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Is Clean Energy Buried at the Bottom of Abandoned Oil Wells? (vox.com) 68

Posted by EditorDavid from the well-well-well dept.
"The U.S. is spending millions to explore a surprising source of untapped power," reports Recode, describing a new pilot program from America's Department of Energy" Geothermal energy works on a simple premise: The Earth's core is hot, and by drilling even just a few miles underground, we can tap into that practically unlimited heat source to generate energy for our homes and businesses without creating nearly as many of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. However, drilling doesn't come cheap — it accounts for half the cost of most geothermal energy projects — and requires specialized labor to map the subsurface, drill into the ground, and install the infrastructure needed to bring energy to the surface.

But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom, just so happens to have millions of oil and gas wells sitting abandoned across the country. And oil and gas wells, it turns out, happen to share many of the same characteristics as geothermal wells — namely that they are deep holes in the ground, with pipes that can bring fluids up to the surface. So, the DOE asks, why not repurpose them?

That's exactly what the agency's pilot program, called Wells of Opportunity: ReAmplify, aims to do, awarding a total of $8.4 million to four projects across the country that will each try to tap into some of those old wells to extract geothermal energy rather than gas or oil. If they work, they could be the key to not only reducing the country's use of planet-damaging fossil fuels, but also helping answer the question of how to transition many of the more than 125,000 people who work in oil and gas extraction across the country into clean-energy jobs....

[T]he next year or so will be spent on planning and assessing the feasibility of turning oil wells into geothermal resources, after which energy generation will slowly ramp up. The biggest question is just how scalable these ideas are: One megawatt is, after all, a pittance compared to the country's energy needs.
"Some European countries already rely on direct use of geothermal energy on a large scale," the article points out.

Volcanically-active Iceland, for example, "uses its vast reserves of geothermal energy to heat 90 percent of its homes."

Thanks to Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for submitting the story
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Is Clean Energy Buried at the Bottom of Abandoned Oil Wells? More

Is Clean Energy Buried at the Bottom of Abandoned Oil Wells?

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  • But to use that heat as heat... (Score:4, Informative)

    by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <<moc.em> <ta> <zniehwm>> on Sunday April 24, 2022 @11:45AM (#62473964)
    The article suggests using the geothermal heat as heat, rather than electricity would be much more efficient... but moving industrial facilities (or homes) close enough to those old wells might be a real challenge in a lot of places and the sites themselves might be seriously polluted from extracting the oil.

    • No one is proposing moving any industries, homes, or other buildings to the wells. With millions of wells scattered all over the CONUS there will be many communities near enough to former wells to be able to use this for heating and cooling (as a thermally driven refrigerator, similar to the Einstein-Szilard patent). In addition, a lot of wells are leaking methane which is 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide. So if these well sites also burn off the leaking methane

    • Iceland can produce far more electricity than it needs even though they use a lot of electricity for aluminium smelting. They're also planning to run undersea cables to mainland Europe in order to export electricity there. The USA has some easy to tap geothermal hotspots, doesn't it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Creepy ( 93888 )

        Thorium in the earth's mantle is converted to fissile Uranium and split. That makes energy and heat. And ugh...yeah, the USA has some extremely good geothermal sites like the Yellowstone super volcano. That erupted last ~9 million years ago, but it'd be devastating to life on earth if it erupted again. Geothermal has some great promises and yet is a tad terrifying.

  • If we convert all our energy needs to geothermal, how much cooling is this going to result in? Also, at what point is this cooling going to impact magnetic field?

    • Re:Effects of cooling earth crust? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by splutty ( 43475 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @11:47AM (#62473976)

      Really? You're a few billion orders of magnitude off in your thinking.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        Can you elaborate? How much cooling does geothermal produces?

        • You ever pissed into the ocean? Each well converted would be less still by magnitudes the earth's core is something like 153 million km^3 and that doesn't even get into heat capacity. All the world swells converted this way would harden nothing but it might have a small effect we could barely detect... funny, it would be positive.

          First we have to understand what the core achieves besides a magnetosphere well, it makes volcanoes, affects plate tectonics, and this impacts earthquakes.

          Second, why is the core s

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            That argument is not unlike the arguments that were made through the early 50's: "We can just just dump this waste into this river or stream or ocean -- it's like pissing in the ocean and will be diluted so much it won't matter".

            The total available energy sequestered and ultimately expressed as thermal energy below the Earth's surface is not the only relevant issue here. This energy would be extracted from a very shallow and relatively cool part of the mantle and no well would be even be close to 0.5% of th

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by splutty ( 43475 )

          Individual wells could certainly run out of heat at a certain point, which would be replenished if it's not used for X time, but the thought it could in any way even start to cool down the core (which is responsible for the production of the magnetic field) is certainly possible. But it'll be so minute that it doesn't matter at all and we'll all be dead because the sun blows up before we can even remotely start affecting that.

