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Pouring Water Into a Volcano To Generate Power
Hugh Pickens writes "Until recently, geothermal power systems have exploited only resources where naturally occurring heat, water, and rock permeability are sufficient to allow energy extraction. Now, geothermal energy developers plan use a new technology called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) to pump 24 million gallons of water into the side of the dormant Newberrry Volcano, located about 20 miles south of Bend, Oregon, in an effort to use the earth's heat to generate power. 'We know the heat is there,' says Susan Petty, president of AltaRock Energy, Inc. of Seattle. 'The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic.' Since natural cracks and pores do not allow economic flow rates, the permeability of the volcanic rock can be enhanced with EGS by pumping high-pressure cold water down an injection well into the rock, creating tiny fractures in the rock, a process known as hydroshearing. Then cold water is pumped down production wells into the reservoir, and the steam is drawn out. Natural geothermal resources only account for about 0.3 percent of U.S. electricity production, but a 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology report projected EGS could bump that to 10 percent within 50 years, at prices competitive with fossil-fuels. 'The important question we need to answer now,' says USGS geophysicist Colin Williams, 'is how geothermal fits into the renewable energy picture, and how EGS fits. How much it is going to cost, and how much is available.'"
Why not throwing the waste there instead of the landfill?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
What could possibly go wrong . . .
All your database are belong to U.S.
I didn't RTFA, but with our projected water shortages coming in the future do we really want to be pumping millions of gallons for energy? Surely there's a better way to get usable energy.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I think the only nice power-related invention humans made (that seems to be harmless) is solar power.
Yes! Let's cover miles and miles of land with solar panels, that's totally not messing with nature!
They've been there, done that:
http://www.punageothermalventure.com/
A 30 MW plant producing heat and energy from the world's most active volcano. An 8 MW addition was just approved, and the utility (HELCO) is looking to expand even further:
http://www.hawaii247.com/2012/01/06/helco-announces-plans-to-expand-geothermal-energy-on-the-big-island/
If there is an area that has a shot at 100% of their electricity from non-petroleum sources, it's the Big Island, with abundant wind, solar and geothermal options.
Wouldn't this cause it to rain more? Fuck rain.
In the long run the universe will achieve heat death.
If you find this post offensive, don't read it! THINK ABOUT YOUR BREATHING! I am what I am because of how apes behave.
Something totally unforseen is going to happen
we are so carelessly messing with this planet in so many ways that, it is just a matter of time until something goes really haywire. and, for such stuff, once is enough.
do we know whether volcanoes are connected to any other volcano through any kind of crustal dynamics ? no. have we mapped the entirety of crustal dynamics below ANY volcano up till this date ? no. we cant even drill that deep near a volcano.
we dont know a lot of shit. current situation resembles an early 19th century scientist researching in electricity and chemistry and being haphazard in his experiments. the difference is, when things went wrong, what would happen in that case would happen to the scientist's persona or at most his house. in the case of planet, it will affect us all.
this is not how science is done. or rather, this is not science at all - this is engineering, trying to preempt science. its as if trying to make an electric car without even knowing how to make an electric motor.
Read radical news here
sue, and do what, exactly ? gain a $5 bn award in damages ? after a volcano erupts, kills a few thousand, poisons a few more million mildly through what it releases ?
what happened when bp fucked up the entire mexico gulf ecosystem ?
Read radical news here
Sounds like someone took The Day After Tomorrow a little too seriously...
Seriously, though, any method of producing energy will necessarily have a negative impact on something. Here in Norway, we have a lot of "clean" hydropower, but that has always faced opposition from environmentalists worrying about salmon and other fish, and from the native Sami people in the north. If you want to reduce global CO2 emissions, you are inevitably going to damage something else in some way. It is always a tradeoff, trying to find the least total negative impact.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
...is also useful to generate cobblestone, especially on some pvp maps.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
Seriously.
Underground plant. Cover the entire area. Extract all that delicious heat.
