Getting deep to hot rocks is important, but reducing the thermal resistance around the borehole is also important.
Some schemes fracture the rock between two boreholes, but this requires fiddly positioning of the wells as well as the fractures. Another interesting approach is to increase the thermal conductivity of the rock around a single well. Much of the thermal resistance is in the rock close to the well (as can be seen by examining the relevant integral), so this doesn't have to affect too far out to have a significant effect.
A company XGS Energy recently raised $20 M in series "A" funding for this. Their fluid (which is forced into fractures around the borehole) is proprietary, but is thought to contain graphite dust. Graphite can be three orders of magnitude more thermally conductive than rock, so incorporating it into even narrow fractures can have a major effect.
(the field tests mentioned there must have been successful, as they raised that $20 M subsequently.)
Because this technology involves a single well that remains sealed from the surrounding formation, it could be used in existing played-out oil or gas wells, some of which go quite deep (although that's in basins with low geothermal gradients or else the fossil fuels would have been destroyed.)
It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...
I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the same way.
The other issue is the margins are razor thin. Energy has to be cheap: so the issue is $1 billion going into this (1) might not be enough to have enough scale to make any money at all and (2) is competing with anything else you could do with $1 billion.
Which is why you need government subsidy if you want something to happen: but the you are also betting that you've picked either the right technology (it works at all) or at least you're accepting you're probably going to overpay.
Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of markets.
If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.
This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years.
It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy.
But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.
He's got solar things already. How many companies do you want one guy to run? The more stuff he does, it doesn't mean the stuff he doesn't do he's somehow to blame for.
I didn't blame him, I said that he's a tragic waste of potential at the moment.
If he were throwing himself into any of his impressive companies, sure, I'd be singing a different tune. But that's not what he's doing, he's either ignoring or actively sabotaging those, so that he has more time to be a social media influencer. He can do what he wants, but it's not admirable.
He doesn't. His solar city acquisition was nothing but a bailout and solar city was gutted down to nothing. Tesla hardly does any solar installations except on their own factories.
The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue, because funds can exit before the startup’s exit through secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok with long term investments.
(src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)
I don't think it's exactly a scaling issue, its that you can't turn the screws on your users and bill them monthly, siphon their data, and show them ads.
one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.
Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.
what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
yes. that's the game we're told to play, so might as well try to play it. there's literally truckloads of money in AI and the hyperscalers themselves point to power as a major issue for their datacenters, so why not try to allocate some of it to fusion?
> what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.
You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people.
That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.
> You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things.
No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you.
For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.
People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.
> People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well.
That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying.
My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor.
> I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave.
And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.
If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.
What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
> If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.
You're still stuck with assumptions that are obsolete in this scenario.
In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment. Eventually the economy will realign towards certain kinds of B2B sales (e.g. electrical power) and vanity projects.
> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently). There might be a rump of exceptionally talented individuals who still could be employed like today, but that's just a tiny sliver of the population. There will also be some "entertainment" jobs, like prostitute that will remain as well, but given the vast decrease in individuals participating in the economy, the total numbers would likely be less than now.
Not everything is going to be a replay of the past. As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
> In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment.
Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
What does this mean? By AGI do you mean "cleaning robots" or "entertaining bartenders" or "live music" or "person who owns this house I want to rent" or "mind I will pay to learn from"? None of those sounds like anything to do with AGI, unless the AGI is housed in a robot that can clean things (and then I don't need AGI).
Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing. ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
>> In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment.
> Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
Sure, but they'll have increasingly less to exchange among themselves. They'll have nothing to sell that the AGI-powered economy wants to buy, except truly limited legacy resources like land that can be gobbled up in one-time purchases. Eventually the AGI-powered economy will monopolize the resources that are useful to it, in a way that likely conflicts with the needs of now-obsolete workers (e.g. converting vast amounts of farmland to solar power megaprojects).
That's the end-state of automation, in our current social system.
>>> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs.
>> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
> What does this mean? By AGI do you mean...
I mean intellectual automation that can do at least what a typical person can do as well as they can or better. Eventually it means the automation that can do all the jobs (or even just enough of the jobs). Eventually you won't have a new job to move into once your job is replaced.
AGI will eventually mean there will cease to be a practical necessity to using human to do labor to operate capital. The capital will be able to operate itself on behalf of its owners. Once that happens, under the current system, the owners of that automated capital will eventually accumulate all the wealth of the economy, because they'll be able to sell without paying wages. Eventually they'll pivot to vanity projects and B2B sales among themselves.
> Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing.
Probably, but I expect even those will eventually disappear too, at least on the mass scale needed to support billions of people, during the later stages of the economic transition.
> ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
I'm not talking about ChatGPT, I'm talking about the utopia the AI folks want to create.
I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.
Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers.
AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best
That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and climate) problem.
Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited).
Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly and we have enough fission power plants to make up the difference.