          Either that, or we need to actually tap directly into the core (which geothermal d

          • I agree low probability. But then I imagine in the early 1900's if someone had suggested burning fossil fuels would have made a change in climate they would have thought it just as crazy. I think it is a matter of scale. If it works, humanity will scale it up to extract all that cheap energy. And before you know it, gigawatts turns into petawatts.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by bidule ( 173941 )

              Agreed, if we manage to extract enough heat to turn the entire Earth surface into lava, we might have a chance to affect the magnetic field vafter a few 100 years.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by hey! ( 33014 )

              The idea of CO2 mediated, anthropogenic warming was hypothesized by Arrhenius in 1896, and was a viable position in the early years of the 1900s. The notion fell out of favor mainly because it was thought that CO2 in the ocean and atmosphere were in equilibrium, and therefore it would be physically impossible for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to increase -- something we know quite definitively to be false.

              As for us extracting enough energy to cool the core, it's important to realize the core is *hug

              • Even if we somehow scaled up geothermal energy by by many orders of magnitude, we would heat the crust beyond habitability long before we cooled the core enough to change the magnetic field.

      • Really? You're a few billion orders of magnitude off in your thinking.

        Don't worry, there will be greens protesting this setup using this very line of thinking soon enough.

    • Someone else gave the answer "negligible, the earth is huge".

      However, there's another factor. Much, or even possibly most of the heat of the earths core comes from radioactive decay [physicsworld.com] and it's going to leak out (very slowly) anyway. Even as you take some away there will be more heat generated and the temperature at the core will remain stable. Come to think of it, that means that Geothermal is really nuclear energy. I expect a huge wave of support from MacMann (where has he gone) and his troll friends. Of

      • Geothermal cannot, yet, be built cheaply and quickly in any serious capacity except at very certain spots. Widescale mass adoption of geothermal would require hotter generating temperatures at least 12 miles down and is not yet feasible and won't be until drilling deep becomes much cheaper and quicker. Which is being looked into using mechanical/laser hybrid drills but the tech is not yet successful. As such, it is not competitive with nuclear except for small scale unless as very certain spots near natural

        • Geothermal works fine for Iceland & they have excess capacity even after doing a lot of aluminium smelting. They're planning to run undersea cables to mainland Europe so that they can sell the excess electricity there. Surely, the USA has some geothermal hotspots that could be cheaply tapped?

          • *blinks* I'm going to guess you have no idea how small Iceland is. Not only is Iceland is pretty much the absolute best case scenario for geothermal energy on the planet, but they produce all of 18.2bn kWh per year. The US produces over 4000 bn kWhs with the only really comparable location being either on the Hawaiian islands or MAYBE Yellowstone. So no, current geothermal tech cannot create a dent in baseline load. All numbers taken from worlddata.info

        • One way itâ(TM)s competitive with nuclear. It takes months to build one of these geothermal plants vs decades for nuclear plants. These geothermal plants could be within yards of homes unlike nuclear plants. But the comparison should end there. These small geothermal plants are not designed to compete against large power plants, they are going to provide base load power to supplement intermittent wind and solar. Sure, nuclear is great base load too, but I havenâ(TM)t heard about any nuclear power

      • I see the US Department of Energy is putting money into this geothermal energy pilot project, which is a good thing. The Biden administration talks big about having an "all the above" energy policy but there is a big asterisk that "all the above" does not include nuclear or natural gas. What we have instead is a "Meatloaf" energy policy. By "Meatloaf" I mean they will do anything for energy but they won't do "that".

        If the US DOE was serious about lowering CO2 emissions and lowering energy costs then they

    • Yeah it will affect it .00000000000000000000001%. We might all die.

    • Do the math. All you need is basic arithmetic and a few trips to Wikipedia for some basic physics. The impact of the energy transfer is negligible, practically nonexistent. Pollution and contamination are much bigger risks. (Ten million years of extracting energy from geothermal at the current rate of the entire global energy consumption is equivalent to cooling the planet by half a degree Fahrenheit. If humans had cooled it at that rate for the last 40000 years (since the late stone age), that would have r

    • If we convert all our energy needs to geothermal, how much cooling is this going to result in?

      It is a heat exchanger, so it results in as much cooling as we want to use it for. E.g., anything hotter than the sink by at least a couple degrees can be cooled. Even in the extreme case where we used it way too much and caused life-destroying side effects, it would still be providing useful cooling. So, as much cooling as we want.

