mainly just get quakes when doing water injection for enhanced recovery. Quakes don't propagate well here, and the plants aren't exactly in the middle of major cities.
Re:What about quakes? (Score:5, Informative)
Have they done anything to address the issue of the earthquakes this can produce? [npr.org] Earthquakes (especially large numbers of microearthquakes) are why geothermal energy is off the table because it damages all of your buildings and infrastructure. To make things worse, the effects of lots of earthquakes on wildlife isn't well understood.
It's Iceland, They have volcanoes and lava and new islands forming, and earthquakes all the time anyway. You could shoot every evil hoomin, appoint some pond algae prime minister, and they'd still have all of the above.
Perhaps a lawsuit against the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is in order.
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You say that like anybody in Iceland is going to notice less than 4.0 earthquakes [iris.edu], Iceland is always shaking a little bit.
WTF is Supercritical Steam? (Score:1)
If a fluid is supercritical it does not have a distinct phase. Steam is vapor phase. You can either have supercritical water, or you can have water vapor. If you have one, you do not have the other.
Most power plants run on supercritical steam (Score:5, Informative)
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For geo, that's huge. 200-300 is typical. Some low temperature ones go down as low as 100. 600 is out of the ballpark for geo.
It's not the same thing as running a power plant or a locomotive on supercritical steam. Power plants and locomotives don't involve multi-kilometer-long cased wells channeling a fluid whose contents you have no control over.
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eh (Score:1)
>It should be noted that Iceland also uses direct geothermal
It still can't beat nuclear district heating and having your tap water coming out of reactor cooling circuit (Bilibino)
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Even when like in the case of Iceland all you need to do is build some pipelines and heat exchangers?
Such scary FUD (Score:5, Informative)
Did you know your decaf latte probably used supercritical CO2 to decaffeinate the beans? Supercritical CO2, also at very high pressures, is a very good solvent and used in many industries.
Have some fun videos about the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gCTKteN5Y4
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I think I read they use supercritical CO2 for extracting THC from marijuana plants, or were at least migrating to it from earlier systems that used butane as the solvent.
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Depends on what you are after. butane as a solvent is less selective than supercritical CO2, but more selective than something like ethanol. the CO2 gets the main thc canabinoids but misses many of the minor THCs and CBDs. Butane gets some of the minor THCs and a lil bit of the terpenes. ethanol grabs most everything.
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I don't really know much of the chemistry involved, all I've heard is that butane extraction is relatively simple, operating at reasonable pressures and the most complex moving part is a vacuum pump for extracting out the butane. The downside being the butane is flammable or potentially explosive if mishandled.
I've also heard that butane leaves a foul taste in extracts, but I'm not sure if that's from crappy sources of butane or bad extraction technique.
CO2 supposedly is better tasting and not flammable, t
Not -Exactly- Renewable (Score:3)
Tapping geothermal energy is a great idea, but it's not precisely renewable.
The process, whether using natural (in place) water or by water injection, is removing paleolithic heat from a piece of solidified rock. That rock only has so much heat in it and the process of tapping that heat cools it. There are already geothermal fields in Northern California (The Geysers) that are producing reduced power output due to local cooling.
The upside with deep geothermal is that there is a whole lot of crust to drill into and depleted wells can be deepened. With better grid technology more remote geothermal sources can be tapped including shallow magma.
There is a lot of energy available but technically speaking it is neither infinite nor renewable any more than anthracite coal fields were renewable. At the turn of the 20th century mining companies were looking forward to mining these vast fields of coal forever.
It is renewable (Score:5, Informative)
You appear to think that most of the heat at the earth's core is residual, in which case presumably tapping this heat would "let it out" and we would eventually run out. This is not the case. The vast majority of the heat (90% or more) is from the decay of radioactive elements. Thus, the heat is being produced continually and is renewable until the radioactive elements decay (should be a good source of heat for at least a few billion years, probably much more). This means that tapping into the earth's core is not going to ruin the insulation of our crust and cause all the stored up heat to get out, because the core isn't really hot because of residual heat – regardless of what people are taught in grade school.
