World's First Magma-Based Geothermal Energy System 161
Lucas123 writes: "The Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) announced it broke through to the Mantle and created a superheated steam pipe capable of producing power at the nearby Krafla Power Plant in Northern Iceland. The system was operational for several months until a malfunctioning valve forced its closure. The IDDP, however, plans to either reopen its first magma-based geothermal bore hole (PDF) — IDDP-1 — or drill another one at Reykjanes. While the IDDP-1 is not the first bore hole to reach the planet's magma, it is the first time an operation has been able to harness the mantle's heat to produce a steam pipe that could power a plant."
Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Funny)
Have we learned nothing from science fiction?
Re:Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Funny)
There's nothing a well-placed nuke won't fix?
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Nukes need scale to make sense. Iceland is among other things likely too small so that powering it with a nuclear plant would create a single point of failure in its power supply.
Then there's the fact that geothermal is very cheap and readily available in Iceland, while requiring little foreign expertise and fuel. Nuclear would require both.
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Nukes need scale to make sense. Iceland is among other things likely too small so that powering it with a nuclear plant would create a single point of failure in its power supply.
Nukes need scale to make sense? Citation?
If you're going to shoot down an argument for nuclear energy on the basis that it brings in a "single point of failure", how can you suggest that a geothermal plant would be better? A geothermal plant would need to produce a certain amount of power to remain economical. A large number of small plants which would bring the redundancy you desire, but would not be economical.
Then there's the fact that geothermal is very cheap and readily available in Iceland, while requiring little foreign expertise and fuel. Nuclear would require both.
Cheap & plentiful in Iceland =! Cheap & plentiful everywhere else that needs electr
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Not sure what's unclear. Nukes are generally larger reactors, because it makes sense to make them larger, and over time they have only grown because it makes them more efficient. If you look at reactors being built today, you see the clear trend - they are getting bigger. The new reactor type at Olkiluoto being built by Areva is 1600MW for example. That's a lot of power for a small island nation.
As for geothermal being cheap and you "not having seen the numbers", now would be the time to start googling inst
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Iceland already has multiple geothermal plants scattered around it's widely dispersed population and industry. It also has considerable hydroelectric, having suitable terrain.
Adding deep wells to reach higher temperatures would allow for increased power generation at sites that need it. I note that the site they've been working
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Renewable energy is the best energy. No mining and consumption of finite materials needed, no radiation-related dangers, little to no reliance on sci-fi technologies needed. I think nuclear will make a good transitional power source though.
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Not when you take the radioactive waste into account. Power for a year, dangerous waste for hundreds. The power company will be long dead before their waste is eliminated. You need to look at the long term picture.
I disagree. The "waste" could well be a valuable commodity in the not so distant future. In fact, it could have been had certain reactor projects not been cancelled just as they were about to pay off. Rather good timing from those who cancelled it, no?
But while the waste is dangerous if not stored or used properly, it is far less dangerous than the waste produced by the alternative; fossil fuels. Nuclear power has a huge advantage on it's competitor there, it's waste is in one nice neat little package
Re:Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory. [dresdencodak.com]
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Obligatory [youtube.com]
Re:Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Funny)
That if you go down far enough from Iceland, you will reach the Centre of the Earth?
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Snæfellsjökull's melting should make it easier to find the entrance!
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I don't think you can really know where to start start before the Kalens of July.
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They'll bring up the Balrog! Noozzz!
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Don't worry. As long as they haven't found mithril yet we're safe. >:)
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I was going to mod you into oblivion for being a troll, but I did due diligence first and looked at the homepage!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Informative)
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I for one greet our new Lavos/Ragnaros/Dolomite Robot overlord.
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Actually, the first thing I thought of was this. [wikia.com]
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"Inferno" is what I always think of when reading a geothermal story, too. One of the best serials featuring my favorite Doctor...
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And considering Britain today is more a match for the alternate universe fascist Britain in "Inferno"....
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Have we learned nothing from science fiction?
Of course we've learned. How do you think we keep coming up with these ideas?
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It sounds like a joke till this works really well and then everybody starts doing it.... ...and then they get bigger and bigger with more and more exponentially.... ...and then we discover what the unforeseen negative side effects caused by the unbelievably massive scale we are implementing this are... ...but we are too balls deep to stop now because all our economies depend on it so heavily.... ...so we angst about it and the pollys flap their mouth parts but corporations just keep on truckin on with busin
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We know a whole lot more about geology now than we knew about ecology when we started burning coal, and then oil, for fuel. Not to say it's not risk-free--no method of power generation is--but you can be reasonably sure that the people running the project have carefully estimated both the costs and benefits.