So we already have the short term solution, it’s really 25+ years out when things get more interesting. Existing nuclear power is going to get increasingly expensive to maintain and recent construction projects have been boondoggles. So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.
Fission has gotten safer as we’ve learned from past mistakes, but each of those lessens directly results in increasing costs. Not just in obvious ways but getting better at foreign material exclusion means it takes longer to do the same tasks. Multiply that by every significant indecent at any power plant and it’s no wonder things keep getting more expensive.
> So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.
They don't yet work out, and there's no evidence that they will. I would love it if they do, but I don't think past performance is evidence of future performance. We might run into a fundamental limitation at any moment, and that would be that.
Japan's median build time for fission is under 5 years[0]. If regulatory environments and engineering specialisms could be made to work, there's no reason (other than Greenpeace) that we couldn't massively curb CO2 production from power generation pretty soon; far sooner than we could do discovery and then build for fusion.
> Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly
What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption. We're not remotely talking about replacing the 80% of fossil fuels with electricity, even with fission + hydro, wind and solar.
Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
The reality is that we don't have a 90% solution to power. Not in the short term, not in the long term. Except if new technologies that do not exist yet appear. Have a look at all those huge boats that enable globalization: how do you propose we replace fossil fuels there? Or aviation.
The solution to the energy problem is to prepare to have (much) less energy. And a good way to prepare for that is to try to produce as much electricity as we can. And that quite obviously involves fission.
> What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption.
An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers. A heat pump uses 1 kWh of heat to produce 3 kWh or more worth of heat. A furnace needs over 3 kWh worth of gas to produce just 3 kWh worth of heat.
An ICE engine is more extreme as extraction, transportation, refining, takes 1/3 of the energy in oil before you even out it in the gas tank. Net result under 20% of the energy in oil ends up being used at the end of the process.
> Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation. A seasonal battery storing 1 MWh gets used once a season. A solar panel only used in the winter is still useful for ~4h * ~90 days. But worst case a ~3kW of solar is equivalent to that 1 MWh battery at less than 1/100th the cost, and whisk generally redundant the rest of the year it’s still reducing outages.
> An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers.
I don't see the relation with apples. If you take electricity where it works well, then it works well. But the fact that it accounts for 20% of our energy consumption today means that it does not work well everywhere. Try planes or merchant boats, for fun.
And that's not even mentioning that on those 20%, a good part is coming from coal.
> There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation.
You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
Replacing an ICE with a EV results in a drop in energy by your calculations even if they are doing the exact same trip. Thus showing your argument is based on nonsense.
When someone burns oil in a car you measure the energy before it’s burned and therefore before engine inefficiency. If you burn oil in an electrical generator you measuring energy after the engine inefficiency.
Thus the amount of useful energy IE what people want in electricity vs other sources is closer to 50/50 than 80/20.
> You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
People build grid infrastructure for the worst case. Nobody complains when a natural gas power plant is only turned on for 12 hours a year because without it you get a blackout. Hell dams build spillways that can sit unused for decades, you still need them.
Thus no the panels aren’t wasted, they are doing exactly the job someone built that infrastructure for.
> Thus showing your argument is based on nonsense.
My argument is that there is a lot more than just cars in the world. Even if Americans may not understand the concept. It's easy to say "replace oil with electricity, look, I have this one example where it works well". Then try to scale that one example, and then start looking at the rest. Again... planes and merchant boats for instance.
Many boats are going electric. Home heating, industrial processes, trains, mining, etc the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.
Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues. Really aircraft are the odd man out, but remove bio fuels from other applications and you can largely replace aviation fuel.
After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
> the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.
Then you completely misunderstand the scale of the problem.
> Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues.
Say they can if they have the hydrogen, then you have to produce a whole lot of hydrogen and transport it for them. Do you know how inefficient that is?
Because you make it work for one does not mean that you make it work for the whole world. Your reasoning seems very naive.
> After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
Except that the only way we drop CO2 emissions by a lot is with a ton of sobriety.
Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument. The only question is if we have the technology, and yes we do.
For scale, 350 gigawatts of PV was installed in 2023 that’s enough to meet ~3% of the words 25,000 TWh annual electricity demand (after accounting for capacity factor) and the rate of PV installed per year has been accelerating. Battery manufacturing capacity is already at weeks of global electricity demand per year. Utilities haven’t been building grid scale energy storage because they don’t need it, but it’s ready when they want it.
Over the next 20+ years a great deal of current infrastructure will need to be replaced simply because of age. What replaces it could be very green without significant issue.
> Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument.
Again, you don't understand. I am not just saying that we don't have the infrastructure. I am saying that the size of the infrastructure we would need is a whole lot bigger than what you must imagine if you think that renewables can produce 99% of the world's energy.
You just vastly underestimate the problem. Saying "look, I went from selling 10 devices last year to 100 this year, so this proves that in 10 years I will be selling 1000000000000 devices per year" is the kind of reasoning you use in a startup when talking to a VC. But when you're being serious about solving a problem, it doesn't work like that.