Replace natural features of the landscape caused by the heat with more efficient, focused artificial reactions. (such as the geyser,)
The amount of energy underneath there is HUGE. There is no reason not to.
And if done right, it could cool rocks over time and push back that large bubble that could pop at any time.
With a dynamic design to the heat pipes so they could be pushed down further, it could potentially push it back for good.
Those park owners really are stupid. They'd rather see the entire park vaporize than see themselves make huge amounts of money and STILL HAVE A PARK.
Has anyone stopped to wonder what the long term effects of the cooling of this active volcano by pouring hundreds of millions of water in it might be?
Yeah, let us engage in elaborate engineering works to discover the geological consequences of fracking with 'dormant' volcanoes -- what a valuable learning experience. Spend untold millions over 50 years to go for that grail of 10% electrical production.
Meanwhile, 103 out-dated nuclear power plants are presently generating 20% of the whole grid, TODAY. With state-of-the-art designs, some up-scaling nuclear could generate 101% of the grid TOMORROW (ok well, let's say 10-15 years...)
The thing never discussed along with geothermal energy potential is the highly corrosive environment that the turbines must work with. The thing never discussed along with wind potential the laughably impossible task of keeping enough generators working at any one time -- to accomplish anything other than fleecing the customer and keep the subsidies flowing.
Photonic Solar Energy does not scale, and the first climate/volcanic cloud cover event is the end of civilization. The only way solar could scale to current demand (and penetrate cloud cover) is if it were captured in geosynchronous orbit and beamed to earth stations in a diffuse beam of microwaves. But then you have a SINGLE entity in control of world power generation which is another name for 'one world government' -- any takers?
These alternative-to-nuclear energy methods are mental lollipops to suck on while we delay making a decision. Success and survival if we go nuclear, failure and endless war over oil if we don't.
Note to human race: go seriously nuclear soon alreay, or die.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
There were apparently theories that the upper atmosphere was uncombined hydrogen
and oxygen, and that there was a chance a V2 going high enough would set it off.
Lotta nerve there.
The article describes a closed loop system, not one where they'd be simply dumping water down the pipe continuously from an infinate supply. Some volume of water is being pumped down, the water heated by the rock, the energy extracted, and then that same water being sent back down through the loop.
The results of that review have not yet been announced, but the type of geothermal energy explored in Basel and at the Geysers requires fracturing the bedrock then circulating water through the cracks to produce steam. By its nature, fracturing creates earthquakes, though most of them are small.
I live near The Geysers, where "treated" sewage water is pumped into the ground in order to keep geothermal production up at the powerplant, which is perpetually over budget and under production, and which has produced a superfund site where they formerly buried the spray-off from the turbine wheels in drums. The turbines are produced by Halliburton — I've seen the red Halliburton truck dragging one up Bottle Rock Rd. on a massive flatbed. Failure all around... the one bright spot is that there is a process for making claims for damage due to the euphemistically-named "microseismicity" as it is generally accepted that the pumping causes quakes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Volcano God plenty angry now. Flatten peasants' puny city.
Have gnu, will travel.
Humans are cancer of the Earth!
Humans are the most interesting thing to have ever happened to Earth. So there's some ecological damage? That's a small price for what's going on.
pick a volcano near the coast, capture the steam, and you have electricity AND pure water. another benefit
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Forget everything you've heard about carbon. Water vapor will be the poster child for environmental disaster in 2025.
The governments will pay use big time to not use this plant at all now get ready to die.
So, what happens when the volcano decides that it doesn't like the cold shower, and erupts much like Mount St. Helen did a few years ago... :-( I think I can spell "exothermic reaction".
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
When the person representing the corporation in charge says something like this:
"We know the heat is there," said Susan Petty, president of AltaRock.
"The big issue is can we circulate enough water through the system to make it economic."
And the expert seismologist says something like this:
We've been monitoring [The Geysers] since 1975.
All the earthquakes we see there are [human] induced.
