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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."
Iceland will be very happy to hear this.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
*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.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Don't come crying to me when we cool the planet core off and we end up in another ice age.
In energy generation, the point of burning a fuel is usually just to create a temperature gradient. Using naturally occurring temperature gradients is certainly attractive.
Existing energy generation technologies generally require a large difference between the high and low temperatures (e.g. steam generation). If economically feasible technologies are developed that can use gradients with smaller temperature differences then even the temperature gradients in the ocean would provide useful energy.
We get it. The US is a Big country with a lot of resources, you don't have to keep telling us stuff like "The United States is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy." You know, even at only 20% of the nation's total electric energy consumption, the US is still the biggest commercial supplier of Nuclear energy? Beating out France and their 80% of their nation's energy consumption. We've got a lot of resources and a lot of needs, why do we have to favor Geothermal over Nuclear or Solar or Wind? Why can we invest heavily into all of them? Maybe with a diverse supply, we won't be caught with our pants down next time an energy resource starts to become more trouble than we need.
Demented But Determined.
When used correctly, nuclear power has no emissions and no leaked radioactivity. Its only associated problem is NIMBY-related, namely the long-term storage of "waste", which would in any case be less important if the US rescinded its silly ban on breeder reactors.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Look, I am a proponent of Nukes. But we are in the nightmare that we are BECAUSE we became dependant on one main fuel source; Oil. Coal and natural gas is heavily used and that is also a big issue. OTH, if we use a combination of Nukes, Wind, Solar, Geothermal, wave, etc then if one has to be taken out of the mix, no big deal. More importantly, none can create a true monopoly (or oligolpoly) as is the current case with Oil.
Not only do we need lots of GT, but western North America and many other places on this planet are perfect for it. One thing that America needs to do, is to better develop geothermal residential heating. That is to place the outside coil of a heat pump in the ground and use the relatively good temp for our house heat. Outside of states that are pumping natural gas, this is probably one of the better ways to lower energy useage in America.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
That's truly nice to know, Anonymous Coward.
As I continue down the long pathway of life, meandering here and there, never knowing what might be around the next bend, I can take pleasure and comfort in knowing that - somewhere out there - there is an anomymous coward that is not a Google shill. Perhaps I shall pass this bit of arcania on to my children - and then to their children in turn - until at some point in the far distant future it becomes a family legend. Thank you, anonymous coward, thank you.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
It's not really saying much for it. Not long ago I had an excel spreadsheet listing all of the power generating stations in the entire state of California including their power generation capacity. Of the over 37,000 registered power stations (this includes quite a few extraneous ones) Diablo Canyon and San Onofre together provided about 40% of the total power used in the state. The majority of California's power generation is Nuclear, Oil/Gasoline, and Coal based.
Among the many reasons the high-quality geothermal resevoirs of the western US have not been exploited more than they have is that they attract opposition from environmental groups. Since the land is largerly Federal in many of the locales they are talking about, they use their clout in Washington DC to hinder local geothermal development since there is little overlap between their supporters in Congress and the constituencies that are affected, so it is a low-cost political bone. Instead they build space efficient natural gas and coal plants, which produce much more power with much less land use.
Geothermal power plants of any scale cover large areas of land with a sparse network of pipes. It is usually not the case that you drill one well and put a turbine on top of it, instead you drill a large number of wells, about one well per 20-40 acres and aggregate the output at a central set of turbines. It is not as though you are paving the region, just putting in a small well-head and a pipe to transport/aggregate the output. Note that you also have to have pipes to pump the condensed water back into the ground in separate wells; they do not dump it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately this covers the land with a very sparse spiderweb of pipes that are deemed "ugly", offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the occasional jackrabbit or some such.
The western US has enormous geothermal potential, but people will have to get used to the idea that there will be vast sections of high desert they never visit that will covered in pipe networks for heat transport. Perhaps they would like a coal plant built next door instead.
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/
Tomorrow's news yesterday -- the bleeding, visionary edge.
Quite to the contrary, 10% is huge and very significant, particularly because none of it is imported. Great advantages in balance-of-trade and not funding terrorism.
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This is no different from an oil well drilled into some other country's oil. Iceland already claimed the Earth's core. The USA is basically stealing from Iceland. You may think the Earth's core is under the USA, but it's really under Iceland!
Perhaps with a series of tubes.
OMG Sorry, just flashed to the future where some Alaskan senator tries to describe the grand oceanic heat pump network as "a series of routers"...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't they know they'll end up cooling off the inside of the earth???
:)
Then what will we do?
