77780
story
Comments: 291 +- Hardware: MIT-Led Study Says Geothermal Energy Is Viable on Monday January 22 2007, @07:30PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday January 22 2007, @07:30PM
from the hot-rocks dept.
from the hot-rocks dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicpower.gif); width:59px; height:66px;
power
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicus.gif); width:80px; height:61px;
usa
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicscience.gif); width:62px; height:75px;
science
amigoro writes to tell us about a study for the US Department of Energy, led by MIT, indicating that geothermal energy could account for 10% of energy production in the US by 2050. The study concludes that geothermal is proven, could impose markedly lower environmental impacts than fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants, and is likely to be cost-competitive with the alternatives. This coverage in LiveScience points out how big a player geothermal already is in the US: "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy. Nafi Toksöz, a geophysicist at MIT, noted that the electricity produced annually by geothermal plants now in use in California, Hawaii, Utah, and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined."
Related Stories
News: MIT Student Gets Artistic With LED Art 163 comments
The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Cheque Enclosed."
-- Dorothy Parker
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
Iceland (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Iceland (Score:5, Funny)
It must be nice to live right on top of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and a volcanic hotspot and get tons of free energy.
Well, except when one of the dozens of active volcanoes erupts, of course...
Parent
Re:Iceland (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Iceland will be pissed. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Nukes are the answer! (Score:5, Interesting)
I like how the summary states that geothermal energy generation is cost-competitive with straw men like solar power, and lumps nuclear power plant environmental impact with the other straw man, fossil fuels.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.
Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants
I appreciated that. Unofficial +1, Funny for you!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.
Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!
Although my sarcasm detector is deeply confused by your post, I'll hazard a reply anyways. A nuclear reactor can cause a large amount of damage but only slightly more then a standard gas/coal/oil power generation plant. Events like chernobyl were basically
Actually, they are not . (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only do we need lots of GT, but western North America and many other places on this planet are perfect for it. One thing that America needs to do, is to better develop geothermal residential heating. That is to place the outside coil of a heat pump in the ground and use the relatively good temp for our house heat. Outside of states that are pumping natural gas, this is probably one of the better ways to lower energy useage in America.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nukes are the answer! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an anti-nuke freak. In fact, I think they're necessary for human expansion into space.
However, I think that all sources of electricity should be treated equally. A per-megawatt subsidy to companies and individuals producing power should be implemented, and the electrical grid upgraded to allow the generation methods to compete fairly.
This would allow individual regions to produce electricity in the most efficient ways. In some places nuclear might be the most cost effective, once the total cost of construction, disposal, and security are taken into account. In a lot of places, it won't be. The Midwest, with its small population, strong winds, and large amounts of land, would be perfectly suited to wind power. New York and Maryland would have tidal power. Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico would use solar power.
What we should not do is provide special loans and incentives for companies to choose nuclear power, or any other specific power generation technology. The government should step in to make the true costs of generation match the price as closely as possible, and then let the market determine what power generation method to use.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, that makes no sense. Government subsidies are only needed if you need to give one or more types of power generation an artificial edge. That is the exact opposite of "competing fairly". It still might be the right thing to do if it stops our reliance on
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm interested in making the economy work the way Adam Smith intended by removing externalities.
There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid.
However, there's economic costs to every form of power generation. Coal, oil, and natural gas power plants should pay for each ton of CO2 and other pollutant they emit. Nuclear power plants should pay for the disposal of their fuel and the power pl
You heard it here first (Score:4, Funny)
Technology to use smaller temperature differences (Score:5, Insightful)
In energy generation, the point of burning a fuel is usually just to create a temperature gradient. Using naturally occurring temperature gradients is certainly attractive.
Existing energy generation technologies generally require a large difference between the high and low temperatures (e.g. steam generation). If economically feasible technologies are developed that can use gradients with smaller temperature differences then even the temperature gradients in the ocean would provide useful energy.
Please don't mess with the ocean gradients (Score:5, Interesting)
(and yes - using the gradients means reducing said gradients - it's that whole "laws of thermodynamics" thing Homer keeps reminding Lisa about)
Parent
Re:Please don't mess with the ocean gradients (Score:4, Informative)
There is so much energy available that the whole world's energy consumption could be supplied with very minimal effect on the oceans. Quote below is from here [energybulletin.net]
Parent
Meet the Carnot cycle (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Yes, yes we have a lot of resources (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes, yes we have a lot of resources (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We've got a lot of resources and a lot of needs, why do we have to favor Geothermal over Nuclear or Solar or Wind? Why can we invest heavily into all of them?