When they move production into a new area, earthquakes start there, and when they stop production, the earthquakes stop.
Well... You kinda have a reason to fear.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Unlike the continental US, Hawai'i doesn't benefit from a geographically diverse grid. When it's cloudy, it's cloudy over all of Hawai'i. When it's not windy, it's not windy anywhere. An oversimplification to be sure, but fundamentally the continental US has much more diverse weather at any given time [plus many more total hours of sunlight], which means that it's not subject to the wild swings of non-dispatchable weather-impacted renewables that Hawai'i is.
Hawai'i can and should get lots of it's energy needs from renewables. However, they need to be able to dispatch, so either storage or fossil or a boat load of biomass or concentrated solar thermal, as the fixed costs of geothermal generally make it inappropriate for anything but base load.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Humans are cancer of the Earth!
Humans are the most interesting thing to have ever happened to Earth. So there's some ecological damage? That's a small price for what's going on.
Maybe it would interesting to know if the Earth shares your opinion...
And you may not like my comment, but :
My comment is the mos interesting comment to have ever been posted to /.. So you get annoyed? That's a small price for what's going on?
Why can't
A more efficient means of generating alternative energy would be to install a system of pusher plates along active fault lines connected to generators. Since natural seismic activity is not reliable enough; small controlled nuclear explosions could maintain a constant state of seismic activity. The best part is that there are many active faults near dense urban areas; so infrastructure would not be a problem.
Maybe it would interesting to know if the Earth shares your opinion...
It would be, if only because the Earth had an opinion to share.
My comment is the mos interesting comment to have ever been posted to /.. So you get annoyed? That's a small price for what's going on?
While that is, no doubt, true, it's worth pointing out that the ID number attached to your post is 38,706,412 which to my understanding is roughly the number of posts ever made to Slashdot. That's a lot of crap that your shining beacon is buried under. If instead, we consider the number of civilizations of intelligent, tool-using critters on Earth, we get a number much closer to 1.
When you have the only civilization that a planet has ever produced, that makes you a bit unique by definition.
We also ignore here that civilizations do a lot of cool activities such as explore stuff, discover things, make things, etc. That's what the anonymous whiner of the original post ignores: the "cancer" is more interesting than the host.
Earth isn't a person, so "she" doesn't care.
And evolution is resilient: even if we managed to wipe out all higher life forms, they would re-evolve within a few hundred millions years. Far bigger cataclysms have befallen earth than anything humans can do.
So fracking may be tied to generating earthquakes, I wonder what this will lead to, for a modest 10% gain in electricity.
Please don't darwin my race
This is an interesting idea, plenty of heat down there, I am just shocked that they would allow this in a National Monument http://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/centraloregon/specialplaces/?cid=fsbdev3_035878 Aren't they protected?
This is the same process as frakking, so it will produce the same results as frakking, which is why it's a frakking bad idea, the only difference being that superheated steam makes an even better lubricant for all your earthquake-generating needs (and why there are no plate tectonics on Venus - no free water).
I cannot see how pouring water into volcano will end up being a good thing ....
This sounds suspiciously like part of the Stephen King story "The End of the Whole Mess": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_Whole_Mess. Are we sure they're going for geothermal power and not an attempt to "pacify" humanity? Just asking...
What could possibly go wrong?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"If we need plasma fire in spark plugs and engines to be stainless steel
Re-Tool it
if we need to design RF to hit the resonant freq's of water
Re-Tool it."
Build it yourself and get rich. Also, you can sleeve engines with stainless and add stainless valves if you like.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Which congresscritter owns the company that does all this injection pumping? First it was natural gas and now it's geothermal energy. Why don't they just take a few nuclear warheads and detonate them to drive a series of turbines? (I'm kidding.) Conservation and transition to alternative sources of energy seem like the way to solve our energy addiction. We need to stop fracking up the world and making ourselves look like fracking idiots in the process.
During the Westmann Islands eruption, they froze the leading edge of the lava flow to divert it from blocking a harbor. The lava just goes somewhere else.