We'll have to have giant heat-exchanger space elevators circulating water/ice to cool the atmosphere back down, and we'll pump all our radioactive waste down deep to warm it back up in there.
er.
Nevermind
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
For those who have not thought about the issue - consider that the primary purpose of pollution controls is actually to remove sulphur oxides and nitrous oxides. What do you think happens with solids with such a process - do you think it is likely that with the water used they end up in the ash dam and not in the air?
Coal has enough real problems without making stuff up.
This is like arguing that the exhaust heat of car engines contribute to global warming rather than the exhaust gases. Direct heat dumping of mankind is negligible - even the hot wind passed in DC is more important. The latter will actually contain some green house gases. It's the gas stupid! CO2 and methane change the heat radiation equation of earth's atmosphere, that is the problem. GT just likes nuclear energy does not emit green house gases. That is why these are preferable power sources.
/. really is going down the drain.
I cringe at the fact that this was moderated interesting. The collective IQ of
Read the actual study. This doesn't look that promising.
First, this isn't a renewable resource. Over time, the rock cools, and more wells have to be drilled. "If there is no temperature decline, then the heat is not being efficiently removed from the rock. If there is too much temperature decline, either the reservoir must be replaced by drilling and fracturing new rock volume, or the efficiency of the surface equipment will be reduced and project economics will suffer."
Second, outside of the few locations where you can get steam at 200-300C from shallow holes, the thermal performance of these systems is unimpressive. Efficiency = (Tin - Tout) / Tout, with temperatures measured from absolute zero, remember. So you need big low-pressure steam systems to extract the power. It's 1890s steam technology, low temperature and low pressure. The study assumes that the systems for recovering energy from low-grade steam will improve in efficiency, but heat exchangers and steam turbines have been developed for well over a century, and are mature technologies.
Worse, most of the good locations are in the empty parts of the United States. Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, inland Oregon, and northern Utah have the best heat reservoirs. East of the Mississippi, zilch. (See fig. 1.4) Electricity would have to be transmitted thousands of miles to be useful, and there's no local use for the waste heat. Hawaii looks promising, but that's because it has cities near volcanoes.
Several experimental plants have been built since 1980, and none of them could even pay their own operating costs, let alone recover their capital cost. (Too many DoE "demonstration projects" are like that.) The study actually doesn't recommend building power plants. It recommends ... another study.
Nice try. Unfortunately, as I understand it, you can't beat the Carnot cycle no matter what technology you use.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
I admit their intentions are good, but to be honest, I dont get it. lets be real. 10% by 2050? stop spending trillions on bogus wars over oil and useless no bid military contracts, divert it to wind, solar and electric car conversions and you would have ~ 500+ gigawatts of average energy right off the bat: do that each year for the time it takes to build the infrastructure involved (5-10 years) and BAM no more non-renewable energy. Am I crazy? Is this idea retarded? Why? because it involves not spending so much killing each other? FUCK YOU!
why do we waste so much money killing each other and why is it considered sane to wage a trillion dollar war on a people who HAVE NOT attacked you but insane to consider diverting a large amount(and I mean most of it) to a purpose to the actual benefit of those who supplied it (taxpayers). Who the frack decided it was sane to spend billions on wars to protect oil but insane to spend the same amount WITHOUT killing or pissing anyone off to replace oil?
OK, I should stop ranting now. Im just goddamn sick of it. War and the budgets involved are insane. Poxy plans to produce 10% of our power by the year 4001 are insane: they are a cop out. Put the date so far in the future it is irrelevant. HOw about this for a target: spend half as much on renewable energy as you do on killing other people and developing weapons to kill other people and pretty soon (10 yrs) you wont NEED to kill people as you wont need to steal their oil anymore.
watch "the money masters" on google video
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
...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.
I lag
Because the old engineering dictum "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" applies to politics, with some interesting wrinkles.
Most "good" options are either prohibitively expensive, or they pay off so far in the future nobody is all that itnerested in them. Anything in the US farther off than the next presidential election is the distant future.
Cost is the most interesting political wrinkle of all. In politics, only discretionary costs count. When you are in a shooting war, nobody grudges money sent to "support the troops": it's not discretionary. So fighting a war is, from a political stance "free", until people start reckoning the cost in dead troops.
Furthermore the definition of "good" in the context of war is particularly malleable. First off, let me say that I'm not one of the people who say the Iraq war is about oil. It is about oil, but I don't like to say it, because what people who do like to say it mean is usually wrong. A simple analogy will explain what I mean. The Iraq war is about oil in the same way sexual intercourse is about maximizing entropy: if you dig deep enough, you'll find that the statement is true in many profound and interesting ways. Despite the truth of the statement, it fails to capture the subjective experience.