People like one solution for all their problems. 3000 years ago, folks had to pray to one god for good health and another god for plentiful harvests and good weather. Now-a-days most folks all pray to the same god for everything regardless of the situation, and they like it that way. They don't want to have to weigh benifits of going one route or another. They don't want to have to think about their options at all.
Maybe one day we'll be able to get past the "one solution to all our problems" fixation w
Anti-nuclear bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Anti-nuclear bias (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no problem having a nuclear power plant in my "backyard", and would be more then happy if it was a fast breeder reactor that could continually burn it's fuel (as to have very little waste). If you want to get (cheap, less-polluting energy) you have to give (having production close by, being rational with regards to generation method).
Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant. Go figure.
Parent
Re:Anti-nuclear bias (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/ colmain.html [ornl.gov]
Parent
Unrepeated junk science for hire (Score:3, Insightful)
For those who have not thought about the issue - consider that the primary purpose of pollution controls is actually to remove sulphur oxides and nitrous oxides. What do you think happens with solids with such
Re:Anti-nuclear bias (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, and when used "correctly" a coal plant doesn't emit anything much either. If we're comparing fantasies we can go on all day, each of us discounting anything we don't like about our preferred technology.
The problem with conventional fission power is a) it is relatively easy to use incorrectly and b) when it is used incorrectly you have an expensive pile of radioactive scrap metal where you power plant used to be. The high energy density of the core means that small mistakes can produce large consequences, and the radiogenic properties of neutrons means that the whole core will be moderately radioactive, making in situ repair of the sort you can do on a coal plant impractical.
Advanced pebble-bed designs fix some of this, particularly by taking most of the high-Z elements out of the core so you get much shorter lifetime low-level waste, but they are not yet a proven technology, thanks to the dearth of investment in the past thirty years.
But honest proponents of nuclear power should own up to the problems rather than making exceptions for them. The earthmuffins are having the same effect on rational energy policy that Creationists used to have on evolutionary theory.
Darwinian orthodoxy (particularly gradualism) went unchallenged for far longer than it should have because everyone was afraid that the kooks would seize on disagreements between evolutionists to justify their insane lies about the fundamental soundness of the theory. In the same way, admitting that there are real issues with fission power that have not yet been solved in any production environment (although there are some promising leads) may sound like you are "giving in" to the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) but in fact it is the first step to making the morons irrelevant to the debate.
Parent
Re:Anti-nuclear bias (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It does not AFAIK produce any power for general consumption. Even if it does produce some it is misleading to say Australia has been "using nuclear power". We're all coal and gas over here. ?Luckily? we have shiploads of the dirty stuff.
UK does not have a perfect safety record... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why did Windscale change its name to Sellafield? read up on the history of that plant. Hint: read up on the 1957 Windscale Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_ [wikipedia.org]
Iceland! (Score:5, Interesting)
My favorite part of the visit was swimming in the Blue Lagoon [art-iceland.com]... a spa built alongside the runoff from a geothermal power plant. Seriously: you're in the middle of a lava rock field, and boiling hot waste water pours from the power plant into a huge outdoor pool. In the cold air you can nearly cook yourself as you swim closer to the power plant. But it's clean enough to swim in.
There are many criteria that need to be met to build a geothermal power station at a given location, but I think the research and development needed must be far less than for some other technologies, and the end result is completely proven, so the risks are minimal.
My ideal-yet-realistic world features geothermal and nuclear supplementing each other, with the preference towards geothermal.
Cheers.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do keep in m
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
they run almost entirely off geothermal
Iceland gets 82.7% of its electricity from Hydro dams. Most of the rest comes from Geothermal though. The Philippines on the other hand get about 27% of their electricity from Geothermal - they're the number two producer after the US.
Unfortunately, there is opposition to this too (Score:5, Insightful)
Geothermal power plants of any scale cover large areas of land with a sparse network of pipes. It is usually not the case that you drill one well and put a turbine on top of it, instead you drill a large number of wells, about one well per 20-40 acres and aggregate the output at a central set of turbines. It is not as though you are paving the region, just putting in a small well-head and a pipe to transport/aggregate the output. Note that you also have to have pipes to pump the condensed water back into the ground in separate wells; they do not dump it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately this covers the land with a very sparse spiderweb of pipes that are deemed "ugly", offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the occasional jackrabbit or some such.
The western US has enormous geothermal potential, but people will have to get used to the idea that there will be vast sections of high desert they never visit that will covered in pipe networks for heat transport. Perhaps they would like a coal plant built next door instead.
No quite accurate. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Interview with Jeff Tester (MIT chairman) Sat. (Score:3, Interesting)
Long Sterling engine (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps with a series of tubes.
OMG Sorry, just flashed to the future where some Alaskan senator tries to describe the grand oceanic heat pump network as "a series of routers"...