Re:Is no one else concerned? (Score:5, Informative)
Haha, actually it was accidental. When they broke through into a magma chamber, that wasn't the goal - they didn't realize they were that close, they were just trying to tap the hot rock near it. But after magma filled up the borehole a couple dozen meters, they decided to try to turn lemons into lemonade and produce steam... and it actually worked.
But yeah, I think a lot of people have a gross misunderstanding how drilling works. You're not creating some big open hole that magma can just shoot up. If you tried that, the hole would collapse before you got very deep at all. Your hole is full of "mud" that is at least as high pressure as the surrounding rock. The gas isn't going to suddenly come out of solution and trigger an eruption when you drill into magma, you're not reducing the pressure on it.
And I'm sure it's mentioned somewhere below, but whoever wrote this article is an idiot. The mantle isn't full of magma, it's solid. The crust is where magma is found They did not drill to the mantle, they drilled into a magma chamber.
The only thing I learned from the article was that they plan to try the same thing in Reykjanes. I fully expect people to freak out, given that's where three quarters of our population lives ;) Also, I didn't know the stats on the sort of power they were getting out of that well... 36MWe of 450C steam from a single geothermal well is bloody insane. Hopefully this will prove to be economical and thus an incentive to stop destroying all of our rivers one after the next for hydroelectric power. : Oh, and I'm not surprised to learn that Alcoa was helping. There's three aluminum smelters here, and even the smallest of them uses more power than all of the homes and businesses combined. They built the largest hydroelectric plant in Europe (in the middle of the formerly-largest-undeveloped-wilderness in Europe) just to power a single smelter.
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...same thing in Reykjanes. I fully expect people to freak out, given that's where three quarters of our population lives ;)
Is Reykjavik on the Reykjanes peninsula proper, or just next to it? (Sure, I'll give you Keflavik and Hafnarfjörður, but they ain't three quarters of the population. :D)
Besides, the bits where they would be drilling would presumably be near the existing geothermal power plants, in the middle of hundreds of square kilometers of lava fields. The worst that could happen to this terrain already happened, and relatively recently (mostly in the last ten thousand years, and sometimes within the las
More like, more Lagoon (Score:3)
Since the Blue Lagoon is runoff from the existing steam power facility, more drilling means MORE Blue Lagoon, or something else like it...
And for the people freaking out from the Science Fiction angle of drilling to where man has not been before, you will probably not be happy that people at the Blue Lagoon are every day smearing mud on their faces imbued with minerals and micro-organisms from the magmic deep.
Besides, destruction of the Blue Lagoon would not deter tourists - we would still come for the tast
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I was not freaking out.
I was raising the question of what happens were we to scale this up to meet out energy needs.
For example: trillions of tons of water per year causing cooling...
Do you know for sure what will happen? I don't?
I bet you don't either....
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I was not freaking out.
But you are now?
It sure sounds like you are now, especially since I never claimed anyone was freaking out.
Chill, like the lava man!
Do you know for sure what will happen? I don't?
Yes I do. Nothing but abundant free power. Do you know how much magma is in a magma chamber? And they have been ALREADY doing this for a very long time. So the answer is already known.
Find the Blue Lagoon, have a swim and relax...
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blah blah.
I see now you are just a troll taking me out of context for the sake of it.
Have a good life...
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Anthropogenic Global Cooling?
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I've seen different maps define it differently, but most maps of Reykjanes include all the way up to Mosfellsbær (to go any further is to be on Kjalarnes). But then again, when most people want to talk about closer to Reykjavík they talk about either Reykjavík or Höfuðborgarsvæði... so I'm not sure if technically it's part. Either way, it's close. There are known magma chambers that are considered a threat to Reykjavík if they went off.
These eruptions aren't little po
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If you've got one coming up where it's not wanted, could drilling conceivably redirect it?
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The number of places where you can do this above sea level is vanishingly small [wikipedia.org]. Iceland sits on a rift where two continental plates meet (theorized to be where an asteroid made a lucky hit and punctured th
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So we know the effects of pouring trillions of tons of water into the ground per year cooling the magma layer over time by some amount and the effect this will have?
Interesting. Have not read that paper.
Again. Not being alarmist. Just thinking ahead and wondering - as any intellectually minded person does occasionally.
