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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)."
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.
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
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.
the nice thing about geothermal: you're not actual bringing stuff up out of the ground. just heat. similar to sinking a well. local environment *can* me minimally impacted if done right.
Probably about the same time all those wind farms start blowing Earth off it's orbit.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
1: who knows.
2: right now, we'd be talking about substitutional energy. people will use geothermal heat where they'd normally use combustion derived heat. so, unless this enables increases in energy use beyond current expected rates of energy use, the net heat to the environment shouldn't be significantly different. of course, when people have their own private free energy source, I guess they'll use more energy. So there is that.
I hope those questions are a joke. Geothermal wells don't go any where deep enough to reach the core. In fact they remain in the mantle, the top layer of the earth. It's only where the core sends a plume of lava close to the surface that geo-thermal is possible. Removing any large amounts of energy from these plumes will make no difference in the core temperature. (about as much change as a fart in a hurricane).
As for question #2, that is one of the limits to the amount of energy we can use on the surface of this planet, and a limit to growth of the human race.
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"
1. core is VERY VERY deep, not 6km, try 6000km :P
2. it is believed the core of the planet is run on uranium
3. no one knows exactly what causes magnetic field to exist as it does - some say iron core, others say water, etc.
4. question #2, well, -_-
Geothermal energy rises through the surface @ 1W/m2. Solar energy falls on the planet @ 1000W/m2 (more or less). Geothermal is much more reliable source of energy.
Anyway, large scale geothermal will not work. Pumping large amount of heat involves pumping large amount of water. Geothermal can be considered mostly like oil - if you pump it fast enough, your hot spot will become a cold spot. Large scale extraction will also bring about its own problems, like geological instability as thermal stresses move the ground around a bit.
Geothermal assisted heating and cooling for houses is a great idea though, especially if you live out in the sticks or close to large bodies of water. But for power generation, like 10GWe plant, well, not realistic.
1. hahaha, any idea how much heat you are talking about?
2. hahaha, any idea how much heat you are talking about?
Well geologists theorize that the Earth maintains iits liquid interior due to fusion in it's core, which is roughly the size of Mercury. The chance that humans could impact such a large object in an way, is pretty slim. A lot of heat escapes naturally anyway in the form of volcanic eruptions. As for the heat being pumped into the atmosphere, it won't happen. Power stations have cooling towers where the waste steam condenses back to water form and is cleaned and reused.
Really geothermal plants operate just as any other heat driven plants do, by directing super heated water through turbines. The benefit is that you don't have to burn anything to get the steam so it's practically no pollution.
I know the latter will eventually happen by burning fossil fuels, too. However, if we have more energy available, we might accelerate it. Would using solar negate that as the heat from the sun would get here regardless? I don't know. The former would also happen eventually but how much faster would wecause it by using millions of megawatts of geothermal a year? Anyway, some maths to back up our completely-fucked-ness (or un-fucked-ness) would be nice.
-SaNo
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...
Please, for the love of deity, tell me you are joking... geothermal wells are, at most, about 3 km deep. Estimates for the deepest are about 10 km, and that would be terribly, and likely, cost prohibitive.
The earth's OUTER core is 2890 km deep, and the inner core is 5150 km deep. We won't be pumping any heat our of the core, and we certainly won't be pumping enough out to cool it enough for our magnetic field to collapse, unless of course you are in possession of some fantastic new drilling technology that the world has yet not discovered.
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.
realizing the map was taken at 6.5km deep, I guess its not the same as an oil well. average oil well depths are 4000-6000ft, or about 2km. So you'd have to go pretty deep for these, maybe not too similar to sinking a well.
No worries, coal seam fires like this one : http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-11/21/content_7120136.htm , some of which have been burning for decades should keep Dear Old Mother Urth toasty warm.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
It is already leaking out. What do you think those sea floor vents are?
Nuclear reactions are one big source of heat that deep. The scale we are talking at all of humanities energy usage would be a rounding error.
I know it only stays in the crust; but the heat from the core will eventually migrate out of the core, into the mantle, then into our geothermal pumps grasp.