OH NO! (Score:3, Funny)
Then what will we do?
We'll have to have giant heat-exchanger space elevators circulating water/ice to cool the atmosphere back down, and we'll pump all our radioactive waste down deep to warm it back up in there.
er.
Nevermind
The study is not that promising. (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the actual study. [inel.gov] This doesn't look that promising.
First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."
Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.
Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.
Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends ... another study.
not pollution free (Score:4, Informative)
(1) The ground reservoir require constant "care and attention". Drill holes block up from mineralized water gunk much like some parts of the country see inthere house water pipes. Circulation pressure is fickle. It cant drop if there are new cracks in the rocks. You have to pump or re-drill.
(2) There are waste products- generally highly mineralized water that no one else can use. Hawaii is avoided geothermal development for this reason.
(3) A "dry" field may require a consistent water source. The US West is short on water supplies.
(4) You can set off earthquakes when you pump fluids. Rocky Mountain flats is the classic example, but this has happened to a lessor degree in the Salton Sea, CA and Geysers, CA area, both in seismic areas.
Still the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks. No carbon pollution.
Oil field and coal methane development have similar drawbacks too.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:GeoWhoWhat? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep, there are several plants in California. The twenty-odd plants that make up the Gysers north of Santa Rosa in the Bay Area, and I understand another field in the Imperial Valley. The Gysers field has been drying up over the years, despite them trying to pump water back down into it, and I haven't really checked the status of it in years.
As much as this is an interesting technology, it's not perfect. The geothermal steam that goes through the plant is also loaded with sulfur and arsenic, which all has to be scrubbed out before the steam can be released through the air. The amount of solid sulfur removed per day was quite a bit.
Another thing to keep in mind, that this Reuters article [yahoo.com] covering the same thing mentions that there are 61 projects in the works for 5000+ megawatts. For comparison, Diablo Canyon nuclear plant has two reactors, and each can produce over 1100+ megawatts. There is way more bang for the buck in other technologies, but they all have their drawbacks.
Parent
Re:Believe me ! I am NOT a Google SHILL !! (Score:5, Funny)
As I continue down the long pathway of life, meandering here and there, never knowing what might be around the next bend, I can take pleasure and comfort in knowing that - somewhere out there - there is an anomymous coward that is not a Google shill. Perhaps I shall pass this bit of arcania on to my children - and then to their children in turn - until at some point in the far distant future it becomes a family legend. Thank you, anonymous coward, thank you.
Parent
Re:How is this projected? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I admit their intentions are good, but to be honest, I dont get it. lets be real. 10% by 2050? stop spending trillions on bogus wars over oil and useless no bid military contracts, divert it to wind, solar and electric car conversions and you would have ~ 500+ gigawatts of average energy right off the bat: do that each year for the time it takes to build the infrastructure involved (5-10 years) and BAM
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because the old engineering dictum "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" applies to politics, with some interesting wrinkles.
Most "good" options are either prohibitively expensive, or they pay off so far in the future nobody i
The Need for Global Security (Score:4, Insightful)
And I'm a soldier too.
Nobody would be happier than me if we could just scrap all the military apparatus in the world and spend all that money on things that would really benefit all of humanity - honest, no foolin'.
But the sad state of the world today (although I think things are getting better) is that there exist people willing to exert deadly force on other people for personal gain - or to settle old scores - or just because they like it.
Look at the Balkans, or Israel/Palestine, or the Sudan, or Rwanda, or Afghanistan... the list is extensive.
Don't we, as a people, have a duty to protect the weak from would-be wolves? I say "yes".
We're not very good at it yet. We're transitioning from a period where armies and warfare were legitimate means of conducting "intense diplomacy" between each other to a period where armies and warfare are used as instruments of stabilization and protection for people in states unable to provide either function for their own citizens. This is new stuff, and we're bound to get things wrong from time to time as we adopt to our new roles.
But the end state is a world without genocide, without terrorism, without the impending threat of mass destruction and loss of life. A world where nobody has to worry about having their children hacked to death with machetes or blown to fragments by explosives.
Is that not a worthy goal?
Now I'll grant you that the USA's record on this of late is spottier than it should be. I honestly do not understand why Iraq was invaded; as all the reasons put forward by the current administration were clearly bullshit. And I agree with you that the American Iraqi Adventure has damaged, not improved, global security. (although now that you are there, you have to win!)
But the power to correct that is in YOUR hands (you are an American citizen, right?) You have the ability to get yourself and your friends involved in the political process, to ensure that the people with the ability to deploy armies choose the good missions (like Afghanistan) over the unnecessary adventures (like Iraq).
DG
Parent
Re:Global Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
I cringe at the fact that this was moderated interesting. The collective IQ of
Parent