It's not like I'm saying .... (Score:2)
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There's a certain ahistoric view of energy development that drives me nuts (not necessarily your comment, but it triggers my rant...)
We have switched energy resources over the years not just because it was cheaper but because it was cleaner and more sustainable. We went from burning trees (deforesting entire countries and enveloping the land in smoke and soot), using animal power (leaving billions of metric tons of shit strewn throughout our cities, towns and villages) and using animal fat (nearly wiping ou
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Like we might end up with a crack in the world?
It's been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
sounds like poor engineering? (Score:2)
Am I the only one thinking an entire plant should be more redundant and resilient than the failure of a single valve?
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Your opinion is probably shared by many who didn't read TFA.
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I read the TFA (both of them) myself, and didn't find any more details about the closing over the "failure of a single valve" than was in the summary. I will point out to the OP, that there may have very well been adequate redundancy and that the single valve failure mandated the shut down of the project not because it disabled it but because it removed the redundancy and they wouldn't operate without it.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Informative)
The plant didn't shut down. The plant is still operating with 30 or something other wells drilled. The new pipe itself was shut down, because of a failure in one of the valves in the pipe. The pipe was never connected to the plant. It seems entirely possible that a linear structure like a pipe can be shut down by a failure of a single valve. It's not like they can route around the failed valve. They're investigating ways to re-open the sealed pipe in addition to drilling others.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
Am I the only one thinking an entire plant should be more redundant and resilient than the failure of a single valve?
FYI: The Death Star design team has a vacancy.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
The Death Star design team has a vacancy.
Look, the target area is only *two meters* wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. Only a *precise* hit will start a chain reaction which would destroy the station. Plus, the shaft is ray-shielded, so they'll have to use proton torpedoes.
That's impossible, even for a computer.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
The Death Star design team has a vacancy.
Look, the target area is only *two meters* wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. Only a *precise* hit will start a chain reaction which would destroy the station. Plus, the shaft is ray-shielded, so they'll have to use proton torpedoes.
That's impossible, even for a computer.
Re-reading that dialog... Most of it sounds a little dirty.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
Get in there you big furry oaf, I don't care what you smell!
Luke, at that speed do you think you'll be able to pull out in time?
Put that thing away before you get us all killed.
You've got something jammed in here real good.
Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?
You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought.
Sorry about the mess...
Look at the size of that thing!
Curse my metal body, I wasnt fast enough!
She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid.
I thought that hairy beast would be the end of me.
Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?
There's an awful lot of moisture in here.
Thats okay, I'd like to keep it on manual control for a while.
Hurry up, golden-rod...
I must've hit it pretty close to the mark to get her all riled up like that, huh kid?
It's possible he came in through the south entrance.
And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!
Control, control! You must learn control!
Hey, point that thing someplace else.
I look forward to completing your training. In time you will call me master.
I never knew I had it in me.
There is good in him, I've felt it.
Hey, Luke, thanks for coming after me -- now I owe you one.
Back door, huh? Good idea!
She's gonna blow!
I think youll fit in nicely.
Rise, my friend.
I'm sure he wasn't on that thing when it blew...
Wedge! Pull out! Youre not doing any good back there!
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The Death Star design team has a vacancy.
Look, the target area is only *two meters* wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. Only a *precise* hit will start a chain reaction which would destroy the station. Plus, the shaft is ray-shielded, so they'll have to use proton torpedoes.
That's impossible, even for a computer.
Something something wamprats, something something dark side...
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Based on Stormtrooper accuracy I'd wager.
Re:sounds like poor engineering? (Score:5, Funny)
C-3PO: My God, you shoot small animals for fun? That's the first indicator of a serial killer, you freak!
Luke: There's two suns and no women! What the hell am I supposed to do?!
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Probably using the same Halliburton designed-and-tested valve technology as "too big to fail" deep water horizon.
I don't get it (Score:5, Funny)
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With a match.
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Build a very big treadmill for Godzilla just outside Tokyo--or maybe Kyoto. >:)
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Or French Zeuhl band [wikipedia.org]s.
Christian Vander's drumming might be a reliable source of power though, and he's been able to do it for over 40 years.
Project Vulcan (Score:2)
I bet I can get them to pay me.... one million dollars... not to go through with this plan.
Re: Project Vulcan (Score:1)
This article is written poorly. They are confusing mantle with magma from an active volcanic field. The real mantle, which they even state is at least 8km thick, is not liquid either.
Should be titled something like they drill into a magma chamber.
Poor science writing.