-SaNo
I never said it would be instantaneous. However, if we are looking for long-term solutions, a couple thousand years should be considered in my opinion. (Though, personally, I don't think the human race will survive another couple hundred, but that's another debate.)
-SaNo
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
I know the latter will eventually happen by burning fossil fuels, too.
No it won't. If we burn fossil fuels at today's rate, there are only 30-odd years of fossil fuels left. Even less if our energy needs keep expanding. What you expected it to last forever?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If we pump heat out faster than it escapes naturally (even from the crust, the heat from the core WILL migrate out and cooling the crust will accelerate the heat transfer from the mantle and, in turn, the crust) there will be consequences. Will it be hundreds of years, thousands, millions? That's all I want to know.
-SaNo
I just want to see someone do the math and prove it.
-SaNo
#2: that's already happening. Heat from the core is constantly diffusing into the crust and then the atmosphere. Even with our best efforts, we're not going to change the rate at which that happens by a measurable amount.
This heat is only a small fraction of the heat we get from above, so no worries.
1. The decrease in temperature will contract the core, leaving big caves beneath the crust. All volcanoes will cease activity. Then the dinosaurs will be able to climb up through them and invade us.
2. We'll move inside the giant subterranean caves, which were inhabited by the dinosaurs. We'll sell all their treasures and be rich.
Damn, you're all semantic crazy-people. Burning fossil fuels + fission + fusion + burning baby tears. I'm more asking that if we COULD replace all our current energy sources with geothermal, what is the net outcome either a net gain or loss of excess heat into the atmosphere and from the stuff beneath our feet (core + mantle + crust)
-SaNo
my only worry is the problems I've heard about earthquakes near these things.. i mean sure.. you can power a city, but if it falls over every 2 years because of the increase in activity.. then what?
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.
Fission, not fusion.
The amount of heat leaking out of the core already is MUCH larger than anything added by geothermal power plants, by several orders of magnitude. The surface area of the Earth is huge, which means its thermodynamic coupling to the atmosphere and oceans proportionally high. When you compute the thermal output of a single lava volcano should find that it dwarfs the sum of all deployed geothermal power plants and probably our worldwide energy needs. All of this heat eventually leaks into the atmosphere already except that part that radiates directly into space through the air.
Some geothermal plant designs do have problems. For example, those that tap directly into hot water and release it as steam can introduce some poisons (arsenic, acids, salts) from underground that build up in the nearby topsoil, which will kill local plants and produce a small "toxic" dump. However, there are other designs that could use a temperature gradient to run a thermodynamic engine, such as the SustainX compressed air energy storage idea:
http://ecogeek.org/component/content/article/3620
While that is mostly for storing energy, if there were a sufficiently steep temperature gradient (boiling hot ground to ice cold water) then such a storage engine could exceed 100% "efficiency" and produce positive power without leaking any undrground water into the environment.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
There's always this one too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derweze
Not really worried about heat death, we're (the human race) won't be around when it happens anyways.
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?
Here's a fascinating thought experiment that might interest you: What is cold weather?
It's so easy to say that cold weather is the movement of cold air, but that's wrong. "Cold" is not a force or some sort of negative energy that gets applied during winter. Cold is what happens when, if even for a moment, we stop getting enough sunlight to make up for the energy that's lost to space. Every single winter of every single year (and remember that summer on one hemisphere is winter on the other), huge swaths of the planet are losing energy to space. It's enough to bring the frost line of soil down several feet just in the northern US--I'd hate to think how deep it penetrates in Canada.
There is no comparison of the surface area affected by severe winters to the surface area of geothermal wells, and as such, there is no comparing the energy loss between the two.
And keep in mind, nobody's suggesting drilling into the mantle, let alone the core. That's known as a volcano. We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well. And the crust of the earth is so remarkably thin compared to the size of the mantle... well, I'm not sure we'll have to worry about it for millenia if not more.
I guarantee that many many many many many many generations from now, the kids of the kids of the people of that time will not have to worry about it.
I think you need to get a grip on scale.
The chance that humans could impact such a large object in an way, is pretty slim.