Let me repeat it one last time: we will go away from fossil fuels, it's not a choice (they are limited in nature). We will need as much fission and renewables as we can get to compensate for as much as we can, but that won't remotely be enough (again, think about a real big merchant boat and tell me how it travels around the world without fossil fuels - not the startup way, but with a real solution).
So on top of fission and renewables, we need sobriety. A ton of it. And it means clever engineering across the board. So instead of wasting talents doing AI or polluting more with SpaceX, they should work on solving the actual problems we have for tomorrow.
3% of the worlds electricity per year isn’t several orders of magnitude from solving the problem. When I say that’s on pace to hit 100% carbon free grid before 2050 I’m not assuming crazy growth in anything.
We’re past the crazy exponentials. Global demand is still increasing every year by ~2.2% but that already includes the EV and Heat pump transition.
350GW last year, 356GW in 2024, 362GW in 2025 etc and before you know it we are done. Except 2024 is on pace to massively exceed that estimate, ~500GW looks more likely.
Again it's all startup talk. I never mentioned orders of magnitude, I mentioned complexity. You keep focusing on what already uses electricity, ignoring the fact that 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity.
And you still haven't answered my question: how do you power a big merchant boat with electricity? Do you realize it doesn't work with batteries, or not? And do you realize that the merchant boats ARE globalization? We don't have a technical solution for that, not even as a proof of concept. And most certainly not with renewables.
99% of the energy used by mankind is sunlight, but obviously we aren’t aiming for accuracy here.
Your 80% as fossil fuels is half (coal, natural gas) which are mostly used to make electricity and therefore goes away on a renewable grid on its own. In essence you are double counting the inefficiency of fossil fuels as if it was somehow a positive. People do use some natural gas for heating and cooking, but there’s direct swap in replacements that use electricity.
“40%” is oil though again that’s what’s pumped out of the ground not what’s actually used as fuel. Subtract EV’s and year really talk about 10% “of the worlds energy” used in boats and aircraft.
> big merchant boat with electricity.
New boats can run 100% hydrogen out of the gate.
Container ships don’t actually last that long, but you can also retrofit existing engines to run 85% on hydrogen fairly easily.
I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.
> It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants.
I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
The Man Month essay describes a breakdown in work throughput because of the exponential increase in communication channels and complexity of administration. Parallel startups do not communicate with each other. It appears from the outside that fusion does not have a known critical path to completion so increasing the number of bites at the apple seems like a logical way to scale attempting to solve it.
I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.
You might enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's video exploring this "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.
Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.
> what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes
Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2].
So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production.
It’s quite easy - we have numbers for humanity’s electricity and heat production. We also know how much atmosphere and oceans weigh, which we can multiply by specific heat of air and water. From this you can calculate how much we’ve heaten up the atmosphere/oceans - even ignoring the loss of heat to space/ground our impact is neglible.
Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life.
Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox
The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.
This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.
Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific project, and having the coordination between the individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger, like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and advancement in the field, compared to not.
It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors.
Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years.
This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains.
When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest".
And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays.
Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead.
Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here:
Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022.
Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.
We spend about 3.5% of GDP on defense [1], and coincidentally about 3.5% on R&D [2]. People tend to wildly overestimate how large the modern US defense budget is. It's only around 13% of federal spending [3]!
We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to restore the Soviet Union.
We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.
(ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)
> curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.
that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
This is laughable, an ideological trope with little bearing on reality. Governments spend and also waste far more money than is not only hidden from tax obligations but also more money than is also collected through tax receipts of all kinds (all that sweet, sweet deficit spending at work). And they do indeed waste vast amounts of it, on military plans, boondoggles that go nowhere, bullshit drug wars, bloated bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves to never solve the problems behind their original purpose and so forth, but the blame for no Jetsons future is really with people hiding a fraction outside what's already taxed and keeping it from more of that same public spending waste?
If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...
Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).
Money hidden by tax evasion is the deadest of all money. It literally doesn't get moved around, invested or reinvested, because that would trigger taxable events and get the IRS after your ass.
You're flatly wrong and should read more about how tax evasion works. I assure you that if someone manages to skim an extra X millions of dollars away from the tax man, they certainly won't let it sit dead and being eaten by inflation after that effort and expense. They might as well have simply paid taxes on it otherwise.
Through an assortment of vehicles and mechanisms, that money does indeed get shifted, moved and invested in all sorts of sophisticated and fully diverse ways, just like assets that were legitimately declared. I mean, what do you think they keep it in? Giant vaults as stacks of cash, like Scrooge McDuck? Absurd, the kinds of childish ideas about tax evasion that appear here.
Ah, where do I begin? Southernplaces7, your argument reads like the greatest hits of neoliberal thought circa 1980. Sure, governments can be wasteful—cue the obligatory mention of military overspending and bureaucratic bloat—but that doesn’t negate the crux of my point: tax evasion and profit offshoring are significant drags on economic equality.