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The crust under Iceland is really thin, it's a divergent continental plate boundary.
!!FUN!! (Score:1)
I was just reading up on this subject. Keep an eye open for spires of bright blue metal.
woohoo! (Score:2)
It's amazing what those cartoons can do! (Score:2)
Who'd have guessed, eh?
Careful! Don't let the gravity out (Score:2, Funny)
Careful! Don't let the gravity out. It might deflate and flbrrbrrrt away.
1.3 miles? (Score:5, Interesting)
Iceland's National Energy Authority has created the world's first magma-based geothermal energy system after drilling 1.3 miles (2,100 meters) through the Earth's crust.
Could they have actually reached the mantle that close to the surface? I would believe they tapped into a volcano, but mantle doesn't sound right. Crust there is something like 15 km [norvol.hi.is]??
Re:1.3 miles? (Score:5, Informative)
Iceland is currently rifting, so it is technically possible. From reading the article this isn't what has happened though.
From what the article states they simply drilled to near the magma chamber of a volcano. I say "near" because in all likelihood that is what they did; If they had actually pierced the magma chamber there is an extremely high probability that it would trigger an eruption, especially after adding volatiles ( water for steam in this case ).
Except for the said rifting, where the island is literally being torn apart from plates diverging, Iceland typically has eruptions somewhere in the middle of the scale from effusive ( think Hawaii, lava just kind of oozes or sprays out without producing huge plumes of ash) and the more violent explosive ( think yellowstone / mount st Helens / the classic huge cloud of ash and lightening volcanos ). Volatiles such as dissolved CO2 and H2O play an enormous part in controlling how violent an eruption is, basically more volatiles = more boom, and adding water to a magma chamber is not going to turn out pretty... do a quick search for Krakatoa to find out what happens ( supposedly anyways, it's what data suggest anyways) when you breach a magma chamber and add volatiles.
Source: I'm starting my 3rd year undergrad as a Geologist, and plan to go to grad school focusing on Vulcanology....
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So you think cooling down the magma (boiling water) increases the likelihood of an eruption? Do you think water will go through the pipe with enough pressure to break the pipe and rupture the surrounding rock, when they're controlling how much water they send down the pipe in the first place? You think dissolved gasses will come out faster somehow when they're doing nothing to reduce the pressure on the magma?
There's no logical reason why such a borehole should trigger an eruption. It should overall decreas
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Weight of things above (Score:2)
Only in the movies :)
Sure - a steam explosion give you a lot of energy but compare that to the weight of rock and magma above the steam explosion. Unless the thing is already on some sort of "hair trigger" requiring just a very small energy input to kick it off then it wouldn't trigger an eruption. High school physics will give you that. The more advanced stuff will let you know where that trigger is.
I'm no geologist, I'm just a form
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The pressures present where the crust and mantle meet are intense. When drilling wells you need a lubricant to assist the drill and prevent the hole form collapsing. Heaving drilling mud is typically used.
At the pressures that exist the mantle the drilling mud would be squeezed out (that is if it wasn't immediately baked solid) and you would need a much heavier denser liquid. It's been proposed that the only lubricant that would be heavy enough would be molten iron. So no, they didn't drill into the mantle.
Little Iceland = Big Power Supplier! (Score:2)
This could potentially be a boon for Iceland's economy for heavy electrical use industry.
Mantle or Magma Chamber? (Score:5, Informative)
The IDDP's own reports on this project do not describe it as having reached the mantle. Other reports described it as having reached a magma chamber within the upper crust.
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The IDDP's own reports on this project do not describe it as having reached the mantle. Other reports described it as having reached a magma chamber within the upper crust.
Yup. They reached a pocket of molten rock. They probably did not drill all the way through the crust to touch that big layer of mantle rock. Other stories are much better written.
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The CW article kind of confuses the two. But they didn't bore down to the mantle. The original news announcement doesn't even contain the world "mantle".
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Stupid people associate Magma with the Mantle. The Submitter is clearly one of them.
There is no conclusive proof that we've ever obtained a piece of the mantle, fact is we don't know with certainty what's it's even made of (other than fluffy bunnies of course).
Magma deep (Score:1)
Jedediah Leland: *hic* It's Friday quittin' time *hic* and I'm drunk *hic*. The only bore hole that deep I know *hic* is the mouth of a [insert political party you hate here].