This argument sounds familiar for some reason ...
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"?
Wait, this question was serious? The heat from the mantle will eventually migrate upwards anyways. And turning it into electricity won't introduce more heat into our atmosphere than we already are from burning coal/ natural gas. Considerably less so, especially without any CO2 production.
Geothermal can last a long, long time. Although I should point out that scharkalvin is wrong (about this one): Google's EGS plan doesn't use geothermal plumes like most geothermal power does, it just uses the Earth's natural heat at about 6.5km down (which occurs everywhere to various degrees.) Hence, the gradient map.
Oh, and lest we forget, sun unleashes something like 1*10^17 joules of energy on the Earth per second. It would take an absolute shitload of geothermal stations, probably more than we could ever effectively build, to add any considerable amount to that.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If we don't figure out an energy solution better than geothermal in "a couple thousand years" I don't think we deserve to survive.
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!
And all the time you burn oil and mine uranium to get energy.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Already done, a poster further up showed how much heat we lose to space vs human energy usage.
> 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
"Eventually" means "millions of years".
It might be possible to tap out a geothermal well, cooling it down faster than the local heat sources can put more heat in. But the effect will be limited to the top crust, not even reaching the bottom crust, much less the mantle or the core.
Yes, in a technical sense it will eventually affect those things, too, but not in any way you'd be able to measure for millions of years. If we find a way to take out energy faster than that, everything in technology will change anyway.
The greenhouse effect dwarfs any direct changes we could make in generating heat. So, if we could replace burning fossil fuels with geothermal, we would slow down the global warming due to CO2 greenhouse effect.
According to this guy, we have about 450 years until the oceans boil, no matter where we get the energy from. Scariest. blog. ever.
Citation please? If you've used any numbers at all to derive that, you've extrapolated a curve based on the assumption that it's exponential. If that couple next door that had a baby 3 years ago, and twins 2 years after that continues the trend, they'll have 16000 children by the time she reaches menopause. What, praytell could we be neglecting in our analysis of these trends?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
LOL! yeah, and the ISS is causing all the hurricane storms of late
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
Who let Al "several million degrees" Gore onto Slashdot?
It's not as bad as fossil fuels for 2 reasons: (a) some of that heat would already be entering the biosphere (and we are just using it for useful work now), and (2) greenhouse gas effects massively dominate direct thermal output of any of our power generating methods (and geothermal shouldn't release any such gases).
However, it is not as good as solar (which doesn't introduce any new heat or greenhouse gases).
On a side note, the core produces something on the order of a few terawatts of energy. Human consumption is on the order of ~15 terawatts. You are right that we cannot expect geothermal to give us everything we need, but a few hundred relatively shallow wells can't have much effect on overall core temperature. If we started talking thousands, or very deep wells then we might have a problem. But not for a while.
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."
The atmosphere has about 1/1000 of the mass of the outer (molten) core. Temperature is average energy per unit mass. So if you want the average global temperature up by 100 Kelvin so all the water boils off, that'll involve transferring enough energy from the outer core to lower it by, 0.1 Kelvin? (Except that obviously the crust and oceans are absorbing heat from the air...still, the oceans and surface are pretty light compared to the core, too, so you get a number more like 10 K cooler core = boiling surface. 10K being enough to freeze a bunch of the outer core, but not to the point of magnetosphere collapse) So, 2 happens well before 1. But does 2 happen? No. Geothermal heat is no different than coal heat or nuclear heat. It heats the air, but the air is in thermal equilibrium with the sun, and so being hotter means it emits more energy (blackbody radiation, yo) and cools off, balance is restored. It gets complicated because hotter air alters the vapor pressure equilibrium with surface water, so that means more clouds (higher atmospheric albedo, so less solar radiation absorbed by the surface) but it also means more water vapor in the air (as a polar molecule, water lets most sunlight through unmolested, but when the blackbody infrared from the surface/air hits it, it gets absorbed and remitted so a portion of the spaceward infrared ends up coming back to the surface, further mucking up the nice simple thermal equilibrium equations in a non-linear manner, which frankly is just plain rude). But unless we start replacing gigawatt powerplants with 1000 terrawatt geothermal stations, it's not going to alter the average air temperature. Because we're already emitting heat, and it doesn't do a damn thing to the temperature. More or less the atmosphere is in equilibrium, and adding energy directly cannot disrupt that equilibrium.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Nickel-iron fission, right? Sigh ... the whole thing is a big spinning metal magnet orbiting another big spinning metal magnet. The torque created rotates the core. Don't you think a spinning core would produce a lot of heat from friction?
