Assuming the millimeter wave drilling technology does in fact hold up (I imagine it draws a LOT of power), the re-use of existing infrastructure (drill a hole at every power station site that boils water to drive a turbine, with existing transmission in place), is brilliant because that's a huge, huge cost avoided - and indeed could be stood up in far less time (barring government approvals) than most mega-scale alternatives.
Full steam ahead!
EDIT: tbh I did also think that this concept sounds like the opening plot for a b-grade disaster movie - "The Day The Earth Cracked Open".
You'll be happy to know that movie has been made :). I watched it as a young kid and found it pretty scary. Years later I saw it again and it was of course laughably bad.
There has been some effort on going to really deep depths in IDDP (Icelandic Deep Drilling Project) - see https://iddp.is/about/
If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.
From what I saw on an earlier post about this technology is that the mm wave drilling technique actually causes the bedrock walls of the bore hole to turn to a type of glass and then no casing is needed. I will try and find the source on that.
Yeah, so drilling into magma chambers might not be the best approach.
Iceland sits on a big magma chamber, so they would need to proceed differently. Still, they have a lot of practical experience with utility-scale geothermal energy extraction the rest of us ought to learn from.
Seems like hitting a magma chamber would simply shorten the depth you have to drill to, or am I missing something? Geology and drilling are decidedly outside my areas of expertise.
I hate to play the Cassandra again, but the deepest hole ever drilled by anyone was 7Km (edit: 12Km), a far cry from drilling 20Km holes everywhere on the earth. I’ve worked in oil and gas for over 10 years, including on the largest rotary drilling rig in North America, and it is insane what kind of machinery it takes to get 6,000 feet down and push a tool 15,000 feet out.
Just as insane is convincing anyone that your drilling activities aren’t causing earthquakes, screwing up water tables, or leaking gas and other chemicals out of the ground.
Ah, good. Someone from the drilling industry. Has anyone ever tried microwave drilling?
Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.[1] Ticker symbol changed from GYTI to GYTIE, indicating failure to file financial statements, and the stock price went to zero. They were talking about this as a precision heat source, like a laser cutter. That would be useful. But apparently it didn't work out.
It seems a big stretch to take that technology from nowhere to something you can push down a drill hole. That's close to the toughest application. You'd expect industrial applications first.
Now, if you could make that technology work, there's a cool application. This August, NASA is sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche, which supposedly has large amounts of heavy metals, possibly including gold.[2] If NASA finds valuable metals, there will be serious interest in asteroid mining. If you want to mine an asteroid, you need cutting tools. But you don't have any useful gravity to hold them to the surface. So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble. Might be the killer app for gyrotron drilling.
yes, many times. as you would expect, it obviously doesn't work.
.
> Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.
that's correct. they weren't able to cut two inches of well controlled non-porous dry material.
.
> You'd expect industrial applications first.
honestly, you wouldn't. it's technical nonsense. lasers are more efficient and easy to build.
the reason we use microwaves to cook is they pass through most material harmlessly, and mostly interact with the water.
which is kind of a dealbreaker here.
.
> So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble.
no, it's really not. it's just science fiction bs.
if we want to save the planet, just build regular 1970s nuclear power, and quit it with the "i'll invent something new with less than ten years on the clock" stuff.
They have tried it out before but most, if not all, industrial oil and gas drilling activities are performed with Rotary drilling or a Coiled Tubing rig (which still drills via a rotating cutting bit). I do not work at a drilling technology center, so I cannot speak to what innovations are currently being examined next, but if it was proved cheaper or better petrochemical companies would be using it.
Wouldn't the energy beam push you away from the surface just as well? I get that you don't need to exert torque, but you'd need to stabilise it somehow.
The whole point is that microwave ablation of these materials does not require drilling mud and is self-stabilizing by the pressures and molten material generated, while also sealing the bore hole and preventing quite a lot of water table, H2S, etc contamination. In theory it should allow substantially deeper boreholes.
The technology is real, and the required power density is surprisingly low.
