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Google Releases Geothermal Potential Map of the US
a_hanso writes "The Google funded Enhanced Geothermal Systems research at the Southern Methodist University has produced a coast-to-coast geothermal potential map of the United States. Having invested over $10 million on geothermal energy, Google seems to believe that it is our best bet at kicking the oil habit (especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)."
first post... powered by Geothermal Energy!!!
Thank you Google -- I wish that the country as a whole was making this happen. We banded together for WWII why not do it immediately for humanity and the planet's survival?
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Preliminary data released from the SMU study in October 2010 revealed the existence of a geothermal resource under the state of West Virginia equivalent to the state’s existing (primarily coal-based) power supply.
Sure that's not Centralia PA?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
I have been using Centralia's zip code 17927 for years for places that don't deserve my real address. Back when Radio Shack used to collect demographic information every time someone bought a battery, that sort of thing.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Still think the gases are so bad NOW, Sheila?!?!?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
All over again...
Here's a link to a Google tech talk about Thorium, an often overlooked option we have. I consider it to be one of our best options to fuel the world. See what you think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZR0UKxNPh8
I've always had two issues with articles on geothermal
1. What happens to the core when we start pumping large amounts of heat out of the core? How long until it cools enough for our magnetic field to collapse enough to be dangerous?
2. What happens to the atmosphere when we pump all that heat from the core into it? How long until the oceans boil?
Seems like very important questions to me...
-SaNo
Hots spots are suspiciously close to Google data centers.
Neat map and all but I wonder what would the effects would be of us sapping all this heat energy out of the crust of the planet do to tempatures?
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Anything Google can do in the arena works to benefit all of humanity (admittedly it works to benefit those who are not getting wealthier creating a need for war in the Middle East the most).
Now if somebody would just put together a project to find more efficient thermalelectric materials so we can take advantage of heat energy represented by the smaller but significant geothermal gradient that is present "everywhere"....
Gotta love any form of energy which can be tapped by going under existing arable land, buildings, and Ma Nature's ecosystems without a subsequent risk of spilling crap everywhere and pollution through combustion.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
I can see the headlines in a hundred years:
"Up against concerns over the global cooling crisis, researches are finding ways to utilize our abundant oil reserves to slow the inevitable heat death of our planet."
There's a lot of nasty crap that gets dredged up out of the ground with geothermal power production too depending on how you do it. It's far from "clean" energy. It's just different dirty stuff.
Better compare that map to earthquakes to know how you have to design your systems to reduce problems from quakes.
That giant dark red glob where yellowstone is pretty foreboding... I assume that 90% of the stuff you hear in all of the shows about a mass extinction event following a yellowstone "supervolcano" eruption is just hype to get people to watch, but still.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
Drill down 100' get enough water for a generation. Drill dowdown 10,000 feet, get enough energy for 100 generations?
Hilarious thing is that over 90% of geothermal energy is generated by the fission of nuclear isotopes anyway. All it does differently is during disposal when the earth just kind of farts it out as Radon into our basements.
Now they also know the geotermal potential of YOUR HOME! Think about it.
Quick google search:
http://www.sierraclub.org/policy/conservation/geothermal.aspx Note that this resolution was adopted in 1980.
The peter principle of the environmentalists precludes any development. Because we JUST DON'T KNOW if it will do anything bad. Because NO LEVEL of testing and impact study will ever prove NOTHING BAD will happen. So you've got hydro blocked because of salmon, you've got solar blocked because of bugs and turtles in the desert, you've got wind blocked because of the birds, and you've got geothermal blocked because it's in the parks, under the mountains, by the streams, and in the earth, and it'll be regulated with oversight and red tape and studies until it's completely uneconomical.
Just wait for the opponents to raise these issues
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It might be vast, but once you extract that heat and pump it into the atmosphere, wouldn't it cause a local cooling of the rocks?
How long would a drill site last without drilling more?
Seriously. Electricity to residential users should be free (up to a consumption level).
Earlier this year my wife and I visited Grand Coulee Dam. It produces nearly 7GW and costs them rather little in maintenance to operate.
This weekend we drove through the windmills in eastern Washington and Oregon. They sit there and turn generating more power than can be transmitted, costing little in maintenance to operate.