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The earth is about one trillion cubic kilometers big, and most of that is molten. Volcanoes have spewed up rivers of liquid rock for billions of years. You tell me whether it's negligible. ;)
Wolfram Alpha says: mass of the earth / (mass of the atmosphere) = 1.2 x 10^6.
Basically:
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
Umm, no. there are 100's of years of fossil fuels. see:Coal.
The issue is it's changing the planet and poisoning us.
And probably 100 years of oil.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Oil well depths vary greatly from field to field. It's not uncommon to see 12,000ft wells in most places around the country. Some areas in Wyoming are even hitting 25,000ft wells deep into the Madison Formation. It really depends on the formations and the field.
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. But light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Imagine sucking the entire world's ocean through a straw.
Now, imagine that the ocean extends through the entire thickness of the planet, instead of only a few thin kilometers.
Now you understand how little effect geothermal could possibly have.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We don't really have materials to safely handle that sort of well.
It's called steel. You pump a liquid coolant at high pressure through a steel lance to keep the temperature down below the melting point, and run the coolant through a mechanically cooled heat sink. Cool the cold side of the system with a big tower (boiling water) or a big surface ground sink (-10C, but needs massive surface area so a tower is going to work better).
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This whole boiling our oceans thing is silly. Sapping the heat percolating up from core and subsequent layers isn't going to add any heat to the surface/atmosphere. That heat is already getting out, it just happens to be over a more dispersed area, namely the whole bloody surface where it eventually radiates into space. All GTE is doing is channeling that already escaping energy into a heat sink so that it can be used to perform work. The worst anyone could come up with would be creating localized heat islands that "could" impact weather patterns. However, we're already accomplishing this through combustion and fission power sources. We're already doing this through the aggregation and expenditure of energy in our cities.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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
Removing any large amounts of energy from these plumes will make no difference in the core temperature. (about as much change as a fart in a hurricane).
I lived through a hurricane once in a small beach house. Someone in the house farted and conditions suddenly were far worse for all of us.
If what you say is true, then the entire earth will take on a distinct odor of brimstone if this plan continues.
How about some numbers? Underestimating scale is what humans do. You are going with a'gut feeling'; which is a stupid way to approach this.
How much geothermal needs to be moved in order to get 30 PWh of energy..yes PWh.
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I've always had two issues with articles on geothermal
I've always had two issues with people on /.: their complete lack of mathematical and physical literacy and awareness of scales.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It's a possibility... if nobody is looking for an alternative. Look at alternative power today. If people weren't all up in arms about oil, the research money wouldn't be spent on something we didn't want (because we have oil...)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
" Even with our best efforts, we're not going to change the rate at which that happens by a measurable amount."
http://tinyurl.com/4ybhdw8
don't underestimate human ability to change the world..
Just so you know, to replace current energy need with geothermal, we would need about 30PWh per year. So, how much geo thermal heat is that?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Yes extrapolating 2 data points in 3 years into an exponential curve to curve out to 30 years would be silly. Extrapolating 400 years of data out another 400 years is less silly.
The economy is based on 2-3% annual growth, so if that exponential curve doesn't continue we are all screwed anyway.
Imagine sucking the entire world's ocean through a straw.
Not quite a straw, but today's xkcd seems to be pumping it all into Narnia through a wardrobe: http://xkcd.com/969/
It's not just the heat of the magma (although I think you're underestimating that); it's also pressure. As soon as you breach the mantle (if not before), violently hot molten rock is going to have a place it can go where it can relieve the pressure of miles of rock sitting on it.