You suggest that hidden capital is always put to good use. But let’s be real, the majority of it ends up in the average urban Joe's much beloved real estate speculation, yachts, and financial instruments that do little to spur genuine economic growth or innovation. It’s like hiding your vegetables under the mashed potatoes and claiming you’ve eaten them. It’s still there, but it’s not nourishing anyone.
Or, while it's lovely to think that the hidden wealth of the ultra-rich is busily working away like Santa's elves to create a better future, the reality is starkly different.
And about that Jetsons future: it’s not about just having the funds. It’s about allocating them efficiently and equitably. When capital returns far outstrip labor returns because the wealthy can hide their money and avoid taxes, we create an unbalanced system where innovation and societal progress are stunted. It’s not just about waste, it’s about skewed incentives.
Effective tax policy isn’t about bleeding the rich dry; it’s about ensuring that those who benefit the most from the system contribute proportionately to its upkeep and progress.
And governments aren’t perfect, but they’re the only game in town for large-scale investments in public goods—think infrastructure, education, healthcare, and yes, tech innovation and green transition. So, before we go all in on the "government waste" narrative, let’s remember that the (current) alternative is a plutocracy where the rich get richer and the rest of us get crumbs. No Jetsons future in that, rather much more like the Flintstones.
Your arguments completely miss my main point. Before I get to it briefly, bear in mind that i'm not opposed to tax collection or government spending on public works, social services and etc. I generally, with certain conditions, reservations and strong criticisms do support the modern liberal social democratic state as something close to the pinnacle of socioeconomic development so far.
On the other hand using the word "neoliberal" reveals little more than a cheap, all too human love of simplistic, idiotic ideological labels with little substance. Go ahead and define whatever the hell a neoliberal is. Name a few examples and exactly how their administrations were in any marked way different from any other modern western state. Here's a hint of the silliness inherent in that, via example: Under the Bush years, the fundamental structure of government and its obligatory spending was little different from how it was under any number of leaders previous to or following that time. Let's look beyond cheap labels and at the actual structure of how governments, markets, taxes and social systems work.
As for my main point: It's simply this (and related to what I just mentioned above) in the modern world, speaking particularly in the context of the developed countries, government budgets and tax receipts from economic activity are so enormous as they stand that losses from tax evasion are far more of a boogeyman than a reality as a meaningful hindrance to resources. The average budget of the average western developed country has so many avenues for allocating funds that using lost tax revenue from evasion as an excuse for why it doesn't do so for a better future is absurd.
The numbers simply don't back it up. To take the U.S. as an example, it's estimated that losses due to illegal tax dodging were something over 600 billion in 2021. Those are losses to both state and federal tax revenues. In the same year, the federal budget alone was over 6.8 trillion. If you add in state budgets, the number gets an extra 3.8 trillion added to it. That makes the total over 10 trillion in government spending. 680 billion is a lot, no doubt, but as an excuse for why government "doesn't have enough money" for better things, it's a pallid excuse.
A significant portion of the defense spend is STEM. It takes a lot of engineering to build a bomb. It takes a lot of math to create/break encryption....
That just makes things worse. Imagine if most people working on nuclear reactors in the navy instead spent the time building and maintaining civilian equipment. The kind of people designing and building the F-22 etc where capable of more long term useful activities etc.
The US could be safe spending 1% of its GDP on defense and largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing. There’s clearly a lower limit, but half of current spending is perfectly reasonable starting point before decisions get tricky.
Is there really that much overlap or are the budgets just so insanely high you end up with accidental overlap? Seat belts are a perfect example where the military and non military application was quite different on day one. But, military had the budget so John Stapp made the argument around how many pilots died driving in their civilian lives. Definitely a huge public benefit, but from what amounted to military funding of civilian research.
Packet switching saw first implementation outside the US including some key ideas like a router. We ended up with the ARPANET > Internet story everyone is familiar with more as an accident of history and a dash of propaganda rather than something that required US military participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPL_network
Teflon is another one people bring up as coming from the military but was invented accidentally outside the military long before its use in the Manhattan Project.
> largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing.
I'm pretty sure they legally can't "largely import foreign weapon designs". The Berry and Kissel amendments, not to mention ITAR and a few other regulations, put a strong incentive on in-sourcing when at all possible. The only exceptions are for things that are really hard to get domestically.
Which foreign systems? If US would’ve withdrew from cold war, half of Europe would be learning cyrylic now, and there would be few countries to import tech from. Not to mention engineers from the eastern block working for the opposite side.
This premise means that the extra dollars would be spent in a way that would justify your comment. Schools in Texas, Florida, et al would probably just replace those liberal texts with much more censored versions. They'd probably find a way to build bigger football stadiums or those other sportsball programs. New uniforms and things too. Then it'd probably pay for perks for principles and sporting directors, but sadly, there wouldn't be enough to increase the base pay of actual teachers. I'm sure there's other ways to spend that money and not a bit of it improves our advance towards the Jetsons' world.