And now Google is encouraging ramping up geothermal (which looks like good stuff for Oregon!), and again requires little cost in maintenance.
Electricity is electricity. The expectation is that when I plug something into an outlet in my house I will get 110v. With the exception of inadequate supply, electricity in any home in the United States should be identical. No one advertises that their electricity is better, so there is no competition in 'who builds a better product'. Is this something the government should take control of, create jobs to build more clean energy production, end-of-life fuel burning generators, and turn electricity into a 'free service'? Residential use up to a certain usage could be free, while overages would incur modest fees. Commercial locations would continue to pay same or even reduced rates to help maintain the facilities. Theoretically this could encourage the move to electricity in other areas currently using other fuel sources, like automobiles. Electric cars are cheaper to operate now, but what if it was FREE?
Seems like something to think about.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
a_hanso is a complete moron.
In the US, very little electricity comes from petroleum.
"Google seems to believe that [geothermal] is our best bet at kicking the oil habit"
Fucking stupid sentence. Totally fucking stupid!
It could replace some *coal* and *natural gas* usage, but geothermal energy will not make any difference whatsoever in petroleum usage until there are more (some) battery-powered cars or a hydrogen infrastructure.
I notice the linked pages do not mention oil or petroleum, so it was an invention of imbecile submitter "a_hanso"
Where do all these stupid people come from?
> Still think the gases are so bad
These radioactive "gases" like Radon are indeed worse, are you lucky and out of the 'zone'?
USGS Radon map
http://energy.cr.usgs.gov/radon/rnus.html
Google seems to believe that it is our best bet at kicking the oil habit (especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)."
I always wonder about the disconnect in some people's minds between green energy and oil. This won't help us get off oil at all. Very few electrical plants use oil. The oil is mainly used in cars and other forms of transportation, and no cars run on geothermal energy. If you want to get us off oil, you need to develop an electric (hydrogen/biofuel/natural gas) car, not geothermal energy.
What this CAN do is get us off coal energy, which is a worthy goal. But please show you have at least a basic understanding of energy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
any civilian nuke enables weapons programs, because all high level rad facilities share rare, $$ technology.
For instance, it is hard to buy and not have people ask question when you buy equipment for handling high level rad waste if you don't have a civilian program; it is hard to develop medical expertise for high level rad poisining if you don't have a civilian program etc
liberal say: be bold, daring and entrepreneurial - use solar and wind, and use incentives to develop technology to solve issues like load mismatch and storage (midnight in dec, demand in NYC not equal to sunlight in AZ)
I have been here pushing geo-thermal while the solar nut jobs push nothing but that. geo-thermal is by far the best bet to carry us for the next 50 years. We have loads of drilling companies that simply want to sink a hole and make money on it. Well, this is how you do it.
And as to not replacing gas, oil, give me a break. The bulk of oil used in America is for transportation. Electrics are coming. In a big way. Sadly, Detroit is way behind, rather than leading. To avoid having to bail out these idiots we should be encouraging a new breed of car makers. GM and Ford are dead within 5 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
FTFS:
(especially now that nuclear power has suddenly become disproportionately unpopular)
There are lots of problems with this phrase:
1. "especially now" and "suddenly" imply that opposition to nuclear power is something new, rather than something that's had at least rumblings about for over 50 years.
2. "disproportionately" doesn't describe what you're comparing it to. I'm guessing it's the cost of nuclear power, factoring in the average cost per KwH, the incidence of accidents, and the average cost per accident, but that's little more than a guess.
So that little editorial comment seems to read:
"Nuclear power is safe and fantastic, but those environmentalist nutjobs have suddenly convinced everybody to hate it for no good reason."
The more reasonable comment, if you were going to make any general statement at all, would be something like:
"Nuclear power seems to be mostly safe, but environmentalists have convinced many people that it's a bad idea because of a few notable accidents."
Or, you know, you could just leave that out entirely. Knowing where geothermal energy could be a viable source is worth doing regardless of what happens to nuclear power plants.