Keep in mind the forces you're talking about. Volcanoes don't throw out tons of ash and molten rock because it wants to fly. Tons and tons of material are given upward momentum because of pressure from below.
(IANAGeologist)
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?
Negligible is simply a matter of scale.
A couple hundred years ago, the effects from burning fossil fuels in a few industrially advanced population centers around the world were negligible. Today, not so much.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
A hurricane has about 6e14 W. You might be able to create somewhere around 8kJ/day if you found a way to harness all your gas. That's about 1e-1 W. That's a difference of 15 orders of magnitude.
The earth has geothermal energy of about 1e31 J. 15 orders of magnitude less than that is 1e16J. That's less than what Zimbabwe uses annually. The core is radioactively replenished at 30TW. As of 2007 there was already 10GW of geothermal electric capacity. That's only 4 orders of magnitude. So no, it's not a fart in a hurricane. I am flabbergasted by these findings. I thought for sure you were right.
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).
Please somebody find an error in my math or science. I would hate for this to be true.
You misunderstand. Geothermal flux from the core to the surface is about 30TW, without any use of geothermal reactors.
Now, imagine we capture a part of that energy, say 3TW, convert it to electricity, and use that electricity for light and motors. Most of that 3TW is going to end up as heat, just as it was before we harvested it.
So, we're not going to change that 30TW heat source in any significant way.
See elsewhere from other posters for numbers. The original questions were silly, and deserving of equally silly answers.
If I am underestimating scale, that means that using geothermal is even LESS of problem than I am implying. Basically geekoid, I think you and I are on the same page, that there is essentially no way that we are going to cause the oceans to boil or our core to stop spinning by using geothermal.
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Umm, no. there are 100's of years of fossil fuels. see:Coal.
[citation needed] But that's ok I will provide them.
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
Second, yet another person who doesn't know how to divide. According to the US government, there are about 2.75 x 10^11 short tons of coal in the US. That 275 billion tons may seem like a lot. Now consider that the US currently is consuming (again according to the US government) over a billion tons a year. That means that at current levels of production, there are under 275 years worth of coal left. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?
Now consider that US coal production is not fixed but is growing every year - and will grow even faster when oil starts getting seriously expensive because it's running out, and you have far less than 275 years remaining. In fact you may not even have 100 years remaining. Especially when you also consider your population is doubling every 50 years or so. Who cares, in 100 years we will all be dead right? Yeah, but when it's gone, it's gone forever.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
OK, flawed analogy. It's not the number of data points. The takeaway was supposed to be that there are constraints. Society's "womb" can't crank out that many "babies".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Say, about 20 TW, depending on the efficiency of the process. Could be as high as 30 (quite possible, but not too likely), or as low as 10 (barely possible).
So, yes, we'd be extracting it faster than it was being generating it within a very short time.
Or does everyone really think that China, India, and the rest of the world are going to continue to live in squalor just so we can maintain our standard of living?
As to how long before it's a problem? A few million years, probably.
Note that the above assumes no fundamental problems with geothermal. Nothing unforeseen, like, say, AGW (which certainly wasn't foreseen when we began burning coal centuries ago).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Might.
On the other hand, don't you think there might be a metric buttload of uranium down there, doing radioactive decay for billions of years?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The original question is pretty silly given the heat capacity and current heat generation rate. The question about environmental impact of removing large amounts of wind energy are not nearly as silly. Assuming you ignore the birds and bats, just a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the energy contained in the atmosphere up to about 150 feet and the amount you might take out of it suggests you can't just dismiss the issue entirely. Depending on the density of the windmills it certainly seems possible to affect the weather locally.
You will note that Google is busy pushing Electric cars as well as electric trains and planes. So, yes, geothermal CAN if we do multiple things.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Hey! What's this post from 30 years ago doing here in 2011?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Death
Taxes
Dumbasses
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How large of earthquakes? If you are talking about 6 on up, then it is MINOR chance. It is really only possible if you have unknown fault lines and inject into those.