      Also, at what point is this cooling going to impact magnetic field?

      This one is easy; never.

      If you don't know 101-level stuff about magnetism, also don't wring your hands about magnetism.

      Up your question game, sinij, these questions suck.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sinij ( 911942 )
        My understanding that Earth magnetic field is dependent on flows of iron-rich lava deep under the surface. If we slow down flows by cooling magma, this in turn will weaken the field and increase surface radiation.

        • The outer core is a region between 1800 to 3300 miles below the surface. The earth's magnetic fields are generated by currents in this outer layer. These currents are hundreds of miles wide and flow at thousands of miles per hour as the earth rotates. The powerful magnetic field passes out through the core of the earth, passes through the crust and enters space. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap0... [nasa.gov]

          The deepest hole ever bored was only about 7 miles deep so we aren't anywhere near reaching the outer core. If

    • No: clear energy has not to do with OIL

      What if the well is already there and you just recycle it? Seems clean to me.

      • Clean energy emits gases like CO2 to atmosphere?! How it can be "clean"? Like Trump "clean coal", right?

        • Clean energy emits gases like CO2 to atmosphere?! How it can be "clean"? Like Trump "clean coal", right?

          Well, technically all energy sources use humans in construction who emit hot air (more or less - depends on the person) containing CO2 and so it's just a matter of proportion. If you take an already used, empty petrol well and build a Geothermal source on top of it then you can probably actually afford to remove from the atmosphere the same amount of CO2 as you emitted in the first place building it so I'd guess it'd be pretty good.

  • then it's not clean energy by definition.

    unless it magically extracts itself with no environmental impact.

    • I [think I] know tertiary oil recovery used steam to pull more oil from a well, so if a well has already been cleaned out that way then you might not have that much left in hydrocarbons... although the chemicals down there are not likely great. I would imagine that cocktail would be the hardest part of the project. You could do closed-loop circulation for a while, but even that has limits.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's seriously difficult drilling. If you bit breaks (And it will cos you're digging through the hardest rocks) it can take days to retrieve. And when you pump water down and back up, it's full of all sorts of mineral sludge that blocks the pipes. It needs far more maintenance than solar panels or wind turbines.

  • One advantage of living where I do is that the people sitting next to you at the bar sometimes talk about interesting things you've never heard of. In the most recent case for me, it was natural hydrogen. This is a very new field, and it isn't even particularly well understood. Estimates of annually recoverable hydrogen range from moderately significant (~1/3 of current hydrogen use) to enough to power the entire planet several times over. In other words, we have no clue. We don't even know with any certain

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tekram ( 8023518 )
      The caveat with that discovery is that the hydrogen is poisoned with carbon monoxide which makes it not only toxic to animals but also to the hydrogen fuel cells that is needed to utilize hydrogen. There is also a question of how prevalent these geological formation are to be able to trap hydrogen and the answer is most likely it is rare and most trapped hydrogen has long ago escaped the earth's mantle.

  • The problem is one of surface area. At the bottom of an old well, suppose you've got a very hot surface. (An irregular surface -- perhaps made flat where the drill head hit it.) Now what?

    You've also got a wide-open, empty cavity. Suppose you throw some water down there. The steam expands, and you get a puff of it back at the top. Suppose you throw down half a million gallons. Now you've got a little geiser of steam. Energy generation from this depends on pressure, and you've got far too large a volume to fi

    • The oil well isn't a cavern; it is already pressurized fluid in there. Pumping water down and recovering steam is fairly trivial... it is just all the stuff that will be mixed with the steam that poses a challenge.

    • There are too many false assumptions in your argument to address everything. But for starters, the water circulates between two well bores through porous shale. Itâ(TM)s not a cavern (as the other reply says). Think of it more like a sponge of sandstone. The quantities of residual oil are too minimal for the oil companies to care about these wells... thatâ(TM)s why they are abandoned, which is a legal status. Thatâ(TM)s why these sites will have geothermal equipment on them instead of oil tan

  • Grasping at straws. Geothermal is only economically viable where magma is near the surface. Of course, that would never stop the government from subsidizing it with your tax dollars in the quest for the holy grail of their religious belief.

    • You're bundling legacy engineering costs into your forward-looking statements, when the context is actually new engineering.

      That's pure stupid-sauce. First you have to learn what a thing is, then you can decide if you're for it or against it. If you're still fucking ignorant, but already have an opinion, STFU nobody wants to subscribe to your newsletter.