Actually, I’m describing peoples misconceptions and fears to any process that penetrates deep below ground for resources (energy included). The general public will always be bringing up perceived or real dangers to drilling that deep (as they should, there is a lot of dangerous chemicals and radioactive materials that come from large well bores).
Is the reason they have to drill down 20 km to 500C rather than say 7 km to 175C (presumably a far simpler task) is the equilibrium heat flow?
That is, the water/steam cycle is extracting heat from the surrounding rock. That can only be extracted at a rate that matches the heat inflow, or ideally, ever so slightly less, so as to maintain equilibrium over decades over cubic miles of rock.
Yes, I understand that larger temperature differences increase thermodynamic efficiency. But if the energy produced is constant, efficiency may not matter as much as ease of construction etc.
Interesting point, what would explain it is non linearity. If you get 20% efficiency at 5 but 35% at 7km depth it might still be worth it. Would still have to outperform exponential drill cost with depth
Sounds promising. How realistic is the depth target of 20km really? Also, I would assume this infrastructure will be less applicable in locations with frequent earthquakes.
I don’t know how to reason on the magnitudes and indirect effects here. If we are using the temperature differential, don’t we have to vent that into the atmosphere? Does that heat eventually go into the atmosphere anyway?
I am aware of the 2nd law. I am looking for data on the magnitudes involved. Every time there is a promise of very cheap energy, I wonder how we will deal with the waste heat.
Global energy production in 2019 across all sectors was ~18TW. Excess radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions was ~560TW.
So we have room to ~20x our energy consumption before we start having to worry about climate change from direct heating, so long as we draw down the excess CO2 we've emitted.
Wind doesn't contribute to that total, as it's harvesting energy already in the system. Solar mostly doesn't contribute to that total, but it does increase surface albedo.
No. (1) because just how massive the Earth is a number you don't fully comprehend, and (2) because the Earth is actively warming itself from ongoing decay of nuclear isotopes which sunk to the center during it's molten phase, so really we're just tapping into a big pile of decay heat.
There's also a huge amount of internal friction created by the moon stretching and squeezing the earth, I believe that accounts for more heat than nuclear decay. Regardless, there's no way we can realistically impact planetary dynamics by blowing some cold water down tubes to the mantle, there's simply too much thermal mass - so yeah geothermal is a fantastic and reliable energy source.
(1) - The geothermal heat flow from the Earth's interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts
(2) - Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019. This corresponds to an average continuous heat flow of about 18 TW
The short answer is no, the long answer is no, but the really long answer is that everybody pretends that it's 100% safe but I guarantee nobody predicted global warming occurring when fossil fuels first started being used. There will be secondary effects, we just don't know what they are yet
People predicted global warming occurring when fossil fuels started being used.
A very simple reality left in the footnotes of newspapers at the time, and then tabled to giant research papers and committees as this was the only consensus that was able to be reached by fossil fuel addicted committees. "lets plan to form a commission in a few years, to do a study in a few years and look at the results in a few years for re-evaluation".
"Secondary effects" is meaningless put up against well-known global catastrophe. Everything has secondary effects. New shoes means your old shoes go unused. Eating now makes you crap later.
What matters is the magnitude of the effect: how much difference does it make?
There will be no secondary effect of geothermal energy extraction even noticeable compared to the present unfolding global climate catastrophe. The latter is what deserves attention. Anything else is a petty distraction. Raising petty distractions from it is a fundamentally evil activity.
No one can predict anything when they don't have access to the larger model. Assuming the real world corresponds to big models rather than the small models and understanding people usually have.
Readit News
Full steam ahead!
EDIT: tbh I did also think that this concept sounds like the opening plot for a b-grade disaster movie - "The Day The Earth Cracked Open".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059065/
If I remember correctly, they were never able to hit their goals because of drilling down into magma chambers. The steam coming up was also of a different scale than regular geothermal steam, causing corrosion that has not been dealt with before.
As far as I know, the main problem is coming up with casing materials that can withstand the extreme corrosive environment at scale and at cost, and for IDDP that's one of the main focuses.
