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Iceland To Drill Hole Into Volcano

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the tapping-the-earth-for-energy dept.

G3ckoG33k writes "BBC reports that Iceland will drill a hole into a volcano so it can tap heat from it, which eventually is hoped to produce commercially available energy. From the article: "Twenty years ago, geologist Gudmundur Omar Friedleifsson had a surprise when he lowered a thermometer down a borehole. 'We melted the thermometer,' he recalls. 'It was set for 380C; but it just melted.'". Excuse me, Gudmundur, but how could that ever have been a 'surprise'..."

8 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Warn Iceland! by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

    Don't they realize that Volcanic Energy has directly caused more deaths than Nuclear Energy?

    When will people learn that there is no safe form of energy?!

    The volcano gods are gonna be so angered when they find out Iceland is mooching the heat. If I know my mythology, nothing (and I mean nothing) pisses a god off like free stuff for humans. We should just rename Iceland to New Pompeii right now.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Warn Iceland! by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Funny

      Setting: Two men in suits with charts stand before an Icelandic government committee.

      Pitch Guy 1: "Boy it sure is cold out today! Now, I know this sounds a little far out there, but we've been studying the volcano over there and we predict that it has energy equivalent to 20 million tons of TNT. Now that energy is, by our god given right, ours. It's just as valuable as the oil underneath the Middle East. So, we induce an eruption."

      Pitch Guy 2: "It's that simple. But John, won't the people be mad that the government is getting all this free energy?"

      Pitch Guy 1: "No, no, here's the best part. That energy will be distributed ... equally."

      Pitch Guy 2: "Gentlemen, I think the real question here today is, 'How can we afford not to induce an eruption?'"

      --
      My work here is dung.
  2. Doctor Who by lisaparratt · · Score: 5, Funny

    Do they not watch Doctor Who in Iceland?

    It'll be green skinned monsters and parallel universes before you know it!

    1. Re:Doctor Who by Trestran · · Score: 5, Informative

      And for those of you wondering exactly what the hell he is talking about: Inferno, a Doctor Who story, in the first season of the third Doctor. It's pretty decent Who story, where a similar experiment ends up blowing up the world (they drill completely through to the crust though). Which the Doctor witnesses in a parralel universe, so he can warn his own universe of the dangers of the experiment. Throw some weird green hairy zombies in, to make sure you do not forget it is Doctor Who. :P

      After watching Doctor Who for the first time with the new series last year, I've actually started going through all the old Doctor Who stories I never saw in chronological order, and boy is there a lot of (26 seasons, to be precise). And I just happened to have watch Inferno yesterday, so it is fresh on my mind, and was actually the first thing I thought of when I saw this newsbit also. :)

  3. Geothermal power is really important by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I took a field trip once to the local hydroelectric dam and learned all about how hydro is safe and clean and provides a large recreational grounds after the water has accumulated behind the dam. It was pretty cool.

    Now if they can build a geothermal plant that actually improves the landscape, I think they are on to something. Free energy ceases to be free when you ruin the surrounding area with ugly power plants.

    1. Re:Geothermal power is really important by gcranston · · Score: 5, Insightful

      There's a host of problems with hydroelectric that rarely get talked about. Damming the river slows the water, reducing the size of sediment it can transport. This causes all the sediment from upstream to settle out at the inlet to the dam resevoir, raising the bed level drastically. Changes in the river like this are detrimental to fish and plats in the river, and have also grounded many boats. This is why very few hydroelectric dams have been built in North America and Europe in the past few decades. For these and a host of ethical reasons (like displacing a couple MILLION people), the Three Gorges Dam should never have been built in China.

      I'm not aware of any of these kinds of issues with geothermal (I really do support the idea), but then I don't know that much about the technology. Just pointing out that hydroelectric is far from 'free' when you build dams to do it. The thing is not everyone has something the size of Niagara Falls to generate power from. (Even then , Niagara does not acount for very much of Ontario's total power generation.)

  4. "Surprise" easy to explain... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Okay. Everybody's joking about it, but here's the solution to the puzzle of the "surprising" heat: that's 380+ Celcius *WATER*, not lava. The area being studied is on the sea floor or kilometres beneath the land surface, and the water is under great pressure. As a result, it gets much hotter than surface water, without boiling. Sometimes the "water" in the sea floor close to these volcanic areas is a supercritical fluid -- beyond the temperature-pressure conditions for distinct gaseous and liquid phases.

    Supercritical water is pretty exotic stuff in power systems. There are some advanced fossil-fuel power stations that use it, and supercritical nuclear power systems are being developed. They offer higher thermal efficiencies. In Iceland, they might be able to get the same thing going, but with renewable geothermal sources, which would be great, but first they have to tame some pretty extreme conditions in the boreholes.

  5. RTFA by Hakubi_Washu · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary is bullshit, even by /. standards. They were drilling for conventional geothermal energy, that is water heated by a lava flow nearby (extremely common in Iceland). Given the high pressure they were expecting high temperatures (the quoted 380) and still liquid water (due to the pressure). What was surprising is the fact that the water was probably more than 500 and actually melted the thermometer. Given this discovery (aka The water in this depth is much hotter than previously calculated) it makes perfect sense to a) explore the reasons for the higher temperature and b) use that for a more efficient power plant. There's no volcanoes involved at all.