Saying geothermal heat like this is not renewable is ultimately like saying that hydropower is not renewable because at some point the sun will expand and the earth will get so hot that all the water in all the rivers evaporates – which
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This sounds like bad news for the Earth's outer core (and eventually our magnetic field and atmosphere). Serious question: Is the cooling of this a long-term problem or will it re-heat on the basis of the mass of the earth over time?
I'm assuming that this is not dangerous so long as the total rate at which we cool the outer core does not exceed the capability of it to re-head through gravity. Is that correct? (not a geologist).
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It is renewable: it is being heated continually by radioactive decay (see my other post in reply to the original post). No need to worry about cooling off the core.
Re:Not -Exactly- Renewable (Score:4, Informative)
Tapping geothermal energy is a great idea, but it's not precisely renewable.
You are correct. There are no precisely renewable energy sources. The wind? Nope, Solar? Nope, pretty clear that stars have a finite lifetime, and are not precisely renewable. But on a human time scale, from when homo has been around, to our likely extinction, it will fit a non-pedantic definition of renewable.
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But on a human time scale, from when homo has been around, to our likely extinction, it will fit a non-pedantic definition of renewable.
Only if you ignore facts, which we glean from history. And the history is this: The Calpine geothermal plant at The Geysers is situated upon the most geothermally active location on the planet (at least, on the surface) and that is not sustainable. They have to pump primary treated sewage (no other water being available in California) into the ground in order to keep the system producing steam. This in turn creates seismic activity in the region, which is absolutely riddled with fault lines both new and old
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But on a human time scale, from when homo has been around, to our likely extinction, it will fit a non-pedantic definition of renewable.
Only if you ignore facts, which we glean from history.
My point is that there is not any renewable energy source in the universe, unless the second law of thermodynamics is null and void. Our home star will eventually not provide any significant energy, the whole earth's core will eventually cool. If OP is going to get pedantic, I reserve the right to peg that p-meter. In the meantime, perhaps we can just call everything alternative energy sources, rather than a term that is generally accepted, but in the end, is pedantically incorrect for any energy source, be
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Technology tends to follow necessity. Currently, you're right. Geothermal isn't entirely sustainable.
There is not an energy source in the universe that is sustainable as far as we know.
This whole conversation took a classic Slashdot turn.
Where we worry about exactitude in terms, then seem to declare that the technolgy isn't possible.
So let those fuckers in Iceland freeze to death, because geothermal everyone knows, will not last forever. Please don't get upset Icelanders, I'm being sarcastic AF.
And seriously folks - anyone have the date when the Mid- Atlantic ridge is going to stop? Iceland sits r
Balrog (Score:2)
Picture an unimpressed Balrog chained to a treadmill...
Good enough for Iceland (Score:2)
Don't want to scare you... (Score:5, Funny)
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Because calling it what it realy is fission makes the greens scared. It's not all radioactive processes but mostly that.
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Fission != Nuclear decay
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a ,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
Re:renewable? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a ,ulti-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
Even if they did object it's not going to stop the process, no matter how much they protest.
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even the most hardcore anti-nuclear people wouldn't generally have a problem knowing that there's a multi-kilometer thick radiation shield in place.
That's because those dumbasses believe that all the Earth's fissioning material is buried miles below the crust, rather than being distributed through it, including places where a lot of people live:
http://ecolo.org/documents/doc... [ecolo.org]
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Fission != Nuclear decay
Well.. If you want to get technical, Fission is a FORM of Nuclear decay.... It's just decay controlled by the physical geometry of the fuel and reactor...
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No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
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No, fission is distinctly not a form of nuclear decay (excepting spontaneous fission, but that's not applicable to the heat release within the Earth). There are all sorts of modes of decay - alpha, beta+, beta-, proton emission, neutron emission, double beta, and on and on. Fission (again, excepting the inapplicable spontaneous fission) is not among them.
So without the inapplicable spontaneous fission supplying a few neutrons, how do you propose starting your man-made fission reactor? It's not like there wasn't a natural self-sustaining fission reaction in the Okio Gabon a couple billion years ago.