About time (Score:2)
This is one of those long-term sources of energy, like the sun, that will last forever, in practical terms, as when that power drys up, we are moving off planet anyway as we are in bigger trouble.
typically (Score:1)
Oh oh...here we go again!! (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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I see you beat me to it. Makes a person feel old, don't it?
Thermal Mine Yellowstone! (Score:2)
We need a few hundred of these around the North American Hot Spot before the next time it blows its top.
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Geysers vs Extinction Event.... Hmmmm tough decision.
Actually the geyser represent a tiny amount of energy... we could always create fake geysers though :)
No need to read tech news, just read Judge Dredd (Score:5, Funny)
Between magma powered energy, government spy drones, the obesity problem with the corresponding fat acceptance demands and the militarization of the police, everything I learned about the future, I learned from reading Judge Dredd comics.
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Steps 1 and 2 got me thinking of a possible solution (as they outline a potential problem as well!) to our CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere.
If one combines the idea of a "Space-elevator" with a thin-walled tube reaching from a base-station/pumping station all the way out of the atmosphere, degassing would take place. The base of the tube would extend into the earth, surrounded by a sleeve that is keep full of atmospheric CO2 and open to the atmosphere at ground level. As CO2 is heavier than other atmosphe
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The oxygen in the CO2 is atmospheric oxygen, not fossil oxygen. I'd just as soon not get rid of it.
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"The oxygen in the CO2 is atmospheric oxygen, not fossil oxygen. I'd just as soon not get rid of it."
Excellent point. I concur. Some way to crack the elements apart would be required, but even then the loss of carbon might not be a good idea, nor would it be retrievable.
But, there still remains the question of this happening spontaneously, without benefit of a space-elevator. Is it possible this process of limnic eruption could occur on a global scale (rather than a lake)? Perhaps a closer look at the evide
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If you can crack it apart, then you can just bury the graphite in the empty coal mines and oil wells, if there's no better use for it.
But this is so energy intensive that's it's not likely to happen anytime soon.
As for a limnic eruption, that just gets CO2 out of solution from water. It doesn't get it off the planet. Earth's gravity is too strong for that.
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Folks should also remember, what we lose to space is not replaced. We're not magically making more carbon, or oxygen, or whatever else. Do you really want to accelerate the existing natural loss?
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"... we already do this on a smaller scale, only it is used to prevent a catastrophic spontaneous degassing (is this a possible outcome of us enriching the atmosphere with CO2?!?"
Perhaps the recent eruptions of water on Ceres are a result of the same limnic eruption phenomenon seen at Lake Nyos. To be honest, this is somewhat worrying--could this same process occur, here on Earth, if we push the CO2 saturation level too high? A sudden degassing of the atmosphere, into space? Has this happened before, in the
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Perhaps the recent eruptions of water on Ceres are a result of the same limnic eruption phenomenon seen at Lake Nyos.
No, that's not possible at all. The eruptions on Ceres are water vapour, not water, and the current theory is that they are the result of warming on the side closer to the sun.
To be honest, this is somewhat worrying--could this same process occur, here on Earth, if we push the CO2 saturation level too high? A sudden degassing of the atmosphere, into space?
No. If you actually took the time to read the link you've posted twice now, you'd see that limnic eruptions can't occur in temperate lakes because the seasonal shift in water temperature mixes the water and prohibits a colder layer at the bottom building up CO2. Now think about the atmosphere - is it still, allowing this kind of build
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RTFA. The "deadly chemicals" used were precisely one chemical: that deadly dihydrogen monoxide stuff.
Fracking is not all a single process. At its most basic level, it's simply water injection. You *can* inject all sorts of other stuff in for various reasons (most of them oil-specific and totally unrelated to geothermal power prouction), but they're not fundamentally required for all fracking.
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Energy from magma chambers only works... wait for it... in places with magma chambers.
Any more easy questions?
If you want a "works everywhere" tech to watch, watch EGS. My favorite variety is a no-fracking variety where they branch off the well in the hot zone and use a conductive grout, turning the well into a giant heat exchanger. Totally closed, so it's non-corrosive and strata-indifferent - needs only heat. But of course, in the end it's going to be whatever's most economic that will take off.
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Once you have a borehole, you can put a concentric injector pipe to pump the water down and recover the resulting steam around it. Steam from hot rocks is being done all over, but boring into molten magma is new.
Magma has a habit of oozing out of chambers once there is a path to the surface, and can't be stopped once it starts. The magma is full of CO2 at high pressure and once depressurized, releases the CO2 and expands rapidly. I wonder how they will ensure they do not start an eruption? I would think the