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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."
Because you know as soon as we start to depend on geothermal energy, we're going to have to deal with property disputes from mole men and lawsuits from members of SPECTRE whose secret subterranean headquarters are being leeched of their oh-so-important liquid hot magma.
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.