Dumb question: is there any use for this for horizontal drilling? I'm imagining scaling up the size of the drill head to the size of a car-carrying bore hole, vaporizing the rock (or whatever gets in your way) and using some of it to recondense into tunnel liner, and blowing out the rest of the ash either back out the whole tunnel or via vertical(ish) vent tubes drilled periodically from the tunnel roof up.
Though maybe the tunnel liner part is too much of a stretch. It sounds like the vaporized rock wants to turn to ash. I don't know if there's a way of concentrating the once-solid parts and keeping it hot enough while routing it to the tunnel wall. It just seems like a cool set of problems to solve, resulting in a self-contained (minus the energy source) burrowing drill that can create arbitrarily long stone tunnels underneath (non-volcanic) land.
The oil&gas industry makes heavy use of horizontal drilling already. Say you own land with a nice pocket of $$$ buried beneath, but you refuse them to put a well on your property. That's when they turn to horizontal drilling.
Infamously stated as "if you have a milkshake and I have a milkshake, but I have a straw that reaches your milkshake, then I have all the milkshake".
Modern laws are generally onto this, and if caught (a big if) bad things happen. This is also why oil and gas companies buy mineral rights anywhere they might be interested in - it lets them take your oil without worrying about it.
Of course not everyone lives where law is caught up to this, but it is a big deal and so most places where it matters the courts know what is up.
I originally started to include about mineral rights, but took it out. If you own the mineral rights and this happens to you, then yes it becomes a case of stealing/theft (whichever is more accurate in legalese). If you don't own the rights and the rights owner allows for that $$$ to be extracted, horizontal drilling is exactly how they'll get to it.
Yes, the quote chosen did lead the meaning to stealing as that's how it was used in the movie. I have just always liked that quote. It didn't occur to me until your post how it changes the intent of the entire comment.
But it does allow you to consolidate the equipment and access roads on a large piece of land because you could, for instance, run a road across the narrow dimension of the property and run the wells horizontally along the wider dimension.
I don't think TBMs (tunnel boring machines) have the same problems as mechanical deep-well drills. For instance, you can replace worn components of a TBM without extracting the entire mechanism from 100s of meters of earth. Whereas vaporizing a 10-meter wide tunnel would require an insane amount of energy. Plus you'd have to deal with the slag trying to flow back toward your equipment.
It sounds like by default the slag is in the form of ash. That's actually the main advantage I was thinking of; current long tunnels require mixing it with water to make muck and transporting it all the way back out. I don't know if they ever lift it out via vertical or angled dumping tubes? Seems like a pain. And then getting the muck out interferes with getting the tunnel lining in. The muck is far from homogeneous, so it's difficult to deal with.
If this microwave drill is vaporizing rock, how do they keep the vapor from re-condensing on the drill, wave guide, and shaft walls and eventually closing up the spaces between them causing things to get stuck?>
Did some (metaphorical) digging, and it sounds like they expect most of the rock to condense as small particles inside a purge-gas, before it has a chance to adhere somewhere else.
I imagine walls are an easier problem--just advance fast-enough compared to the deposition rate, and the thickening is controlled. Not sure about gradual buildup on the wave-guide, but some periodic cleaning mechanism (further back, away from rock-condensation) might be possible.
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> Even though the rocks are being vaporized, it does not mean that there is no material to be taken care of. “The gas will quickly recondense back to a very fine ash, which will then be taken up to surface by a purge gas. In our case, we will use nitrogen”, Matt [Houde] explains.
> MIT’s Paul Woskov, whose research is the bedrock of Quaise’s approach, spent a decade proving out the physics involved. The system will use a beam of millimeter-wave energy—an electromagnetic frequency in the territory of microwaves—generated by a gyrotron on the surface. The microwave beam shoots down the drill hole alongside a gas—nitrogen, air, or argon—and evaporates layers of rock deep in the Earth. Then the gas binds and carries the vaporized rock back up to the surface like a plume of volcanic ash.
There is a stand-off between the end of the waveguide and the bottom of the hole which prevents damage to the waveguide. It also causes the beam to spread out so the hole is made wider than the waveguide.
There are so many energy projects that need probably orders of magnitude less investment than even the geothermal You propose, e.g. like the sodium fuel cell I have been writing about from time to time.
For instance sodium can be used in its metal form directly to produce electricity in a fuel cell e.g. as described in US3730776A (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3730776A/en). The fuel cell does not require any special materials, however it still is a challenge to construct from the engineering point of view. Also, the proposed design can be greatly improved with additional knowledge about the reactions occurring. The resulting sodium hydroxide solution can be recycled using the well known Castner process, the "waste" hydrogen resulting from both reactions can be used as fuel or for other industrial processes.