. Why do I say this? Because we have been injecting CO2 into the ground for decades. Now, if you look at the CO2 injection, you will find that there are LOADS of earthquakes from it. Down in Ms,Mi, Ak, and Lo, they are having constant 2-4's and they are believed to be caused by CO2 injection.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The answer to both is never, because the Sun will expand and eat the Earth before either effect is measurable.
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
You can convert coal into gasoline and diesel via several coal liquefaction processes. Germany did it during WW2 when they got into oil supply problems.
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This is the part that never makes sense to me about Global climate change. How can we do one thing and not affect the earth, but do another and destroy it?
This is the part that never makes sense to me about social relations. How can I do one thing and not affect anybody, but do something else and kill somebody?
Yeah and look where it got them. I'm not saying it can't be done - it can. This does not create new energy. In fact, it consumes even more energy than before.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I don't want to sound like a dink, but isn't it called magma when it's below the crust, and only lava when ejected?
Just to nitpick, Ford didn't take a bailout. GM and Chrysler did.
"Eventually" means "millions of years".
Yes, and "millions" means "hundreds."
And all that use of solar energy is going to burn out the sun faster!
Ok forgive me for being completely ignorant of planetary physics but... if it's experiencing friction shouldn't it slow down eventually?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Damn, you're all semantic crazy-people.
Welcome to /. ;)
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
But by burning coal and releasing CO2 in the atmosphere we are negatively affecting the earth? This is the part that never makes sense to me about Global climate change. How can we do one thing and not affect the earth, but do another and destroy it?
You have this huge heat source, the Sun which keeps the Earth warm. The theory is that increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere is like throwing on a blanket. It's harder for heat to radiate to space and the Earth grows a bit warmer in response until the heat radiated into space once again balances the heat that reaches Earth from the Sun.
I'm sure there will be unexpected consequences to tapping the earth for geothermal power. They are probably not as bad as CO2 gas, but they should be studied now. This is why we are in the mess we are in now. We take new technology and use it until we have a problem. Then we realize there is no easy solution to get out of the problem that has been caused.
Except by innovating new solutions. That route works pretty well. Geothermal power is actually fairly well known. It's been around a while (used by the Icelanders for centuries, for example).
As I recall, the biggest problems with it are 1) that it is partly a depletable resource (the long term power generation capacity is something like half the short term), 2) a lot of toxic metals and corrosive salts get into the working fluid (typically water) resulting in a variety of environmental and maintenance issues, and 3) if there are any natural geothermal features about, geothermal power generation tends to rob them of heat.
According to the article that provided wikipedia with the 30TW number:
If we're just capturing heat that would be radiated away from Earth anyway, then we'd hit a hard limit above X TW, but we wouldn't cool the Earth at an accelerated pace because we're not digging deep enough to change the conduction of heat outside a localized area.
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
about as much change as a fart in a hurricane
Yes, but imagine a fart for every man, woman, and child, all at the same time in the same hurricane. Not because it counters your statement--just because it is funny to imagine.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
But how can we be sure that geothermal power won't cause something more drastic.
Two reasons. First, we can see how much heat it releases into the atmosphere versus other sources like solar. That incidentally gives many orders of magnitude less heat effect from geothermal than for solar. Similarly, there's a vast heat content in the Earth's core which we can't scratch. (For example, the energy leaked or released from the Yellowstone hotspot over millions of years (including massive caldera eruptions) probably is more than sufficient on its own to power the US. And it is a negligible source compared to what's down there.) Second, we can see the effects of all the geothermal projects we've done to date.
One problem off the top of my head is massive cooling of the oceans messing with weather patterns and cooling off large parts of the world increasing our dependence on geothermal heat, which will spiral out of control freezing the earths surface?
We call that sort of thing an "ice age" and yes, it is a long term problem, but not one that is going to be affected by geothermal power.
Yes, eventually. The idea is that since it's magnetic (through the virtue of spinning), it's affected by magnetic fields. Since the sun is magnetic (and god damn BIG), it's going to affect the object orbiting it.