They estimate that geothermal fields are good for 50-100 years.
liquid water under high pressure lowers the melting temperature of rock.
meaning this dormant volcano may very well become active again. especially if there's a good amount of pressure under the plug.
weaken the rock and see what happens. hoo boy.
This is basically the plot to this B-movie classic, only they planned to drill into the earths mantle for unlimited geothermal energy.
They, predictably, cracked the world, and ultimately it results in the birth of another moon.
My first question would be - is there a possibility that this continued reaction could cause the volcano to erupt? Is in itself is a relatively small volcano...but it is surrounded by larger and more "actively dormant" ones. And let's not forget Mt. Mazama (Crater Lake) down the road...
Freezing the edge of a lava flow to divert it is one thing. It is relatively simple conceptually - cool the leading edge and hope the rock wall formed will divert the flow. The general worse case scenario is that it doesn't work and whatever you were trying to divert it away from gets destroyed.
Injecting high pressure water into rocks around a dormant volcano is different. First there is no initial danger - the volcano is dormant and not erupting - so the consequences of a mistake are bad. Second you are injecting water into a complex and active underground geological system. Fracking has been shown to cause earthquakes in areas which are geologically stable because water is an excellent lubricate. While you are not trying to "frack" the volcano you are injecting a lubricant and cooling parts of an active system.
So we should pursue this but with caution and it should be lead by academics who are in a better position to be able to speak truthfully about the risks with fewer consequences - this being the whole point of tenure.
Humans are the most interesting thing to have ever happened to Earth.
I'm not sure it's valid for the subject of the interest to make that judgement.
I'm not sure it's valid for the subject of the interest to make that judgement.
Then what is left to make that judgment? The natural world is no help. It's all breed till you fill your niche and start starving. This morality only exists because we exist.
But earthquakes are zero-sum. They're just releases of stresses which have built up in the Earth's crust. Those stresses come from natural movements of the crust, not from the fracking. If fracking causes an earthquake, that means it's releasing those stresses a little at a time, before it would have released naturally, thereby decreasing the chances of an even larger natural earthquake. Like controlled man-induced avalanches, if fracking causes an earthquake that means it's making the area safer, not more dangerous.
First off... these are not natural earthquakes, caused by the movements in Earth's crust due to settling or whatever.
These are man-made earthquakes, a byproduct of a rather chaotic process - just take a look at the link on Basel above.
Second - there would be NO stresses to be reduced, naturally. Pumping water through the cracks is what is causing the stress.
There's no "if" about it. Both fracking and hydroshearing cause earthquakes.
As for avalanches analogy...
Try instead mining for precious minerals using nothing but large quantities of explosives. That's a bit closer to the actual situation.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Basically they are using the same technology that oil companies use to get to oil. Given the press over some methane in water allowing it to burn, just imagine the public outcry when lava starts showing up in your tap water! You try to hose down a fire, and instead it sets the rest of the lawn ablaze. Luckily all that pumice means that the town residents will be very clean and not need to go to the local spa to get the epidural scrub.
This is NEWS? Guys, this same thing is being done in Costa Rica as we speak http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=45994
"EGS technology has already been proven to work in the few areas where underground heat has been successfully extracted. And further technological improvements can be expected"
It will remain just that, "few areas" and suggesting otherwise is like blowing smoke up our arses.
Isn't there some kind of consequence to intentionally cooling the earth? I mean if this were to take off large scale, wouldnt we be shortening the planets life?
What could possibly go wrong . . .
One word: Krakatoa.
Three more: Mount Saint Hellens
As I understand it, the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano was a steam explosion, caused by high-pressure ocean water coming into contact with lava deep underground, with the only way to release the pressure being to push the mountain into the air. The result was the loudest sound ever recorded: It was detectable on barographs world-wide.