Iceland sits on a big magma chamber, so they would need to proceed differently. Still, they have a lot of practical experience with utility-scale geothermal energy extraction the rest of us ought to learn from.
could it work in 50 years? maybe. probably not.
it's not working in 7 years, which is the climate change timeline.
it's time to stop trying to chase new inventions, and just build 1970s nuclear.
Just as insane is convincing anyone that your drilling activities aren’t causing earthquakes, screwing up water tables, or leaking gas and other chemicals out of the ground.
I still hope it works lol!
Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.[1] Ticker symbol changed from GYTI to GYTIE, indicating failure to file financial statements, and the stock price went to zero. They were talking about this as a precision heat source, like a laser cutter. That would be useful. But apparently it didn't work out.
It seems a big stretch to take that technology from nowhere to something you can push down a drill hole. That's close to the toughest application. You'd expect industrial applications first.
Now, if you could make that technology work, there's a cool application. This August, NASA is sending a probe to the asteroid Psyche, which supposedly has large amounts of heavy metals, possibly including gold.[2] If NASA finds valuable metals, there will be serious interest in asteroid mining. If you want to mine an asteroid, you need cutting tools. But you don't have any useful gravity to hold them to the surface. So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble. Might be the killer app for gyrotron drilling.
[1] https://www.gyrotrontech.com/gyrotron/
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/psyche
yes, many times. as you would expect, it obviously doesn't work.
.
> Using gyrotrons to generate enough microwave power to cut and weld glass has supposedly been tried. The company that was doing it seems to have disappeared.
that's correct. they weren't able to cut two inches of well controlled non-porous dry material.
.
> You'd expect industrial applications first.
honestly, you wouldn't. it's technical nonsense. lasers are more efficient and easy to build.
the reason we use microwaves to cook is they pass through most material harmlessly, and mostly interact with the water.
which is kind of a dealbreaker here.
.
> So, drilling with some kind of energy beam looks worth the trouble.
no, it's really not. it's just science fiction bs.
if we want to save the planet, just build regular 1970s nuclear power, and quit it with the "i'll invent something new with less than ten years on the clock" stuff.
The technology is real, and the required power density is surprisingly low.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286571247_Penetrati...
12.2 km - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
You seem to be describing fracking which is a completely different technology.
That is, the water/steam cycle is extracting heat from the surrounding rock. That can only be extracted at a rate that matches the heat inflow, or ideally, ever so slightly less, so as to maintain equilibrium over decades over cubic miles of rock.
Yes, I understand that larger temperature differences increase thermodynamic efficiency. But if the energy produced is constant, efficiency may not matter as much as ease of construction etc.
'AltaRock Energy,” in partnership with Quaise Energy, is developing millimeter wave (mmWave) technology...'
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
Hopefully those 30 years of technology will be of service
But this effect is orders of magnitude smaller than the greenhouse effect.
So we have room to ~20x our energy consumption before we start having to worry about climate change from direct heating, so long as we draw down the excess CO2 we've emitted.
Wind doesn't contribute to that total, as it's harvesting energy already in the system. Solar mostly doesn't contribute to that total, but it does increase surface albedo.
(1) - The geothermal heat flow from the Earth's interior is estimated to be 47 terawatts
(2) - Human production of energy is even lower at an estimated 160,000 TW-hr for all of year 2019. This corresponds to an average continuous heat flow of about 18 TW
[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth'...
The wiki says that its about .08W/m^2. That means it an area of 2-3 football fields only puts out as much heat as a single space heater.
Likewise for solar and wind.
The present trumps the future. The past kicks us in the arse
A very simple reality left in the footnotes of newspapers at the time, and then tabled to giant research papers and committees as this was the only consensus that was able to be reached by fossil fuel addicted committees. "lets plan to form a commission in a few years, to do a study in a few years and look at the results in a few years for re-evaluation".
What matters is the magnitude of the effect: how much difference does it make?
There will be no secondary effect of geothermal energy extraction even noticeable compared to the present unfolding global climate catastrophe. The latter is what deserves attention. Anything else is a petty distraction. Raising petty distractions from it is a fundamentally evil activity.