Yes, even in Australia. We're very stable by geological standards, yet we still have minor fault lines and the whole plate is still moving north.
When your borehole is kilometres deep it only takes a tiny amount of drift to start breaking stuff all up and down the system.
And superhot steam is not exactly a friendly substance to begin with.
The main company who've been working on the Australian deep-drilling geothermal problem is Geodynamics. And they have been at it for years and years. They've consumed tens of millions of dollars and have, so far, not successfully produced a deep-geothermal plant.
Laugh if you like; but the stuff used in stationary plants isn't full of an unpredictable cocktail of dissolved minerals and hydrocarbons.
Truthfully I am not across the detail of the problems with deep boreholes.
I am however across the fact that it hasn't worked yet. And we're talking stuff that Very Intelligent People With A Lot Of Funding have been working on for quite a while at this point. And they don't even have a working proof-of-concept plant working yet.
Deep borehole geothermal sounds great on paper, but the engineering challenges are enormous and yet to be surmounted. By comparison oil, gas and especially coal are absolute doddles with work with.
When your borehole is kilometres deep it only takes a tiny amount of drift to start breaking stuff all up and down the system.
And superhot steam is not exactly a friendly substance to begin with.
The main company who've been working on the Australian deep-drilling geothermal problem is Geodynamics. And they have been at it for years and years. They've consumed tens of millions of dollars and have, so far, not successfully produced a deep-geothermal plant.
It's just not as easy as people make out.