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Re:renewable? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
The sun should probably be called reusable as nothing we do on earth can affect the output of the sun. We can block it from reaching the surface with pollution but we can't change it's output. Many of the other "green" technologies I wonder about. Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather? Is it really completely free? Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it? Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem. I wonder if 100 years from now if we find out that some of our free and green energy sources are not as free and green as we originally thought.
Re:renewable? (Score:5, Informative)
I assume you mean wind turbines? Here you go [udel.edu].
The higher you go, the higher the figure you can harvest. Effects at the surface are generally rather minimal, although there are some small effects. It's a shame, honestly, as I think most people in windy areas (at least speaking for myself) would like more of a reduction on surface wind speeds.
Geo is generally locally, temporarily depletable. Over broad regions or over long periods of time, it's renewable. Nuclear decay inside the earth yields an average of 0.06W per square meter heat input. While that's far less than solar (even accounting for night, angles, inefficiencies, etc), it's particularly useful because it concentrates and stores. So if you drill a well into a particular hot water reservoir, you're harnessing the heat that flows up through that entire reservoir, not just immediately at the point of the borehole. And even if you're depleting it faster than it's being added (which is generally anticipated to be the case by significant margins, although these things are surprisingly difficult to assess), there's always other areas to move into; over somewhere between dozens and thousands of years (depending on the reservoir), the old site will reheat.
Note that this isn't always the case; sometimes you have "fossil heat". For example, in some places we tap heat from old lava flows or dikes. They're hot because they represent heat from another location (deep magma sources). They're hotter than their surrounding rock, and if you take the heat from them, they're never again going to be hotter than their surrounding rock.
Climate does not work that way. Planet surfaces very rapidly equalize to their equilibrium temperature, as radiation increases relative to the fourth power of temperature. The only way to have a meaningful difference in the surface temperature is to change the radiation balance (which can happen in a wide range of factors, affecting both incoming and outgoing radiation), and thus the equilibrium. Simply having "something hot at points on the surface" is virtually meaningless.
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So what you're saying is: windmills do not work that way! [youtube.com]
Good night.
Cooling the core (Score:3)
Also the sun's, though if I recall correctly it's only about half as strong.
More to the point though, even an extraordinarily deep 6km borehole, you'd only be reaching 1/1000th of the way to the Earth's center. We're not appreciably cooling the liquid core, or even the outer semi-liquid mantle, we're just cooling some of the hot spots in the solid crust floating on the surface.
In the extreme long term, or if human energy consumption increased radically, that might indeed be a problem. As it is though, the
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Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
We don't. In essence, nothing is renewable, thanks to thermodynamics.
However, in comparison to fossil fuels, the power of the Sun or geothermal energy is plentiful and almost completely unused. It is renewable in the sense, that we have an X amount of energy total on Earth from fossil fuels, and if we use some amount Y, then for tomorrow we have X-Y total energy that we can use -- but, today, we get Z photons from the Sun, and no matter how many we will use today, we still get Z photons tomorrow. Same wi
Re:renewable? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather? Is it really completely free?
The short answer is yes. Trees also slow down wind and we are short on those, literally — old growth is taller. We can see a minor localized heating effect downwind of a turbine (due to turbulence and a reduction in wind speeds) which is rapidly lost in the chaotic noise.
Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it?
So far the only problems we're actually seeing (or even imagining) with geothermal are increased seismicity and pollution. Radioactives come out of those vents with the water. These are both real problems, though. It would be interesting to do the math and figure out how much of humanity's energy needs would have to come from geothermal before the delta would be significant. Well, it would be interesting for someone else to do it, since they might do it correctly, and then report back.
I wonder if 100 years from now if we find out that some of our free and green energy sources are not as free and green as we originally thought.
We already know geothermal to fall into that category, but we have no reason to suspect it of wind. Solar, of course, can involve toxic manufacturing processes, but barring those it's not going to cause any substantial problems until it dramatically changes albedo. Mostly they don't change it much because of where they are located, and anyway a solar panel with a white back (as most of them have) is going to reradiate most of the unused energy back into space (or at least the atmosphere) through the usual mechanism.
