MIT-Led Study Says Geothermal Energy Is Viable

amigoro writes to tell us about a study for the US Department of Energy, led by MIT, indicating that geothermal energy could account for 10% of energy production in the US by 2050. The study concludes that geothermal is proven, could impose markedly lower environmental impacts than fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants, and is likely to be cost-competitive with the alternatives. This coverage in LiveScience points out how big a player geothermal already is in the US: "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy. Nafi Toksöz, a geophysicist at MIT, noted that the electricity produced annually by geothermal plants now in use in California, Hawaii, Utah, and Nevada is comparable to that produced by solar and wind power combined."

Comments

Nukes are the answer!

[dreddnott]

*Modern* nuclear power plants are the best solution to our coal and oil dependence.

I like how the summary states that geothermal energy generation is cost-competitive with straw men like solar power, and lumps nuclear power plant environmental impact with the other straw man, fossil fuels.

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[42Penguins]

I concur! And speaking of defending America through energy, may I suggest to you some terror-free gas? http://www.terrorfreeoil.org/

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[king-manic]

Ahh... I see you suggest modern nuclear power plants.

Did you know that archaic nuclear power plants produce a whole bunch of "unusable" nuclear "waste"? Further, every time we put in a new nuclear power plant a terrorist gets a weapon of mass destruction!


Although my sarcasm detector is deeply confused by your post, I'll hazard a reply anyways. A nuclear reactor can cause a large amount of damage but only slightly more then a standard gas/coal/oil power generation plant. Events like chernobyl were basically steam explosions when the operators purposely overode every failsafe for some reason. The major difference is a nuclear power plant is that after an accident, clean up takes longer. A modern reactor like a pebblebed or candu reactor would result in less nuclear waste and is even harder to have an accident occur.

Nuclear isn't "optional" is is the next most abundant fuel after the hydrocarbons are gone. So it's either now or later. You don't have a choice not to use it.

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[timmarhy]

your post makes no sense at all. first you say "A per-megawatt subsidy to companies and individuals producing power should be implemented" then in the next paragraph you say "What we should not do is provide special loans and incentives for companies to choose nuclear power". government should stay the fuck out of it.

Re:Nukes are the answer!

[Paulrothrock]

I'm interested in making the economy work the way Adam Smith intended by removing externalities.

There is an economic benefit in having a megawatt of electricity generated. So each power company should be given a subsidy for putting that megawatt into the grid.

However, there's economic costs to every form of power generation. Coal, oil, and natural gas power plants should pay for each ton of CO2 and other pollutant they emit. Nuclear power plants should pay for the disposal of their fuel and the power plant itself when it is end-of-lifed. Solar panel manufacturers should pay for the disposal or recycling of their panels at the end of life. Hell, McDonalds should pay for each pound of trash it generates with its packaging.

In this way consumers would be able to make better decisions because the true costs of them would be visible in the price. It would remove the externalities that Adam Smith said were the problem with his economic theory. Also, by paying these fees to the government and passing along the price to the consumer, we would be able to eliminate almost all taxes that we currently pay.

Please don't mess with the ocean gradients

[Overzeetop]

I'm fairly comfortable that we've got a long way to go to screw up the earths core temperature and/or magnetism (that's not based on any scientific knowledge, btw). It seems, however, that we could much more quickly screw up ocean currents by changing the thermal gradients that exist (again, not based on hard science numbers). Since much of our weather patterns are based on those ocean currents, I would venture that a real effort to convert to using ocean thermals to satify a larger portion of humaities need for energy could very well alter the global weather in just a few generations. Maybe the numbers don't support my gut feeling, but I would need to be convinved otherwise before I considered using ocean gradients for power.

(and yes - using the gradients means reducing said gradients - it's that whole "laws of thermodynamics" thing Homer keeps reminding Lisa about)

Re:Please don't mess with the ocean gradients

[maxume]

Puny human, ocean huge! Anyway, for starters:

http://www.noaa.gov/questions/question_082900.html

Perhaps more interesting than anything else is that it states that a hurricane puts out about 1/2 the global electrical generation capacity; figure out how tiny a hurricane is compared to the ocean and you just have to be careful not to pull to much energy out in one particular place.

Iceland!

[localman]

I visited Iceland a couple years ago, and I became sold on geothermal. I mean, Iceland is a small country, but they have fairly high power needs per capita because of the cold climate, and they run almost entirely off geothermal, as I understand it. This isn't some apologetic green technology that is decades or more from delivering affordable massive power, like solar, wind, etc. No, this is the real thing: a geothermal plant puts out power at nuclear reactor levels. And these things are clean.