We know the core rotates, and we know the earth orbits the sun. No sane physicist (or grade schooler that took third grade science) is going to argue that spinning molten metal is magically frictionless--lubricated by being molten, maybe (at pressure it could be a SOLID core, but if it spins there is a molten layer or at least gravel--but metal gravel would eventually mash together and weld from heat and pressure, and besides we've done testing with P-waves and S-waves and fancy science to determine that there's a large liquid core), but lubrication is not frictionless.
In short: there IS friction.
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Makes sense to me; we won't be cooling the core at any usage level below 30TW. If we were directly tapping the core, and there were no radioactive replenishment, the thermal energy comes to about 20,000,000,000 years at current usage levels. I'm not sure where along the line we would run into magnetic field problems, but it will be way after I'm dead, so it doesn't matter. Still, not a fart in a hurricane. ;-)
I think it would be a net reduction in heat into the atmosphere because geothermal energy is already getting out but isn't serving any useful purpose when it does. So, using what gets out for useful purposes and then cutting back on the stuff we use to generate energy already will mean less extra heat pumped into the atmosphere. Secondly, less heat because fewer greenhouse gasses are released in the process of obtaining energy, so less retained heat.
Thirdly, on your whole catastrophic scenario thing - the sun pelts the earth with some ridiculous amount of energy constantly. The human race uses something like 15 terawatts (that's 1.5x10^13 watts) per year. The sun hits us with something like 1.2x10^17 watts per *second*. So, every second, we're absorbing 4 orders of magnitude (roughly) more energy from the sun than we release in a year, and have been doing so for several billion years, and our oceans haven't boiled away yet; therefore it seems logical to assume that being more efficient about energy use would delay or be irrelevant to oceanic boiling.
Mind you, these are just my own guesses based off of not being a complete idiot and having a vague understanding of how things work from my distant high school past, with any numbers used being pulled from my memory or being the easiest ones picked up from a quick googling.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I doubt Henry Ford knew he was causing one of the largest natural disasters ever.
I doubt we know that either.
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.
There's plenty of heating effects down there. Tidal forces, fission of uranium and thorium,, and the initial heat of the formation of the Earth are the three main ones.
But calling climate change a "disaster" is a big stretch. This false certainty is what I was referring to in my previous post.
That one's still burning? I thought Red Adair had slammed the shut the Door to Hell.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Actually, mankind must be content with the knowledge that we haven't drilled into the Earth's mantle yet; we're still poking around in the crust. I believe the current record is about 12.3 km depth in the Al-Shaheen field in Qatar - the depth to an oil reservoir. 12.3 km is MUCH deeper than any current geothermal well and still within the Earth's crust.
Granted, the base of the crust may be as shallow as ~7-10 km (oceanic crust), and we certainly have samples of mantle material (e.g. kimberlites and other volcanoes - though often with crustal contamination), we just haven't haven't drilled down through the transition from crust to upper mantle yet.
As a complete side note, if you ever get a chance to handle and iron meteorite you're actually holding a piece of the core of a small planet that was destroyed.
It is unlikely that Governor Tarkin played any role in its destruction.
Does your "back of the envelope" calculation take into account that the human race has basically denuded HUGE swaths of the globe of their natural tree cover?
Before Columbus a squirrel could go from what was Savannah GA to what would be Chicago (or go back another couple thousand years, from Paris to Moscow if you prefer European Geography) and never touch the ground..
Think about how that affects wind currents as they move across the globe...
If anything, windmills bring things closer to an natural state, not farther.
Depends on how it's done, some plants inject water into the ground and then run the steam that comes out through a turbine. Occasionally those turbines need to be cleaned and that's when a lot of arsenic and other nasty shit gets brought to the surface.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
The sun is going to die first before we extract all the heat out of the Earth, basically (I think the Sun has what, 6-9 billion years left?). And when it becomes a red giant, it's going to expand so big it'll encompass earth's orbit. Even then, as we get close the sun will make the earth rather hot to live on.
Basically, it's a free for all - the planet will be long uninhabitable before the core cools down... though the magnetic field is a still a question.
Any electric car can run on coal. Small electric planes can too.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
First, I dare you to design coal-powered cars and airplanes.