There's no good reason to believe that wind or solar have a negative environmental impact. There is exceptionally good reason to be concerned about the implementation details when it comes to geothermal.
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> How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather?
As much as three trillion trees do. Trees are pretty effective at slowing wind, which is why areas like the Southeast aren't so good for wind power. We have lots of trees, the midwest not so much. It's also why offshore wind is generally better than land, in terms of available power - no trees.
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>Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem
Technically yes, but not in any substantial fashion, at least at current levels of energy consumption. Any released heat is going to be,at worst, 3 or 4x greater than the harvested energy due to inefficiency losses. Global warming has much worse returns - burn fossil fuels and you get similar efficiency losses at the point of consumption, but you also relea
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Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
A renewable process is any process that does not use up external inputs of some fuel. Geothermal energy is renewable nuclear, in the same way that a dam is renewable solar.
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Because on human time scales, the resource renews itself. Suck heat out the ground with a geothermal plant, and the ground will heat up again from deeper sources. Collect solar and wind energy, and there will be more tomorrow. This is unlike coal or oil, where the resource does not renew itself on human time scales.
Strictly speaking, all energy sources are finite. The Sun's fuel will eventually run out, and the Earth's interior heat will run out. But that will take billions of years, and energy project
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release some prehistoric mutant monster, or hit a pocket of zombie creating virus
You've obviously never watched the History Channel. It reports accurate and verified claims about this sort of stuff daily.
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'Muricans are anti-science idiots who deny the existence of volcanoes,
Actually, they live on top of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Seems like they haven't figured out how to tap the free energy though.
Re:'Muricans are too stupid to do this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course we haven't figured it out. Too many goddamn hippies tell us that we need to preserve the pristine nature of the area... so we made it a park and forbid any serious effort to try to poke around at it and make any useful headway.
Then you have morons like the guy on scienceforums.net [scienceforums.net] that says "The idea is like trying to put a pin into a balloon to let just a bit of the air out." Idiot doesn't realize that there is a way to do just that. Put a piece of tape on the balloon; poke a hollow needle coupled with a valve into balloon through the tape; have as much control as the valve allows to let the air out slowly without bursting the balloon. Using science it'd be easy enough to figure out a method to tap the volcano and bring it under control for man's usage in much the same way.
There's all this talk of making America great again as a leader in business and scientific innovation, but it just isn't going to happen until we get over this fear of death and killing thing going on right now. You can't make a damn omelette without breaking a few eggs. Likewise you can't make meaningful progress without killing a few people in experimental ways. Case in point, how many test pilots died as we tried to figure out how to get into space? How many people died from the effects of radiation exposure and gave us a better understanding of nuclear technology from it? How many people died in the construction of the various skyscrapers that dot the oldest American cities? True progress can't happen without the deaths to learn from.
Re:'Muricans are too stupid to do this. (Score:4, Insightful)
And if the Earth were a ball of compressed gasses held together by an airtight skin, that would be a valid worry.
Fortunately the Earth is actually a ball of liquid and semi-liquid rock held together by its own gravity, with an incredibly thin and broken crust floating on the outer surface. Absolute worst case scenario, a borehole is creating a pinprick hole through one of the floating pieces of broken crust that, if conditions are just right, may end up spewing magma on the surface - i.e. creating a new volcano. Could be a really bad day for anyone directly downstream, but it isn't going to threaten the planet.
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Well sounds like we should then be extracting energy now to lessen it's destructive capability eh? A few centuries of powering the entire continent might actually save our collective asses.
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I'm not a geologist, but I'd figure a little borehole isn't going to suddenly make it go boom. If (some say when) it wants to go boom it will, borehole or not.
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Still I'm not sure I'd want to be holding the flashlight to see what's at the bottom of that borehole, I suspect even a minor hiccup would spoil your whole decade.
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Come on, when they frack it doesn't cause the land for miles around to sink like one of my soufflés.
Well only a bit.