Now, getting back to "good": war is a chaotic, life or death situation. You have to accept the goals you can achieve. You may enter with a selfish calculus that looks like this: a democratic middle east is good for us because it will ensure a stable supply of oil (let's imagine we beleive this), so let's go in and spread democracy. However once you are in war, the balance tips from policy aims to victory. Like some lottery scratch ticket games, you have two ways to win: (1) achieve your policy aims or (2) win military victory. Either way you're a winner.
Victory itself is subject to semantic engineering. Often you're lucky coming out of a war not much worse than when you went in. When things are really bad, all you have to do is argue you beat the worst possible case. The phrase "Peace with Honor" comes to mind.
War looks like a "head I win, tails you lose" proposition if you're a president. You just have to avoid the mistakes all those other guys make of getting bogged down. You won't, because you're sure you're smarter than those other guys. If you didn't habitually think you were smarter than everybody else, you'd piss your pants at the prospect of being president.
We probably could lick the problem of energy dependence in the mid to long term. My sense is that a diverse energy portfolio, like a diverse retirement portfolio, is the best option. You also like to have your investments liquid; the energy equivalent of that would be to have an efficient common means of energy distribution. A superconducting electric grid comes to mind. Naturally conservation is the quickest boost to energy self-sufficiency, but it is perceived as costly. Let's say we look at conservation as an "energy source", which makes sense in the context of a diversified energy portfolio. So, we start on diversification in year 1, including conservation, but not insisting conservation be fully "on line" right away. The distribution infrastructure is designed by year five and starts going in. At that time we start the push to bring on more energy source. By year fifteen, if we're not energy independent, even if we're not independent of any one energy source, let's say we're independent of the decisions of any one foreign country over our energy supplies. That's worthwhile and achievable.
But, its costly and takes a long time. A quick war followed by falling energy prices as the world's energy producers tremble at the prospect of our military might gives us a kind of super-national energy sovereignty. Sound good, doesn't it?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Before I start, keep in mind that I'm Canadian - so I'm immune to American partisan party politics. Democrat, Republican... all the same to me.
And I'm a soldier too.
Nobody would be happier than me if we could just scrap all the military apparatus in the world and spend all that money on things that would really benefit all of humanity - honest, no foolin'.
But the sad state of the world today (although I think things are getting better) is that there exist people willing to exert deadly force on other people for personal gain - or to settle old scores - or just because they like it.
Look at the Balkans, or Israel/Palestine, or the Sudan, or Rwanda, or Afghanistan... the list is extensive.
Don't we, as a people, have a duty to protect the weak from would-be wolves? I say "yes".
We're not very good at it yet. We're transitioning from a period where armies and warfare were legitimate means of conducting "intense diplomacy" between each other to a period where armies and warfare are used as instruments of stabilization and protection for people in states unable to provide either function for their own citizens. This is new stuff, and we're bound to get things wrong from time to time as we adopt to our new roles.
But the end state is a world without genocide, without terrorism, without the impending threat of mass destruction and loss of life. A world where nobody has to worry about having their children hacked to death with machetes or blown to fragments by explosives.
Is that not a worthy goal?
Now I'll grant you that the USA's record on this of late is spottier than it should be. I honestly do not understand why Iraq was invaded; as all the reasons put forward by the current administration were clearly bullshit. And I agree with you that the American Iraqi Adventure has damaged, not improved, global security. (although now that you are there, you have to win!)
But the power to correct that is in YOUR hands (you are an American citizen, right?) You have the ability to get yourself and your friends involved in the political process, to ensure that the people with the ability to deploy armies choose the good missions (like Afghanistan) over the unnecessary adventures (like Iraq).
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I worked for a company once that had geothermal as a side business and am aware of its short comings:
(1) The ground reservoir require constant "care and attention". Drill holes block up from mineralized water gunk much like some parts of the country see inthere house water pipes. Circulation pressure is fickle. It cant drop if there are new cracks in the rocks. You have to pump or re-drill.
(2) There are waste products- generally highly mineralized water that no one else can use. Hawaii is avoided geothermal development for this reason.
(3) A "dry" field may require a consistent water source. The US West is short on water supplies.
(4) You can set off earthquakes when you pump fluids. Rocky Mountain flats is the classic example, but this has happened to a lessor degree in the Salton Sea, CA and Geysers, CA area, both in seismic areas.
Still the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks. No carbon pollution.
Oil field and coal methane development have similar drawbacks too.