The Potential of Geothermal Power 397
EskimoJoe wrote with a link to an AP article about progress in the development of geothermal energy. A Swiss company is competing with another in Australia to be the first to commercially develop a geothermal power plant. The concept is simple to understand: earth's core heat transforms water into steam, which in turn causes a turbine to revolve. The potential, though, is enormous. "Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world's annual needs 250,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment. A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 percent of the heat under the United States could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over. It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S."
Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
The first one? (Score:2, Informative)
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
A Swiss company is competing with another in Australia to be the first to commercially develop a geothermal power plant.
I think they should go on a trip to Iceland... Frankly [wikipedia.org]...
The article is 49 years out of date (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.ew.govt.nz/enviroinfo/geothermal/energ
Just 40% They say.. (Score:5, Informative)
Another thing one must address is that the heat flow can only be used where permeable strata exists in the ground making it possible to circulate water to extract the heat. In places with crystalline bedrock, the heat flow can not be used.
Yours Yazeran
Plan: to go to Mars one day with a hammer.
Not quite the same.... (Score:2, Informative)
It uses the natural geothermal activity local to the region.
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Oldest one is over 100 years old (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What are the side effects of geothermal? (Score:3, Informative)
Shattering rock is how the process words. Water has a hard time passing through solid rock, so the mining process initially injects cold water to form microscopic cracks in the rock for the water to flow through. In the Swiss project, the earthquakes occurred because they were injecting water into a fault, in effect lubricating things enough that the two sides of the fault line could side easier. This may be a show stopper for that project. In North America, we will probably want to avoid drilling along the Pacific Coast or anywhere near the Reelfoot Rift [wikipedia.org].
Lastly, Earth's magnetosphere is produced by its core, not the magma. And if "sucking the heat out" could cause volcanoes to "dry up", I think that most people would consider that an additional benefit, not a disadvantage.
Re:article (or quote) must be wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Why would they correct something that they didn't get wrong? Just because a few slashdotters don't feel that the number cited is correct, you're going to tell them that they're wrong? How about doing three minutes of research to find out for yourself first? Let's hear it for "Citizen Journalism", where truthiness is more important than facts.
And for those of you playing at home, the relevent passage from the MIT study (press release here) [mit.edu] (actual study here) [inel.gov] [PDF warning] is this:
Based on growing markets in the United States for clean, base-load capacity, the panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale that would produce more than 100,000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant.
Re:The numbers (Score:3, Informative)
At a crude oil price of $75/bbl, a 13.7 bbl/day well is yielding $1027.50 of product per day, or $375,284 per year. At a cost of $1.44 million, it takes the well 3.84 years to pay for itself. At a cost of $7-$8 million, it would take 19-21 years to pay for itself. That's assuming you could extract as much energy-dollars from a hot rock well as from an oil well (can't find any numbers on this, but it can't be much higher or the oil companies would be all over this since they're already in the best position to take over any market involving drilling).
The hot rock well does have the advantage of being guaranteed productive for those 20 years, but you're talking "long term" as in way past the term of any elected official. It's hard to get them to pay for needed maintenance on roads and bridges, much less make an investment which won't pay for itself for 20+ years.
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
We use hot water pumped directly from shallow wells for the hot tap water. It contains sulfur.
It's close to 100C, so you can use a heat transformer to warm up the non-sulfuric cold water for showers, etc. Some houses here do.
Re:Misleading (Score:1, Informative)
Um no. Thanks for the patronising suggestion, but I'm already familiar with the Carnot cycle.
I'd suggest you look up the Kalina cycle, since it's the one that's relevant here.
Re:Misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, that's so misinformed I can only laugh. Do you have any idea on how many goats that would take?
Sahara, for example, was born 4000 years ago because of a climate change. Land use by man was not an important factor in the creation of the Sahara. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/390097.stm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:The question of scale (Score:1, Informative)
If you lower the temperature in a region, heat flow in the region goes up. Period.
Flow being determined from the difference in temperature * area * thermal conductivity.
This is being *conducted*, not radiated.. because it is a solid/semi solid depending
on pressure and temperature. We can probably eliminate convection as a concern, too.
It is still a small amount in geological terms.
Re:Misleading (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between Native American and white approaches to nature is that Native Americans tuned nature to be even more beautiful for human thriving, while the typical white approach is to "conquer" it. This attitude the whites brought from Europe, where the wilderness was largely identified with evils and dangers, rather than a thing of beauty to be appreciated for its potential to nurture us. That European attitude finally changed - in part because the American landscape changed us (see the New England Transcendentalists), and word got back to Europe from here; in part because the English Romantics discovered their own landscape, and then expanded from there to the world. But most of Europe viewed nature like the French, for whom it belonged best in geometric gardens, or the Germans, for whom the woods were fully of mythic monsters and deadly dangers.
Oh, please. (Score:2, Informative)
Nobody is claiming this process is 100% efficient. They're talking about efficiencies in the range of 60%. In some cases proponents talk about efficiencies that are "80% higher". However since existing coal plants reach efficiencies of over 30%; adding 80% to that gives you 110%; so they must be talking about current efficiency *1.8, not current efficiency + 80%. That would yield efficiencies in the range of 55% to 65%, precisely what the proponents have been claiming when they talk in absolute terms.
It's misleading to say these things run off of "waste heat", as if "waste heat" is something different than "useful heat". Heat is heat; and while more efficient processes do capture some heat that would otherwise be wasted, but they never capture 100%. It's physically impossible.
If you actually look at a block diagram a Kalina cycle engine, you will see it has an element called a condenser. In it, cold water enters, and "cold" water exits. But if the water were perfectly "cool", why have a condenser at all? Or if it were needed to work some magic, why not feed the output of the condenser back into the input?
The answer is that the "cold water" exiting the condenser may be relatively cold compared to the liquid in the main loop, but it's still warmer than when it entered the condenser. If you fed the "cold water" output of the condenser back into the input, the system would stop functioning. The system won't function unless there is something to carry at least a bit of waste heat away.
Why? Simple. The turbine is not 100% efficient. The fluid in the primary loop is chosen to allow a very efficent turbine, but a 100% effient turbine would have fluid exiting at absolute zero. A realistic turbine will have fluid leaving at something above the ambient temperature. Keep running the fluid through the primary circuit, and eventually it becomes as hot as your heat source. Since you can't get heat to flow from hot to hotter, you can't extract any more energy. The temperature on both ends of the turbine is equalized, and it stops turning.
So, the whole shooting match requires enough heat to be extracted and thrown away to return the liquid in the primary loop to some base temperature that is cooler than your heat source. Maybe you can find some use for that waste heat, like heating an apartment block, but you can't utilize that heat within your engine itself.
Remember "The Core"? (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, Earth is about 6E24 kg. The specific heat of silica & iron (the two most common minerals) is .7 & .45 J/gk - average it to .55. That would mean 3E24 J for a 1 degree drop. 3600J is a watt-hour... so 2.1E19 J is a terawatt-year. That means it would take about 140,000 years of 1TW 'drain' to cool the entire (interior of) earth about 1 degree. Even assuming that all human electricity was generated via geothermal energy, it would take somewhere in range of millions of years.
So, yeah, I wouldn't really worry about it.
Re:Misleading (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit. The American indians simply lacked the technology to have a significant impact on their environment until they got horses, at which
PS: The pueblo Indians managed to deforest their environment to the point that their culture collapsed.
PPS: Also there is no such thing as 'American Indian Culture'. The American continents (like Europe) were diverse places with extremely diverse cultures. Positive racial stereotypes are still racial stereotypes, m'kay?