My favorite part of the visit was swimming in the Blue Lagoon... a spa built alongside the runoff from a geothermal power plant. Seriously: you're in the middle of a lava rock field, and boiling hot waste water pours from the power plant into a huge outdoor pool. In the cold air you can nearly cook yourself as you swim closer to the power plant. But it's clean enough to swim in.

There are many criteria that need to be met to build a geothermal power station at a given location, but I think the research and development needed must be far less than for some other technologies, and the end result is completely proven, so the risks are minimal.

My ideal-yet-realistic world features geothermal and nuclear supplementing each other, with the preference towards geothermal.

Cheers.

Re:Anti-nuclear bias

[TooMuchToDo]

Actually, I myself used to live in downtown chicago and recently moved out to a small town in rural Illinois. I live 20 miles away from a nuclear power plant in Byron, IL and on clear days can see the two condenser stacks from the second story of my home.

I have no problem having a nuclear power plant in my "backyard", and would be more then happy if it was a fast breeder reactor that could continually burn it's fuel (as to have very little waste). If you want to get (cheap, less-polluting energy) you have to give (having production close by, being rational with regards to generation method).

Most people don't get that a coal-fired electical generation facility puts out more radiation then a nuclear power plant. Go figure.

Interview with Jeff Tester (MIT chairman) Sat.

[sterlingda]

This coming Saturday, I will be conducting a 1-hour, live interviw with Jefferson Tester, who headed this Geothermal panel and report. It will be broadcast live from 6:00 to 6:55 pm Eastern time. http://pesn.com/2007/01/22/9500449_MIT_Geothermal_ Report/

Re:GT being used here for years..it is good

[WindBourne]

yeah, the GT homes really make sense. I grew up on wisc/ill border and saw -40 day and night (this was 60's and 70's). A number of the homes had heatpumps, but they were air based heat pumps. So instead, most have A.Cs (basically air based heat pumps), and gas heaters. But with the ground at a nice 55F, it has always made sense to use GT for both. On my next house, I think that it will be new and we will have them install a GT. May add an extra 5K, but worth it.

No quite accurate.

[WindBourne]

The problem is that most of the designs for geothermal is to use the prevailing heat as a wet well. That is they want to not only use the heat, but the local water. If they had a recycling GT set-up, then there would be a whole lot less impact and fight. But of course, that means spending some real money. A good example was the one in Wyoming next to YellowStone. Some far right wing group set up there and built one that used the water. Funny enough they simply discarded the water rather than re-inject (too much money). Needless to say, nearby springs and gysers lost their pressure. So a court injunction was obtained and they were stopped. Once a recycling GT can be built cheap, and effectively, you will see GT springing up all over here.

Re:GeoWhoWhat?

[ChicoLance]

(The following is all from memory. I worked at a geothermal plant long ago.)

Yep, there are several plants in California. The twenty-odd plants that make up the Gysers north of Santa Rosa in the Bay Area, and I understand another field in the Imperial Valley. The Gysers field has been drying up over the years, despite them trying to pump water back down into it, and I haven't really checked the status of it in years.

As much as this is an interesting technology, it's not perfect. The geothermal steam that goes through the plant is also loaded with sulfur and arsenic, which all has to be scrubbed out before the steam can be released through the air. The amount of solid sulfur removed per day was quite a bit.

Another thing to keep in mind, that this Reuters article covering the same thing mentions that there are 61 projects in the works for 5000+ megawatts. For comparison, Diablo Canyon nuclear plant has two reactors, and each can produce over 1100+ megawatts. There is way more bang for the buck in other technologies, but they all have their drawbacks.

UK does not have a perfect safety record...

[fantomas]

Throwing nuclear waste down a 65 metre hole in the ground including fissile material and then being surprised when the cap blows off and showers the area with radioactive waste does not appear to be a responsible use of nuclear power to me. Read up on Dounreay power station in Scotland: http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=12626 82002

Why did Windscale change its name to Sellafield? read up on the history of that plant. Hint: read up on the 1957 Windscale Fire: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Hope they won't produce earthquakes...

[stiebing.ja]

...like they did unfortunately in Basel (Switzerland) when they made tests to use geothermic energy on a new (?) way.
They pumped water under high pressure into rocks several kilometers under the surface to further loosen the stones for later pumping of water through it. Obviously the rocks stood already under pressure which was released through the experiments and caused several earthquakes with a strength between 3.2 and 3.4 on the Richter scale - which is just strong enough to be noticed by humans.

Don't believe it? See the report on tagesschau.de (sorry - german only) from 16.01.2007 and the site of the Swiss Deep Heat Mining Project which makes the experiments.