I know it's so small-scale by compare, but it still feels like a really obviously bad plan to sap energy from the magneto-hydro engine deep inside spaceship earth that we probably can never recharge. The scale of drain might remain small across millenia but it's still not something I feel ok messing with. "Nearly limitless" is at some indefinite expense of some deep future, especially if it works & succeeds & scales.
And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating.
I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong. That there are just so many orders of magnitude difference. But the doubt is still there too.
> I acknowledge these sensibilities are mostly, well, wrong.
The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics.
> And we're dumping the heat into the atmosphere which also doesnt really need additional heating.
The crux of the climate issue is our increase in the heat insulation properties of the atmosphere (now mainly via CO2, more and more by increased methane and water vapor) not so much the "heat" we output.
Vast amounts of energy arrive on the surface via the sun, most of this radiates away .. the increasing amount of "human activity related blanket" has been the cause of change in recent (few thousand years) climate stability.
> The scale of energy in the geothermal layers we can reach dwarfs our consumption and will take time greater than human existence to date to alter in a manner that impacts the orbital scale geophysics.
Isn’t this thinking the type of naïveté that got us to the current situation in the first place? The CO2 in our atmosphere increased ~0.01% (absolute percentage of atmosphere) over the last 4 decades.
Scientists 4 decades ago explained away any concerns in the exact same way you did.
Granted, we need all hands on deck (including experiments like this) to reach our decarbonization targets, but let’s not downplay the unknown tail risks involved.
> Scientists 4 decades ago explained away any concerns in the exact same way you did.
You're confusing "O&G | Koch Bro's stooges" with "Scientists".
The notion of human activity affecting the atmosphere dates back more than a century, the real concern that industrial activity was having a detrimental effect became real in the 1970s .. and the pro Tobacco and pro Oil and Gas lobbying dates back to the same core PR agencies using the same tired "person in a white coat" arguments.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) raised human activity affecting climate as a real and present danger in the mid to late 1970s, the International Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988, etc.
Scientists had a firm grasp of the problem four decades ago and understood that the heat capacity of CO2 exceeded that of other gases .. they understood the relative scales and how little it took to tip a balance.
In a similar manner geophysicts understand the scale of global energy held in rotation, in internal heat, in GMF, and the history of crustal fission reactors versus core fission et al.
There’s a difference between scientists converging on the research objectives of understanding the impacts of greenhouse gases, and agreeing on the general prognosis from the increase in gases to take action.
Even in 1991, Roger Revelle—one of the earliest scientists to recognize global warming—cautioned against taking drastic action because of scientific uncertainty[1]. He is not your oil and gas stooge, Revelle authored the seminal paper on CO2 buildup in 1957[2].
> But should the United States assume "leadership" in a hastily-conceived campaign that could cripple the global economy, or would it be more prudent to assure first, through scientific research, that the problem is both real and urgent?
We can sum up our conclusions in a simple message: The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this tine [sic].
While in hindsight it seems there was much scientific consensus opposed by industry, much of the skepticism was actually from the scientific community itself on the absence of certainty.
Point being that Revelle had a grasp on the actual geophysics, knew that the ocean buffer for C02 absorption was not sufficient to counter the gas increase in the atmosphere ..
His specific doubt was about timscale and sensitivities .. he suggeted people wait until observed temp increases exceeded the noise threshold, he didn't doubt that they would.
Returning to the original point, human tapping of the earths geothermal energy will be confined for a veryt long term to no deeper below the crust than the atmosphere rises above.
On the matter of scale, if the earth was the size of a green granny smith apple (although 'spherical' (damn near), like a hypothetical cow) .. would the atmosphere be thicker or thinner than the skin on that apple?
ie. How's your grasp of the actual physics in both these cases?
Imagine a breakthrough in some incidental category and 'poof' everyone is using geothermal and fossils, solar, nuclear etc. fall to the side, all of world geopolitics shifts and 'climate change' arguments dissapear.
It would be like the change wrought by the telephone + car + radio kind of thing - just unthinkable.
I don't think people from the 1890's really imagined what things would be like in 1990.
That said, it may be that those things won't happen and we do have an idea of the 2090's because it's not that-that much different than today.
I've watched enough terrible sci-fi movies on the Syfy channel to know that if we start using geothermal energy, we'll suck all the heat out of the core of the Earth, it'll stop moving, our magnetosphere will degrade, and we'll all die in a solar flare apocalypse.
No, but seriously, good luck to these guys. Someone's got to be the first to succeed at making geothermal power scalable/practical, let's hope it's them so we don't have to wait another century.
This is interesting, but isn't the challenge with "deepest holes ever" that they frequently cave in on themselves? And wouldn't you need multiple levels of water storage while pumping upwards since there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped? (rough citation on that: https://www.theurbandeveloper.com/articles/how-water-works-w...)
1) the issue is not usually that the hole ‘caves in’, but rather that at some point everything is hot enough and under enough pressure that it doesn’t act like a solid anymore. Think playdough. Casings make it doable for awhile, but then at some point it’s so soft and hot it’s more like pudding.
2) you’re thinking of limits on vacuum suction (aka ‘sucking’ water up), which yes is very limited. Deep bores of any kind are almost always submerged pumps, and they don’t have this issue (‘pushing’ water up). Typically there are strings of submerged pumps in the borehole for deeper wells.
For geothermal, usually they can just push cooler water down, and don’t even need to pump it back up - the heat expansion/steam pressurizes everything and does the work for them, as it’s a closed aquifer.
> there are practical limits to how high water can be pumped?
Well, no. The problems you see on your article really doesn't apply to their situation. (And it's a really small limit on the article, if it applied, we wouldn't be able to extract most of our oil or even water from some aquifers.)
I heard this episode of How I built this, about company Quaise on how they plan to drill to unprecedented depths using new technologies involving drilling with microwaves to be able to tap into geothermal energy. The idea of repurposing coal powered plants and leveraging the turbines that were already built, then drilling holes next to these plants to generate geothermal energy is absolutely brilliant. I'm surprised more people haven't heard of this company.