I am officially gone from
The vast majority of oil use in this country is as a transportation fuel and is only used in a tiny minority of electric generating systems having been phased out for natural gas over the past 20 years. Nor is oil typically used in baseload plants (what geothermal offsets) during the few times it is burned. Therefore, building renewable electric generating systems of any kind (solar, wind, hydro/marine,geothermal) does not offset oil. Renewables offset old coal or the need for new combined cycle gas facilities...or other renewables depending on your capacity expansion assumptions. For geothermal to offset oil you would have to electrify an enormous portion of light vehicle transportation which is only going to happen across many decades given slow turnover in the vehicle fleet and the current limited penetration of EVs in the new vehicles market. Just a pet peeve of mine. Also, nuclear is still coming on strong in the south... at least for Southern Company/Georgia Power's Vogtle expansion
Still think the gases are so bad NOW, Sheila?!?!?
Or free-market/private corporations conducting research.
Why not just deal with it directly so we can fill up cars, trucks, buses, trains and airplanes with MAGMA instead of petroleum products? The waste products are simply heat and rocks. It might be a bit of a problem disposing of warm rocks from an airplane but with little parachutes it shouldn't be a problem.
Handling magma shouldn't be that difficult - sort of a big super insulated coffee mug would be required. Of course, we could get real fancy and move to something like magnetic suspension in a vacuum eventually.
This would also solve power problems for many portable devices by simply using a small Stirling engine running off the heat of a small amount of magma. Of course, proper insulation is going to be required as this brings a whole new dimension to the idea of a hot notebook computer in your lap. But the "battery" life could be a few days instead of only hours. How small could a thermal-to-electric conversion system be? Could we have magma-powered iPhones soon?
I do suggest watching the movie Crack in the World, a 1965 movie about tapping magma for an unlimited source of power for the world. Our friends at Google have made this available to everyone who might be interested.
Way to think myopically again. I'm sure oil harvesting seemed unlimited and inconsequential at one time to many. How about we actually put these technologies into measurable quantities?
And the answer to the question "what is our geothermal potential?" is... Not so great really.
You need much better than 150-200C to run turbines efficiently. Much, much better preferably. And the map shows that most of the areas where efficiency is reasonable, the terrain is... much less so. Not to mention in general being far from population centers, which means significant transmission losses. *And* lacking in water for either injection (open cycle plants) or cooling (closed cycle plants).
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What is the risk of causing earthquakes by injecting water into the geothermal wells?
Deep well injection has caused earthquakes before:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/faq/?categoryID=1&faqID=1
Death
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Dumbasses
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Does anyone know of a similar project for Canada? I'd love to see the data.
Why always dealing with such mega project deep drilling stuff? There are plenty of opportunities to offset a lot of your heating and cooling with low grade geothermal like the "geoair" fellow did with his "citrusinthesnow.com" work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxlrQ5gDdGY
Just to nitpick, Ford didn't take a bailout. GM and Chrysler did.
There's a quote in the article "Conventional U.S. geothermal production has been restricted largely to the western third of the country in geographically unique and tectonically active locations."
If you look at the map, it's abundantly clear why. Until recently, geothermal tech required fairly hot temps to be useful; the map shows that all of the areas where it would work well were predictably in the western third of the country.
Full map direct link at http://www.smu.edu/News/2011/~/media/Images/News/2011/Fall%202011/geothermal-UnitedStates-google-SMUlogo-14oct2011.ashx
-Styopa
Several comments... first, some few people will take control of centralized systems—and several-km-deep systems are going to be large and centralized—and figure out how to make the product artificially scarce to enhance profits. Geothermal of any sort will be a significant improvement, but decentralized energy production would make the planet a far better place for individuals to live. Ask anyone who's unplugged from the grid—they might sleep well at night having saved Earth from drilling/spills/climate change/mountaintop removal/fish kills/mine explosions/mercury poisoning/etc., but they get excited about being independent—not just from OPEC but from large corporations and government.
Second, people misunderstand substitution commodities. Let's take a horribly inefficient proposal: use electricity instead of petroleum for every step of corn ethanol production (tractors, fertilizer, distillation, all of it). Now our cars are fueled by electricity, which can be pumped into the tank anywhere in the country just like gasoline. Corn ethanol IS ridiculous, but there are a lot of ways to produce liquid fuels using electricity that make sense if electricity is cheap and isn't produced at the expense of the environment.
Third, I'd like to see Google actually build some deep facilities, since they have a different motivation than energy companies and speculators. Google certainly causes some unwanted things to happen, but they've offset the MAFIAA, M$ + Apple, and Internet throttlers to some degree for various selfish reasons, but to the benefit of citizens and consumers. Leading the way into deep geo could only help soften the energy oligopoly.