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And do you understand how broken and porous the geological formations already are? All those geysers, etc. aren't there because they like the view. Adding another tiny pinprick to a huge broken geothermal formation might trigger a localized release of pressure, maybe even allow some magma to reach the surface and ruin the day of everybody nearby. But it's not going to trigger a massive increase in pressure in the main chambers, nor weaken the "plug" preventing an eruption. To do that you'd probably need
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Well, Yellowstone will surely do itself in and take a good deal of nature away from the US.
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'Muricans are anti-science idiots who deny the existence of volcanoes, which is why they don't live directly on top of one that can supply them with heat and lava.
Sadly, you're right:
http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/... [hawaiibusiness.com]
And the main argument the opposition has is not the occasional release of gas pockets while drilling, but that geothermal energy angers the volcano god.
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"angers the volcano god" I think that translates to give the volcano god worshipers more money. The volcano god can be placated by money.
very large boilers create steam this hot. (Score:2)
typically used for industrial processes, but one local example may be the area hospital laundry facility, where they typically run in the 2500-2700 degree range at the boiler.
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typically used for industrial processes, but one local example may be the area hospital laundry facility, where they typically run in the 2500-2700 degree range at the boiler.
You wouldn't think they would run that close to the melting point of the equipment...
http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/melting-temperature-metals-d_860.html [engineeringtoolbox.com]
Re: very large boilers create steam this hot. (Score:2)
Re: very large boilers create steam this hot. (Score:5, Informative)
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RN-15/IDDP-2 (the Icelandic borehole) is shooting for 400-500C steam so it's not outrageous.
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Precisely. Engineering has been handling stuff that puny meat-sacks find terrifying since forever. Have you any idea how unutterably mindbogglingly insane the inside of the jet engine that takes you on holiday is? School perhaps should be teaching the science of exotic man-made technology rather than avoiding goto loops. I despair, maybe Trump and religious zealots should be taking decisions for all the snowflakes.
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Precisely. Engineering has been handling stuff that puny meat-sacks find terrifying since forever. Have you any idea how unutterably mindbogglingly insane the inside of the jet engine that takes you on holiday is? School perhaps should be teaching the science of exotic man-made technology rather than avoiding goto loops
I've found that the level of ignorance of engineering technology is completely astounding. Even the basic premise of this story is silly. Who knew that we have worked with supercritical steam for years, and it's not a BFD?
The benefits are many, and use of supercritical steam has it all over saturated steam. While everyone is aghast over the temperatures, I'm pretty certain that all of the equipment will actually last longer in addidion to generating more power. Only in modern America is technology so evil that a story of an obvious engineering step is somehow going to doom the earth.
But I guess that's what happens when we get our science education from Kim Kardashian and Politicians.
Re: Is it just me? (Score:2)
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Years? Try almost a century of working with supercritical steam.
Who knew that many years were in a century?
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> Have you any idea how unutterably mindbogglingly insane the inside of the jet engine that takes you on holiday is?
Hell, I used to do blacksmithing as a hobby. You can easily reach temperatures that will melt steel with nothing more than charcoal and a hair dryer, though I used coal and a larger centrifugal blower.
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Because the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is supposed to just stop spreading?
We average a surface volcanic eruption once every year and a half, and subsurface spreading of dikes much more commonly than that. Each eruption releases energy levels measured in megatonnes. Yet eruptions represent just a fraction of the energy being unleashed by the spreading; most simply dissipates to the surface via conduction or, more commonly, through the heating of groundwater.
Our rock will continue heating beneath us. We may locall
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Because this country of 330k people produces the sixth most geothermal power on the planet, comprising 26% of electricity production and 53% of primary energy production, including the 3rd largest geothermal plant in the world? And is pioneering new production methods?
(Tombstone is barely a thousand people, so not even close; Iceland is closer in population to, say, Anaheim... and about the area of Kentucky).
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Remember the boss of Exxon does not like these terms
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It's very tricky, though. A big problem is a lot of time the water you inject just runs off. With conventional geothermal, you already have the water there; you know it's a stable reservoir. With hot dry rock, it's a risk every time.
I have seen some technologies attempt to avoid the problem. GTherm, for example, has an interesting approach: rather than pumping water into and then out of the rock, they have a single branching well that acts like a giant heat sink, cased in a thermally conductive grout.