    • Simply put, there are many kinds of geothermal and you are comparing apples to oranges. Geothermal of this type is a good base load renewable energy source in an era when intermittent generation is a real problem. Also, magma is not a requirement for energy generation. Hot water does the trick. The nice thing about these types of geothermal projects is that they utilize abandoned oil wells and dont have the cost overhead of drilling wells.

  • Geothermal heat largely comes from natural thorium reactions occurring inside the earth.

    • Shhhh, don't tell the green crowd that we are all riding on a pool of magma heated by nuclear energy! They'll flip out.

  • the oil well are full of hydrocarbons, and mineral sulphur in particular, the water going in will return as vapour full of those hydrocarbons and minerals (i.e. contaminated)... Then What?

    • Closed loop circulation? You are going to need to treat the return water some, but the extent is the big question.

      • Presumably you would drill in places where you could drill straight down and lower a closed circuit pipe down there so it would pick up the heat but not the mineral content.

        You might not even run water through the circuit, depending on the temperatures involved and the type of heat exchangers/turbines/etc used in the top side.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      TFA says thermoelectric generators. So there's not going to be much water (or other goop) returning to the surface.

  • In principle, this is a good idea in that a "large" geothermal facility ought to have a land footprint not much bigger than a traditional thermal power plant and requires almost no consumables to operate 24/7.

    In practice, the same religious fanatics who object to building electrical transmission lines in the middle of empty woods or on top of/underneath abandoned rail lines (there is a strong contingent of these nutters in Massachusetts, for example) will find a reason to object to drilling holes in the gro

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tekram ( 8023518 )
      This is just giving money away to the fossil fuel drilling industry because it makes no economic sense and everyone knows it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      will find a reason to object to drilling holes in the ground.

      If I understand TFA, these are holes that have already been drilled.

      • Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut (to name a few populous states) have no oil wells at all. The nearest one is in western Pennsylvania.

        If we wanted to get in on some of that sweet sweet geothermal power, we would need to drill our own holes here.

        Massachusetts doesn't have any oil worth drilling so it's a moot point here, but New York State and Connecticut explicitly have fracking bans on the books for some reason. Not sure it makes a difference in CT but in NYS it might actually be leaving some money

    • religious fanatics who object to building electrical transmission lines in the middle of empty woods

      The problem you with you nutjobs is that after you repeat the hyperbole 20 times you start to believe your own lies, and so after a few decades of doing it as a group sport, even the things you knew when you were 12 are foreign to you, replaced by hateful absurdities.

      And, what if the woods weren't empty? What then?

      • Even the cold vacuum of space isn't empty if your religion commands you to prize the virtual particles above anything else.

        Man alters his environment to suit his needs. Some of those alterations are cheap (clearing a small field with rudimentary hand tools for pre-industrial agriculture) and some are expensive (building a giant concrete damn and filling a 100+ ft reservoir for tens of miles upstream).

        Building a power line will displace some virgin nature. So will building a hospital and putting up a zillion

  • From Wikipedia about an early deep drilling project

    Project Mohole expanded its operational depth by inventing what is now known as dynamic positioning.[14] By mounting four large outboard motors on the ship, positioning the ship within surrounding moorings using acoustic techniques, and guiding the motors by a central joy stick, CUSS I could maintain a position within a radius of 600 ft (180 m). Such unprecedented position keeping enabled the drilling to occur in deep water.[15] With William Riedel as

  • I recall geothermal wells want to be a lot wider than oil wells, because warm water isn't nearly as valuable as oil. Is this practical?

  • We have a United States Department of Energy but it looks more like a Department of No Energy. This program to develop old petroleum wells for geothermal power is being funded by the Department of Energy while this same department is holding up efforts for drilling for natural gas and building nuclear power plants at at time when energy is in short supply.

    I get it that the DOE wants to see lower CO2 emissions but until we have an alternative we need to keep drilling for oil and gas. With oil prices runnin

  • What is this preoccupation with Iceland? The USA produces more geothermal energy than tiny Iceland. Even some 3rd world states produce more geothermal than Iceland.

  • But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom,

    Er ... you mean "in the wake of pretending we don't need oil and gas anymore, switching to buying it from Russia instead of producing it ourselves, and then finding that a bit embarrassing ..."

    FTFY

  • Nothing wrong with doing some basic research on this, but I don't expect much energy to come from it.

    "The project will conduct a field demonstration of a novel method to generate electrical power from fluids produced at existing oil and gas facilities. The project’s goal is to demonstrate the use of thermoelectric generators that can utilize low quality heat"

    That seems like a difficult challenge. An article I saw on this recently (somewhere) said the water extracted from the wells would have a tempera

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