For those who prefer a less American-centric metric: 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers. 15,000 feet is about 4.5 kilometers — roughly the height of 14 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other!
https://en.renovablesverdes.com/iceland-is-drilling-the-deep...
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202411/07/WS672c6803a310f...
https://www.size-explorer.com/en/compare/buildings/eiffel+to...
Most people have enough trouble believing that their foot is the same length as their forearm. You never see your feet close up, either.
1 Statue of Liberty (including foundation) is roughly 1 American football field (excluding end zones)
1 Eiffel Tower is around 3 Statues of Liberty (each with foundation)... which is almost 1600 bananas
Easy peasy.
The usual value for the geothermal gradient is 25 to 30 degrees C per kilometer. So at 2.5km, in most locations they might be able to get boiling water, but not superheated steam. Most of the geothermal enthusiasts are talking about needing to go down 4 to 12 kilometers. Is there something special about the geology at this site?
Beaver County, Utah, has at least one hot spring, and I suspect more than that. I'm pretty sure that the location for this project was not chosen at random.
It's not a fully renewable resource. It's possible to pull out too much heat too and deplete the resource. The entire geothermal heating of the planet is only 50 terawatts, which seems big, but it's spread over 500 million square kilometers. Or 100KW/km^2, which is not much. Solar is orders of magnitude larger.
The US has long been the world's leading producer of geothermal power, mostly generated from this basin.
Or about one Mont Blanc from sea level
And 50 football fields would mean a lot more, to less measurement-aware Americans.
I wonder, if we draw enough heat out... would the core cool enough to shrink? And if so, would the crust collapse to the new size?
Pure speculation of course, but did the first guy burning coal know the outcome?
Anyhow, I love geothermal, think you're right, but just got tweaked on the word "infinite".
It'd take multiple orders of magnitude more impact from humanity for us to actually affect the core, no?
Q = m c ΔT
m = mass of the crust (roughly 10^22 kg)
C = specific heat of crust (roughly 1000 J/kg·K)
ΔT = 1 K
Q = 10^25 joules would be needed to lower the earths crust by 1 degree K
About 10,000 years worth of today’s human energy consumption
We know how weather works quite well, but knowing if it will rain in a week is an entirely different beast.
My memory is that the calculation found that if humanity switched to geothermal for all its energy needs, then in only about 1000 years, the core cools enough for the magnetic field to stop, but I am not sure.
(We should definitely deploy geothermal in the Yellowstone caldera though long enough to cool it down enough so that it will not erupt again.)
(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours globally as of this comment)
Also... Iceland. They're massive in aluminium production for a reason. They have basically infinate abundant energy boiling out from the ground. Here in sweden its used by alot of homes for heating; getting a well producing 60c water is pretty cheap. (A single home may have their own well)
The issue is using it for power really only becomes viable when you reach superheated steam temperatures. And at those depths; drills melt, so its use outside of volcanic regions has been real slow.
As a layman, I assume waste heat would still be an issue? Even so I would also assume it's still way less damaging to the environment than everything else.
Whaste heat from nuclear or fusion does contribute to earth heating, though insignificant compared to any source pf c02.
But my intuition tells me geothermal wouldn't...
Mm. Actually, water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas; and that's how to covert heat to energy. So mabie it would indeed be significant.
They deserve big props for this innovation and effort, as historically Utah has frequently been been treated as an industrial dumping grounds. The long-term ecological damage and visual eyesores due to strip mining, chemical dumping and other pollution is significant.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/02/f7/geotherma...
It is mostly an issue in places like Europe that do not have a history of strong earthquakes and therefore lack seismic resistance civil engineering. There are a few places like that in the US (e.g. New England) where a minor M5 earthquake can cause damage but those don't overlap with areas with high geothermal potential.
I don't know if it's "no footprint" at all. For what I know, which is not much, but just what a person living here might know, there's a footprint that can be somehow managed. But I'm not an engineer
‘home geothermal’ isn’t really a thing unless you’re already living on a hotspring, which is quite unusual. (delta-v is not sufficient)
At the point someone is drilling km+ boreholes and installing MW+ turbines, it’s safe to call it commercial.
Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
It’s like the difference between having a pool in your backyard, and damming a huge river and installing turbines.
I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal
A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy
Now, that energy is coming from somewhere else (in this case, the heat of the ground beneath the house or the air outside), but that's true of electrical generators as well.
And more: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fracking-aust...
One interesting point made here is that the cost of turbines puts a floor price on any form.of generation which uses them, whether renewable or not, meaning in the long run solar has a big advantage: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer. I don't know how accurate that is
If I recall they touched on how US oil drilling companies with lots of experience in horizontal drilling were being used by these companies & the financing that goes into them.
Heres a presentation we did on the system last year alongside Schlumberger. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7852s Potatoe quality but my part starts at 2:10:52.
It’s absolutely awesome deploying our super rugged, super high temp drilling technologies for GeoThermal.
If you’re interested in working on this kind of tech we’re hiring.
barbazoo•3h ago