To everyone "arguing" that it will last forever: Watch this video: Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy
Maybe then you'll understand, that NO it will not at all last forever. Because growth is exponential! That means that only 7% growth will mean a doubling every 10 years. And a thousand times more every 100 years. Calculate that using the energy earth needs nowadays, and it will be clear that we will lose our magnetic field way quicker that you think.
Every single approach that is not using renewable 100% environmentally (not just carbon. EVERYTHING.) neutral cycles fueled by sunlight, is thought up by a idiocy-riddled ignorant brain who can't think further than around the next corner/election, and doomed to fail.
There was a town in Euroland, German to be precise, a few years back which suffereed some very serious damage after beginning to use geothermal power. Some how that seems to be a pretty negative side effect.
One of the best and easiest ways to use the temperature of the earth is for passive cooling with convection. There are houses built with south facing attached greenhouses that gather solar energy. The houses are built of rammed earth and bermed earth about 5 feet thick surrounded with high value insulation. This entire thermal mass is heated to 70 degrees (or whatever you pick) and can keep the whole home at that temperature for an entire winter even when it is freezing outside. Here's the geothermal part. When the house gets too warm a skylight opens up in the front of the house where the greenhouse is. In the back of the house insulated covers open up on the ends of about 1 foot diameter tubes which are buried in the earth, pass through the heated thermal mass and insulation and run under the cool earth outside for about 30 feet before surfacing in a cover and screened opening for intake. The hot air goes up and out the skylight. Air is drawn through the tubes and cooled by the earth. Convection climate control. These houses also collect all their own water, reuse it four times and have zero water or sewage output. Greywater through indoor planters, flushes your toilet, to outdoor planters, all converted to harvestable plants. Power from the wind and the sun. Earthships. earthship.org
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png
Notice how amount of oil used to make electricity is NEGLIGIBLE compared to either the total amount of energy used to make electricity or the total amount of oil used. Electricity comes mostly from natural gas, coal, nuclear and hydro (in that order).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
That was done 30 years ago. The Boeing Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) used a kerosine/coal slurry fuel. Increasing fuel energy extends the range of the missile. Coal is nearly twice the density of kerosine, so even though it has slightly less energy per weight, it has a higher energy per volume. So they mixed finely ground coal in with the kerosine, but not to the point it would not pump.
I don't know about everyone else here, but doesn't geothermal energy help produce earthquakes? http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/does-geothermal-power-cause-earthquakes I suppose it matters if you have passive heating/cooling geothermal set up, but the more active energy-generating plants could possibly cause some adverse side effects.
The article is quite misleading "capable of producing more than three million megawatts of green power"
It is hardly "green" (environmentally friendly) - you waste vast quantities of water which comes up radioactive and polluted, and you potentially pollute the water table. A typical "closed" cycle loses 30% of the water on each trip.
Its not sustainable (you suck out the heat within a field within a decade or so) so then you need to move on. Just like mining coal...
Its astonishingly hard to do technologically at a reasonable cost (else why do you not see it more widely used)
And finding hot rocks is the least of the problems - you need the right sort of rock you can frack.
Just because there is squillions of joules of energy underground does not necessarily make it a useful power source.... Another unfortunate truth.
Google has some very smart people on search optimization. They're pretty stupid on everything else.
People need electricity. To run computers and smart phones and wireless and wired networks to use Google in the first place. Along with air conditioners, washing machines, dishwashers, in many places stoves and ovens, coffee makers, and nearly everything else. This electricity use has a near constant floor, and often peaks under really hot days, or really cold ones. The more power people have, the cleaner their water, the less pollution (from burning coal or wood, look at London's transition from hellish coal-smog to fairly nice with modern electricity), and the better their lives are. TED has a video posted on Youtube about how washing machines transformed the lives of ordinary women from total wash-drudgery (all day, laborious) to a casual chore.
Wind requires a lot of carbon to create, kills LOTS of endangered birds particularly raptors, is ugly to look at, and is useless when its really hot and the wind is not blowing. It also does not scale, a small Natural Gas plant can provide the same electricity as say, covering a small county with windmills, and it produces it when the wind is not blowing. Wind is great in Mongolia, where the question is, power when its windy, or no power at all (because no one is going to build powerplants away from mining sites or run transmission lines). The same goes for solar, massively inefficient, useless at night, and requires massive mining pollution just to create the panels and batteries.
