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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)."
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.
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.
About the same as you throwing a small ice chip into a bonfire. Your incredible lack of scale is ASTOUNDING. If you could magically 'pump' heat from the core to the surface or vice versa, there's enough heat energy in the core to LIQUEFY the surface of the earth for thousands of years. Also, the amount we'd be tapping into is an infinitesimal fraction of what the Earth naturally radiates each day.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
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"
There's money in weapons and killing people. (Google "Military Industrial Complex") There's a definite loss of money when it comes to the care and feeding of humanity or of the planet. Geothermal is too close to being "free energy" for most to consider.
Also, for every clean energy source, there will be some asshat that will come along to protest it. Most notably, I recall a story about wind farming being protested because it kills birds. So okay, burning stuff is out. Wind is out. Solar is out because it takes too much room and is too ugly and not to mention how inefficient it is. Nuclear is out because people are scared of it. What's left? Ocean currents? Oh no... that'd somehow imbalance the ocean's eco-system, kill whales or mermaids. How about beaming energy in from space in the form of microwaves? Yeah... no... that's a huge death ray and would probably cause serious problems for people who enjoy popcorn.
Okay, I'm out of ideas.
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.
You do realize that people are in fact living, and thriving, out here in these dark colors, don't you?
Wait... never mind. I've said too much already.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I think it's your own lack of scale that's astounding. There is plenty of heat stored in the earth, but the rock is a very good insulator. Trying to extract too much, and the rock will cool rapidly.
The average geothermal heat flux on the earth is only 0.1 Watt per square meter. That's only 0.1% of the energy that we get from the sun.
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.
The thing is with the vast majority of these systems, the in-ground portion is a closed loop like the radiator in your car. The cooled water is pumped into the ground, which heats it. When it comes up hot its heat is transferred to another medium, that works like a refrigerator but in reverse. In normal operation, no emissions at all.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Not consciously; but wealth is suprisingly reliable at lowering fertility rates(shockingly, constant breeding is apparently not actually what people want) and poverty is less surprisingly reliable at raising mortality rates...
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
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 ...
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.
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!
> 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
According to this guy, we have about 450 years until the oceans boil, no matter where we get the energy from. Scariest. blog. ever.
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
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. ;)
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.
You do realize that we already pipe energy from one side of the country to the other right? The "Long Wires" are for the most part already there. Upgrade, enhancements will be need but the framework is in place.
Actually, we don't. At least not significant amounts.
The USA is essentially 3 main power grids without much interconnection between them (but it's planned).
Check out this map:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398
(turn off the "proposed" lines to see what the grid looks like today)
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
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/
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).
Are you keyword triggered or something?
Thorium is a stupid move. You'd have to start the darn things on reprocessed plutonium anyway, so you may as well go with fast breeders ( The reprocessing step is the major obstacle at the moment ).
Now while there may be some safety advantages with using molten salts as coolant, there is no reason why you could not do that in a fast neutron spectrum with plutonium and uranium. In fact, the latter would probably be easier since you could use much more common and less corrosive salts, like NaCl , MgCl or ZrCl , whereas the thorium versions would use Lithium and Beryllium fluorides.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Once again we encounter this silly notion that most power in the US is used for "people" (residential needs). Residential electricity consumption is just over a third of the total US electricity demand. If power is cheaper in some part of the country, heavy industry and high electricity-consumption commercial will move there. That's why we have so many of our aluminum smelters in the Pacific Northwest, feeding off of cheap hydro. It's why aluminum is Iceland's leading export despite there not being a single bauxite mine in the country.
Furthermore:
A) There are "hot" areas out east as well -- just not as major or widespread. But you honestly don't need much; the total power potential from EGS is so much greater than the demand.
B) You don't have to produce from the hottest areas; it just means more well cost per unit power generated to use a cooler area.
C) Power *can* be shipped cross-country with rather low losses, via HVDC lines. Which are surprisingly affordable; HVDC has a lot of per-terminal cost but a not-unreasonable per-mile cost.
Lastly:
"Get away from the Northeast, the West Coast, and Texas".
In case you didn't notice, the greatest heat potential areas *are* near the west coast.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Yes, there are idiots. So? Even the Audubon Society supports wind power, so long as you do the (required) bird safety studies and best-practices for bird strike amelioration. Bird turbine deaths are a drop in the bucket compared to most anthropogenic bird death causes, even taking into account its currently limited scale. Our worst are glass windows and the raising of housecats, but everything from habitat destruction to hunting to industrial waste ponds to vehicle strikes kills far more birds than wind turbines. The "wind turbines are bird cuisinarts" notion came from one old, specific wind farm, built in as horrible of a location and manner as possible (Altamont Pass). It was from before the bird strike issue was well known. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway, using small, low, closely spaced, fast-spinning turbines whose tower structure was inviting for birds to try to perch on. It was a perfect recipe for disaster, and doesn't apply at all to modern wind farms.
There are some concerns about EGS, mainly about earthquakes; however, the quakes are low-level, and all you're really doing is just accelerating what was going to come naturally. Apart from that, geothermal is about as non-intrusive of a power generation method as you can get -- just a plume of steam rising in the distance. There's even one interesting geothermal approach being pursued out there that eliminates even EGS's problems. Instead of drilling open "wells", then fracking a reservoir, then running water through the reservoir, instead you drill a self-contained water-cooled "heat sink" of thermally-conductive grout. Your water working fluid never touches the rock (only the grout does), so it never takes on corrosive minerals or waste gasses, there's no earthquakes (because there's no fracking), and it works reliably, equally well everywhere in the world with the same heat gradient (instead of just in areas with good potential reservoir rock layers) since you don't have to get water to run through a fracked rock layer in just the right manner (one of the big problems with EGS is that you never really know where your water is going to go once you inject it until you drill the well, frack the rock, cross your fingers and try).
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Take a look at GTherm's technology. No shaft corrosion problems because the water never touches the rock. Heat is transferred to the water by a thermally conductive grout; it's basically a giant underground liquid-cooled heat sink. Which also eliminates the huge problem in EGS of not knowing where your water is actually going to go after you inject it until you physically try it out. Probably the biggest problem EGS has is that you have little control over how the reservoir rock is going to behave. Your injected water could just flow through some unknown cracks into some other layer and be lost for good rather than making it into your recovery well(s). Its just so random. The GTherm approach is for a single modular system that's virtually identical no matter where you put it. All that varies from place to place is the difficulty in drilling through different kinds of rock and the heat/depth profile (aka, in general, how deep you need to go).
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Abundant, low impact power can achieve amazing things in terms of increasing carrying capacity. Iceland will soon be a net *tomato exporter*, for example. They build geothermal power plants, generate power from the water which they use to run lights in greenhouses, and use the waste heat to heat the greenhouses. Super-dense, high productivity grow operations. You can see some examples up north here. Iceland has long been self-sufficient in fish, dairy, eggs, and meat, but is increasingly becoming self-sufficient in vegetables, too. If Iceland can do it, and EGS can bring this kind of abundant heat and electricity to anywhere else in the world, the rest of the world will be able to as well.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
While it's true that a considerable amount of Eastern electricity is derived from Western sources, the "Long Wires" are railroads and pipelines moving coal and natural gas respectively. In very round numbers, 25% of Eastern electricity is generated by burning coal from Wyoming and points farther west. Another 15% or so is generated by burning natural gas from Texas/Louisiana/GOM, the Rocky Mountain region, and western Canada. As others have noted, relatively little electricity is actually moved between the three Interconnect regions in the US, particularly on net.