Btw. the energy density of sodium metal is 3694 Wh/kg and 3555 Wh/litre - so an order of magnitude more than a typical Li-Ion battery. Also, the advantage of decoupling capacity from power is dramatic. Of course, you can also split the process of storing and releasing of energy which can be an advantage. Last but not least, sodium in its metal form is not hard to store or to transport. At ~100°C it becomes liquid and therefore even easier to transfer using regular steel pipes.
That sodium battery sounds great for grid scale storage and maybe aviation. The major problem with lithium there is weight per kWh. Wouldn’t use it in anything consumer because liquid sodium loves to party.
No, I really meant less investment - you don't have to push seamless pipes 10+ km underground for the sodium fuel cell to work. It can literally be built in a garage.
Liquid sodium is totally fine unless you pour water over it. You have problems with other substances too and it depends what use case and limits you have whether you are willing to go with sodium.
For example, filling a big tank with normal gasoline is dangerous without protective atmosphere and other precautions like good grounding because it tends to produce flammable vapors that catch fire easily. Not a problem with sodium. Also, if you happen to spill sodium into water, it neutralizes quickly doing damage only for a short period of time. That cannot be said about any kind of mineral oil, gasoline that has a tendency to destroy ecosystems etc. Last but not least, you can produce sodium metal without begging mostly totalitarian/ authoritarian regimes for natural resources which is the case with the majority of fossil fuels today.
Because of electronics and fine machines we learned a lot about how to make stuff water tight. Sodium is in my opinion mostly much easier to handle than hydrogen, which leaks even through steel, which you have to keep under high pressure to have any kind of decent volumetric energy density or cool to very low temperatures if liquid.
If you used sodium for grid scale storage than you would more or less solve the electricity storage problem and most likely quite cheaply. The great thing about it is, you can store and transport sodium metal easily. Storing power for the winter becomes practical.
For stationary stuff in homes or businesses you could probably use sodium too. You could replace old central furnaces with it and instead use the fuel cell and a heat pump perhaps with a small battery and PV to smooth out the peaks. That way you probably wouldn't need to upgrade the last mile of the grid in many places. You could power boats with it. For aviation it doesn't seem that great as you would still have to handle the resulting sodium hydroxide.
I have often thought that in the future, there'd be a machine that you could scoop raw earth into (like "Mr. Fusion" in the movie "Back To The Future II") -- any kind of raw earth -- and the machine would automatically separate the raw earth into its constituent elements...
Now, such a device would probably seem a little bit far fetched...
But the first step in making such a device, if it could ever be engineered, would be to melt the inserted raw earth into a hot liquid state. (From this hot liquid state further chemical refinement processes could be completed, such as scooping out heavier elements from the bottom and lighter elements from the top of the liquid. Any emitted gasses could be captured and cooled down, liquified, etc. From there further chemical refinement processes of the liquids could take place, ultimately resulting in refined Elements being output...)
This technology -- the ability to "melt rocks" (aka, the ability to melt raw earth, any raw earth notwithstanding its chemical composition) might just enable the taking of that first step to creating such a machine...
Such a machine, should it ever exist, would find great application on Mars in the future, should it ever be able to get there...
Anyway, I wish this company a lot of luck in their endeavors!
Has anyone calculated how much energy could be extracted before the cooling of the earth's crust, due such geothermal extraction, would turn irreversible the reservoir and unleash worse consequences than those "greenhouse gasses" mentioned?
From how such progressive temperature change (extraction) would affect the dynamics of the Earth's core, among other things, to how it would affect such temperature to the nature chemical processes on the surface, how it would affect vegetal life (cultives), and so on.
The planet is big, but we are talking about, lets say, a century of use or more. Has anyone calculated were would be the limit of holes (on geothermal a new hole each XX years due area cold down) before the "we never guessed that X could happen"?
More than we could ever hope to extract at even heightened future consumption levels, which you could take to mean pretty much impossible, see a past comment of mine along these lines: [0]
Thanks. By your link we have a 47TW of annual heat loss from the Earth due to the surface heat flux, that makes 92 KW/Km² annual (Earth is 510M km² [148.9M km² of land]).
If the thermal diffusivity can not feed a tinny surface hole more than 20-30 years after extracting just around 3-10 MW, where the sun is supposed to replenish the heat on summer also, what makes the scientific community to have faith the slowness in such thermal diffusivity will not bring consequences? Did anyone study it?
( EDIT: we are talking about more than several centuries, I guess, so my interest decreased proportionally. )
Actually, it's estimated radioactive decay in the Earth is about 20 TW, which is also about equal to the current global rate of primary energy consumption.
Geothermal can be better described as heat mining than it would be exploiting a steady state heat flow.
First, if your extraction method is at all efficient, then much of the energy you extract is going to end up as heat again. Sure, it'll be somewhere it can more easily radiate to space, but rock is a pretty good thermal conductor too.
Second, Earth is big. Like, really big. I once did a napkin calculation of the proportional depth of the ocean. How much of a "water world" are we, really? What would it be like for some cosmic being to grab onto the Earth and throw it?