That's pretty much where electric cars get their power, isn't it?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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 reply.... motivated by distrust of nuclear energy!
A FART you say? That's not so bad.... At least it's not a single BUTTERFLY flapping its wings. Now THAT could ruin your whole hurricane experience!
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'm not sure if any oil gas or geothermal wells go deep enough to reach the upper layers of the mantel or not. You're probably right about the crust layer.
If you take a look at the Google map, all the hot spots are near volcanic areas of the country. This includes all hot springs, and many fault zones. The source of this heat is ALWAYS a magma plume rising from the core to the earth's surface. These plumes are what carry the earth's natural heat to the surface. So I'm NOT wrong about the source of the geothermal energy.
That article is fundamentally flawed. It points to 2.3% per year increase in energy use in the US and ignores the population growth over the same period. In fact energy use per person has remained around 12 kW since about 1970. Homes are larger, but they are also better insulated. Vehicles and industry are more efficient. So while total energy use has gone up, energy per person has plateaued. If population growth in the US stopped, so would total energy use.
Now, world population is expected to level out around 10 billion. If everyone used energy at the USA rate, that would require 120 TW, or 8 times what we use today. The question is where can you get that much, and what are the side effects?
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.
It's not cold, it's just un-hot.
It is more worrying that someone like you knows how to find slashdot.org.
#include bier;
Nobody has ever drilled as deep as the mantle and the depth record is held by the Russians and is a lot less than most people would think. Wikipedia will help.
Sounds good with very limited knowlege but reality gets in the way. Steel and liquid metals at any temperature (eg. mercury or potassium at room temperature) do not get on very well :) There's good reasons why crucibles are lined with other stuff.
There seems to be masive amounts of confidence coupled with ignorance going around at the moment. Physics doesn't care how loudly you shout, it just goes and does what it does.
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.
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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.
Well science uses submerged steel rods to regulate molten steel when making the stuff. Steel is made by plunging a steel rod into a furnace filled with high-carbon-content iron ore. This rod has coolant pumped through it, and is used to inject 99% pure oxygen into the furnace. This injection causes the carbon in the iron to ignite and burn, which raises the temperature immensely. Eventually the liquid metal is nice and hot and well tended and well reacted and mixed with all the alloying materials added to it, and the steel rod is pulled from the molten mess.
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Do you? There's pretty solid evidence that there is global warming and decent evidence that humans are the cause of most of it. But to jump from that knowledge to calling it a "disaster" is unwarranted.
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
You confuse power with energy.
You confuse mentioning two different things with confusing two different things. I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm not likely to confuse power with energy, like most laymen. I mention both power and energy with appropriate units for each, but I only compare amounts of energy to energy and amounts of power to power. I also compare power to rate of energy usage, but that is consistent, and in fact, you did the same exact thing. I, too, noticed in another post that we'd get about 20 billion years of power from the extant thermal energy (assuming we don't increase our energy usage). Still, a fart in a hurricane is at best 15 orders of magnitude. That was what I was trying to check.
I thought it was small, too, but then you have to think about the small quantities of radioactive isotopes. There's just not a lot of the stuff out there, and each decaying particle only puts out a tiny amount of energy. I got the 30TW number from here. I think the more interesting point is that the heat is going to flow anyway, so it's a good thing for us to tap it on its way out.
I make it 1,083,206,916,845 km^3 ... so yeah about a "trillion", depending on your meaning of "trillion".
But while almost all of it varies from "hot" to "very hot", only around 25% of it is anything like "molten", comprising the outer core (which stops the transmission of seismic shear waves) and the vastly larger asthenosphere which is without (Gk "a-" prefix) strength (Gk "sthenos" root) which may have up to several volume-% of melt in it. The rest is solid for all practical (human) intents and purposes.
The phase diagrams of most common rock-forming minerals have melting take place at higher temperatures when under higher pressures. The common, everyday example that most people intuit from is water, and it's phase diagram (for modest near-surface pressures) is not like this. But water is a very unusual substance.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
**facepalm**
I hope that response is a joke... /. now?
Oh cruel irony.
Lava monsters posting on
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