Geothermal is another unicorn. A myth not reality -- its located in places that are national parks (Yellowstone, etc) or away from population centers. Its not available for the population centers of the East (you tell Granny she's going to freeze to death because we just can't get geothermal in Boston). It does not SCALE -- the technology to build a cheap (relatively) and efficient Natural Gas or Oil fueled plant exists now, is well understood, and doesn't pose massive risks like nuclear in the case of tsunamis or earthquakes. You can build them big or small, add new generators, and run them day or night, windy or calm. In places where there is no or little geothermal activity.
Google is filled with guys really smart about search who want something for nothing; a unicorn and rainbow world without sacrifice or struggle. They'd laugh at you if you suggested that their search engine results just happen by "magic" without man-decades of sweat, intellectual effort, and tears. They expect however that to happen with energy. Because they want all the nice things that power brings, including their business existing at all, but not the compromises that all that energy at affordable prices bring. In a lot of ways, outside their narrow area of expertise Google is filled with stupid people.
If the whole planet starts using geothermal, are we not simply transferring energy from inside the earth to the surface where it can radiate into space? How long before our precious magnetic field is gone? This story seems familiar........
But seriously, if anyone with a more rigorous physics background than me could give some insight, I am genuinely curious.
Take a VERY close look at the pacific coast. Two things I found interesting.
Note the shape of the USA 50km along the pacific coast, notice how it's all cool until you get to LA. Now go back north to Mendocino. This shape suggests something interesting about the geological activity of the pacific coast. It seems like the true continental edge is 50 km or so away from where the ocean is now.
This is somewhat worrying in that maybe a Tsunami could take out that much coastline.
US energy consumption in the US in 2008 = 26,560 TWh. Of that, 11,710 TWh (11.71 PWh) was from oil (in 2006 because 2008 figures not given).
Estimate of total geothermal energy that can be extracted worldwide = 35GWe - 2,000GWe (with a 10%-23% conversion efficiency). Assuming the high end 23% was used for the 2,000 GWe estimate, therefore 2000/.23 ~ 8,700 GWt. Assuming 100% uptime for the plants (not possible, but it won't matter), that's 24 * 365.25 * 8,700 GW = 76,264 GWh/t maximum worldwide capacity. The US has 9.83M km2 of surface area, which is ~6.6% of the world land surface (149M km2), and 1.9% of earth's total surface area. Being very optimistic, the US might have access to 10% of that maximum geothermal energy, or 7,626 GWh/t and more realistically somewhere between 2% (1,525 GWh/t) and 5% (3,813 GWh/t) of the highest estimate of worldwide geothermal energy possible. All of those are significantly less than our current oil consumption.
Achieving high rates of geothermal energy extraction also requires use of enhanced geothermal systems which have been shown to trigger significant seismic activity, so it's unlikely we can even replace 10% of our oil consumption with geothermal energy.
The only sustainable/renewable sources that can actually provide all the power we're currently using are solar (*1), wind, and nuclear (*2). Other sources such as hydro, geothermal, wave/tidal/ocean, can supply part of the energy we consume, but all such sources combined can't supply even 25% of current worldwide power consumption, therefore, solar, wind, and nuclear have to be the staples of any sustainable energy plan.
Solar and wind both require installation of 3x-5x average demand because they're intermittent sources and because production varies throughout the year. Both require a higher capacity grid that spans multiple countries (or the globe) because they're intermittent. Solar, wind, and nuclear all require some form of energy storage because they don't react quickly to meet peak demand.
So, we have 3 viable primary sources for sustainable energy, all 3 have some significant issues to address. All require major upgrades to the electricity grid. All have environmental and political concerns to address. All have cost and energy storage issues to address. They can be addressed, and it will take time, money, and commitment.
*1 - I'm including biomass/biofuels in with solar, but because of the land, water, and nutrient requirements, I doubt they can contribute a significant portion (> ~10%) of a sustainable energy plan. They're useful mostly for production of liquid fuels for mobile applications.