Assuming I did it right, the Earth is basically a bowling ball that someone heavily misted with a spray bottle, resulting in an average of 0.4mm of water resting on the ball's surface. (Marianas trench is 6.8 miles deep, diameter of Earth is about 8000 miles, bowling ball is 8.6 inches in diameter. To be fair, that's like 10 squirts of spray.)
Said cosmic being would just have to wipe it off with a rag to avoid it slipping out of its hands and accidentally clobbering Alpha Centauri in several years.
Pretty sure the numbers are not comparable, not by many zeroes. Like, trillions of times more energy in the Earth's heat than humans could extract in a billion years.
Add to that, Earth is heated by deep radioactive elements. A fission furnace. Not gonna burn out for a billion years, maybe not ever.
On the phone so won't try to even get to a ballpark but just thinking on the scale we are talking: a massive volume of a molten ball of rock with a thin crust I believe it'd take a fucking lot of energy to have any cooling. Even more where it'd be radiating out to space and "lost".
This seems to have tremendous potential, and not just for geothermal!
However, one issue with geothermal that I didn't see addressed is that iirc, geothermal systems start out great, but as water/fluid is pumped down and back up hot, minerals rapidly deposit themselves on the plumbing and decrease the system efficiency and ultimately kill it. Could this system be used to more quickly, cheaply, and regularly perform maintenance, or is this just one good step to get broad geothermal applications, and that remains a problem to be solved?
It's be great to hear from any experts in the field - thx!
This is pretty interesting but it seems like there’s a massive component of this system that is yet to be proven viable—from the article:
“Drilling a hole is challenging enough,” says Tester. “But actually running the reservoir and getting the energy out of the ground safely may be something very, very far off in the future.”
Is there any existing +3km deep geothermal well energy system in use?
Fervo Energy is making great progress in this area. They've drilled a injector/producer pair, frac'd between them (exactly like oil/gas), and pump water at ~60 L/s. Whatever goes into the injector comes out the producer a few hours later much hotter. Their proof of concept produces 3 MW, and uses ~1MW to power the injection pumps. They are doing a full scale plant in Utah now, and expect ~8 MW net for each injector/producer pair.
3km would be far below average for new oil and gas wells in America. Climate change sucks but the technology for punching holes in the ground with extreme aspect ratios is really cool. A reason I am more interested in geothermal than nuclear for "base load" generation is because geothermal can reuse our existing drilling technology and workforce.
Yeah, and think about the amount of political support you could get for geothermal projects if workers from the oil and gas sector could see a clear and easy path to adapt their skills.
Globally viable geothermal power generation would be an absolute game changer for fighting climate change. It doesn’t have to be better than nuclear. If it’s even close to being as good, the benefits of getting ex oil/gas people/companies on board would more than outweigh the difference. The growth rate could potentially hit levels that make a substantial impact on climate change within a decade of the initial ramp.
Geo would make a good transition project for the drilling side of the business.
It's counter intuitive but if we did move that way we need a LOT more petro infrastructure going forward. And without irony it would be better for us.
Capturing all the wasted natural gas (that gets flared off) as a reorient to maintain existing wells lowers carbon foot print and makes the use of gas less attractive due to cost.
Petrochemical products aren't going away any time soon. Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like lubricants. Having useful plastics (because there are tons of medical uses). And we're not getting rid of fertilizer (cause feeding 8 billion people is hard).
There are reasons to keep the drilling side and the current matinence side around doing what they do today while lowering carbon foot print.
> Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like lubricants. Having useful plastics
We know how to make both from many other process. PLA plastic (commonly used for 3d printing) is commercially made from plant sources as well (I wasn't able to find a source for if it all is or just some). There are plant based oils that are biodegradable that you could put into any transmission today (meet OEM requirements) - they cost about 6x what regular oil costs though. If that isn't good enough the process to make synthetic oil just need carbon (ideally in the form of CO, but we could use CO2), water, and energy and from there we can engineer any hydrocarbon you want - again at much high cost.
Pumping oil from the ground is cheap though, so it is hard to compete with something else. We know how to do it though. If you are a chemical engineer there is a lot of money in reducing costs (though I'm not making any claim this is possible, only if you can there is money)
"Synthetic oil is a lubricant consisting of chemical compounds that are artificially modified or synthesised. Synthetic lubricants can be manufactured using chemically modified petroleum components rather than whole crude oil, but can also be synthesized from other raw materials. The base material, however, is still overwhelmingly crude oil that is distilled and then modified physically and chemically. The actual synthesis process and composition of additives is generally a commercial trade secret and will vary among producers."
Polyalphaolefins (PAOs), the most common synthetic oil, are produced from ethylene. In the US, this overwhelmingly means being produced from natural gas, as US fracked gas is rich in ethane, the feedstock for ethylene production.
Utah FORGE is the deepest I'm aware of: https://utahforge.com/project-research. Well 58-32 goes to 2.2km. 78B-32 goes to 2.9km. 16B(78)-32 appears to break 3km.