*2 - The current nuclear power model (uranium fueled fission) without fuel reprocessing is not sustainable, we'll exhaust the uranium in a few thousand years, and it produces far too much radioactive waste. Sustainable nuclear requires transitioning to primarily thorium fueled breeder reactors with fuel reprocessing, or a breakthrough in fusion.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Interestingly there's plate tectonics running pretty much down the Western edge of the entire Americas. Proportionally speaking Central and South America are probably even richer in geothermal resources than the US is. And we all know about Iceland. I wonder what a map like this of Europe and Northern India would look like, and Sichuan province in China. Japan, Indonesia and New Zealand and probably Australia are rich with the stuff. That's like - almost everybody. Maybe free energy has been all around us this whole time.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Interesting map. I guess Alaska isn't part of the US. Neither is Hawaii. Interesting considering Alaska probably has more geothermal potential than the rest of the US put together. Hawaii may be right up there as well as long as Alaska isn't counted, and Google apparently doesn't.
Someday there will be a public outcry against cooling the core and weakening the Earth's magnetic field by excessively mining geothermic energy. Everyone will laugh at first (like now).
Free energy could be the great equalizer of nations, who knows?
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Have they figured out how to make PV elements that over their lifetime generate more energy than the energy required to make them? This is not a troll. I really don't know and want to. Last I checked they hadn't done this, and the issue isn't addressed in your link.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
True, but that is not an inherent flaw of geothermal, they just royally fucked up their geological survey before drilling. Basically, they opened up a watertight layer that had protected a formation of anhydrous gypsum. Water went in, gypsum expanded, ground level rose accordingly... No profit.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I don't know why we are always chasing after these rainbow-colored unicorns.
We haven't even gone after the low-hanging fruit. Most of these fantasy rainbow unicorn solutions are dirtier than their salesman will ever admit. The simplest solutions are usually the best. A glass tube with a black pipe in it... it's cheap to make, doesn't require much energy, and can offset 50% of the electricity we use, since we use about half of all of the electricity we generate to heat water.
They're cheap, reliable, durable, and I haven't needed to pay for hot water in years. I don't even have a backup water heater. I don't need one. The system works even when it is cloudy. It also comes in handy for heating the house in the winter.
We need to chase after cheap, simple solutions. We're allowing government to get duped by snake-oil salesmen into pissing billions of taxpayer dollars down the rabbit hole after these fantasy projects that never pay off. You could put a glass-tube solar hot water heater on 30,000 homes for what the taxpayer wasted on Solyndra - a company selling net energy loss technology.
The "science" is called metallurgy and I was a metallurgist for a few years and I've seen what you think you are describing a few times in a steelworks.
It's called top blowing when oxygen is added to reduce the carbon content and at no point do steel tubes directly contact any molten iron because the stuff is very corrosive to steel - it dissolves almost like sugar in water (although a little bit more slowly) instead of slowly melting like ice. The stuff is coated with refractory materials, which are ceramics that can withstand the conditions and can easily be replaced.
...not the Thorium Web. Thanks for the nerdy tangent, however.
If geothermal sources were affordable to get to, they would already have been exploited. As the population increases, energy needs and costs will increase perhaps bringing geothermal costs within reason to go after. In any case, the cheap geothermal will be had first, and it will get WAY expensive after that because it is just WAY down there. Posts have discussed shipping the energy across the country, but a major major expense will just be drilling the massive holes miles down to get it. You need many holes (tens to hundreds) at each site, each several miles deep. You are talking serious money here, and money historically has always been the reason things are done (or not done). BTW there might be an environmental impact to be considered too; namely, bringing all that heat to the surface and releasing it into the atmosphere is bound to cause global warming.
Synchronizing stop lights across the US = one less nuclear power plant
Geothermal mapping has been happening for decades, publicly and privately funded, in many countries of the world. The potential is real, though the technological challenges are real too (how do you drill a well in rock that's hot enough to turn your drilling fluid super-critical? I work in drilling, and I see it as a whole host of inter-related problems. Which is not saying that it's impossible, just that it's difficult. And therefore it's expensive. Which you've got to make economical within certain energy price ranges.)
Example : USGS map of geothermal potentials, dated 2008 ; a little research will give you ones dated further back for some areas.(This link appears very flaky - I can't get the PDF to download fully, but the cover page implies there are maps there.)
A page with working maps back to 2006.
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