But FORGE is mostly based around research, from what I understand, rather than rolling out broad-based commercial geothermal.
Does anyone know how much of the atmosphere's heat comes from geothermal energy as opposed to solar radiation? By extracting geothermal energy we'd be increasing that effect in the short term, but would it even be significant?
Interesting stuff, particularly the estimation that 140 TW of solar radiation are captured by photosynthesis. In arguments about the efficacy of tree-planting as a climate control effort, I've heard about the effect on albedo radiation and of course on the sinking of CO2, but I've never heard it pointed out that photosynthesis itself captures solar radiation that would otherwise be reflected heat.
Inaccurate title. "Finds" implies it is being or has been used. More accurate would be "Fusion tech proposed to be used in geothermal energy drilling."
"The deepest man-made hole, which extends 12,262 meters below the surface of Siberia, took nearly 20 years to drill. As the shaft went deeper, progress declined to less than a meter per hour—a rate that finally decreased to zero as the work was abandoned in 1992. That attempt and similar projects have made it clear that conventional drills are no match for the high temperatures and pressures deep in the Earth’s crust."
This is true. Neither the article nor the CEO of the microwave drill company say why.
At that depth, rock isn't a solid. It behaves plastically. The traditional tri-cone bit used could make progress, but it kind of just started "massaging" the rock. The bit (as all bits do) wore out. They pulled the drill string out of the hole to put a new bit on. The borehole would close back in during the multiple days it took to pull 40kft of drill string out, change the bit, and put it back in. Progress was not possible.
Unless the microwave drill includes some enormous cooling system (that works 40kft down hole even when the drillstring is removed!), they will face the same issues.
Also, separately, I saw pictures of the resulting lab-drilled hole on LinkedIn the other day. The hole shows a high rugosity (qualitative description of the roughness of a borehole wall). Similar photo here - https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image-of-a-rock-surf.... That's a ugly hole, and would be very difficult to run casing into it.
Further - traditional well drillers' #1 focus is controlling pressure downhole (typically done by varying the density of the drilling mud). If the pressure becomes too great, a blowout can happen, which is bad news for everyone involved (see the BP Deepwater Horizon incident). For geothermal wells, they presumably will try to avoid hydrocarbons. However, rock far above water boiling point can cause a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion), which is also undesirable. Super curious to see how they intend to control bottomhole pressure with statements like this - "Instead of pumping fluid and turning a drill, we’ll be burning and vaporizing rock and extracting gas, which is much easier to pump than mud."
From what I understand the whole point of the solution is that you don’t have to remove their equivalent of a drill string while drilling the whole. It can all be done in one continuous operation. That’s why it’s so much faster.
I’m not sure they would need cooling down there? They’re continuously blasting gas down inside the waveguide, and the gas can only escape on the outside around the waveguide.
Maybe it’ll be like blowing air down a straw into honey.
I don’t know the temperature of the gas they’re pumping down, but maybe it’s colder than the rock at deeper depths which will help keep the rock around the waveguide cool expect for at the tip where the rock is being blasted.
Do they need a casing? I seem to remember reading somewhere that the process of blasting the rock will harden the walls of the hole. Though I’m curious how that would work at extreme depths.
> At that depth, rock isn't a solid. It behaves plastically.
Sometimes this false-intuition comes out in sci-fi settings, when some terrible force scars a planet or moon with a big gash/puncture/fragmentation which appears semi-permanent, rather than being (relatively) quickly erased as the thing--a liquid on that scale--reflows back into a spheroid.
Like most new technologies, I bet they will not get the goal they are aiming for, but when they try they could get other interesting results as valuable as the original goals.
If you get a technology capable of creating cheap holes, you will be capable of getting lots of cheap natural gas and hydrogen reservoirs.
Fascinating! What would you consider the water source for a BLEVE? There is no drilling liquid, so are you concerned about drilling near a water source and the well becomes suddenly contaminated with water, then steam?
Some schemes fracture the rock between two boreholes, but this requires fiddly positioning of the wells as well as the fractures. Another interesting approach is to increase the thermal conductivity of the rock around a single well. Much of the thermal resistance is in the rock close to the well (as can be seen by examining the relevant integral), so this doesn't have to affect too far out to have a significant effect.
A company XGS Energy recently raised $20 M in series "A" funding for this. Their fluid (which is forced into fractures around the borehole) is proprietary, but is thought to contain graphite dust. Graphite can be three orders of magnitude more thermally conductive than rock, so incorporating it into even narrow fractures can have a major effect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434975
https://jpt.spe.org/hot-rock-slurry-developer-of-emerging-ge...
(the field tests mentioned there must have been successful, as they raised that $20 M subsequently.)
Because this technology involves a single well that remains sealed from the surrounding formation, it could be used in existing played-out oil or gas wells, some of which go quite deep (although that's in basins with low geothermal gradients or else the fossil fuels would have been destroyed.)