The details of mountain explosions were something of a mystery until an "AHA!" moment produced by a heroic seismologist. He was too close to Mount St. Helens when the explosion finally occurred. So he took a series of shots of the process with his camera, then wrapped it in his spare clothing and backpack so it would survive the shock, flying debris, and pyroclastic ash flow (which he, of course, did not). Stitched together the shots formed a jerkey movie which clearly explained the mechanism:
Extreme pressure under the volcano (in this case volcanic gas) gradually raises the dome, with resulting faulting and shocks. Eventually one side of the mountain collapses in a landslide. This removes a LOT of weight very suddenly. The remaining weight is entirely inadequate to restrain the gas pressure which, in addition to expanding in all directions as a shock wave, blasts the rest of the mountain into dust and lofts it into the upper atmosphere.
Pressure injection wells produce earthquakes by turning areas the size of counties into the large piston of a hydraulic jack, pushing apart and lubricating faults. Enough pressure cracks the rock, producing additional faults to be "jacked open".
The potential problem from doing this with water is that it can suddenly open a passage and bathe a lot of lava-hot rock, suddenly and drastically heating and expanding the water AND increasing the size of the "large piston". If it can't make it back out through the injection well, make it out through a new geyser, or relieve its own pressure faster than it rises by jacking open the ground, it might create a Krakatoa version of the Mount Saint Hellens scenario.
I hope the engineers have calculated for this scenario and determined that it isn't plausible and/or designed adequate pressure relief to take into account things like earth movements simultaneously shoving a slug of water against a lava face and blocking some avenues of its retreat.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2603836&cid=38588550
The idea of doing this with fresh water is a bit like running you car on food. Oh, wait, we're already doing that.
For a long time I knew volcanoes were untapped sources of energy, and usefulness. Imagine you could just throw all the garbage into those, and let mother nature melt its course....all the garbage would not collect and need to be sitting in landfills...we would just disintegrate it....and now they have gone and created a way to also capture the power of its energy.....awesome!
I'm no expert, but if this was viable, the people in Iceland would be doing it for electrivity, and we're not. We do heat up cold water and use it for heating our houses and for hot water from our taps, but not directly for electric energy.
as a word, "hydroshearing" has a bad vibe to it..
How will this generate more power than it takes to pump all that water into the volcano? It seems like a bad idea.
So the problem of ground slippage (earthquakes) is just as big for this water injection proposal as it has already been for oil and gas frakking. And no, this is not "conjecture" any more - one company has already admitted that their frakking caused a series of small earthquakes, and more are under investigation. New Jersey banned it, as did France.
I was simply refuting that the problems weren't as bad OVERALL. I didn't claim that there wasn't the possibility of earthquakes.
Ah, don't sweat it :-) It's just one of those normal "misunderstandings", and it does add to the overall context - I'm surprised not more people saw the petro-frakking angle right away.
It's not like this "ask slashdot" by a guy who, as best I can tell, is trying to do an end run around Canadian legislation requiring all people who do any sort of advising to immigrants to be licensed.
There was so much abuse of the "investor immigrant" program - fraud, outright scams, fake documents and histories (including brides), people paying off others to teach them how to con a Canadian into marrying them, then divorcing them as soon as they got their magic permanent resident papers.
I know two women who got conned like that, they believed the guys, got married, the guys spend most of the next year screwing anything that moved, both womens lives messed up pretty badly. I also know one guy who paid $4,000 to a woman for a "marriage of convenience" to stay in the country - she needed the money, he wanted permanent resident status. And two couples who worked the angle VERY extensively - divorcing, coming to Canada, marrying, then divorcing, then re-marrying their spouses, eventually bringing about 50 people to the country under the Family Reunification program.
And those are only the ones I *know* about for a certainty because they admitted it. I also know of 2 people who came using fake documents, claiming to be 20 years older than they were so they could collect old age pensions after 10 years, even though they were only 45 instead of 65 ...
I hate to say it, but that's obviously just the tip of the iceberg. We REALLY need to not just tighten up current policies, but go over past immigrants to see who was committing fraud. Legitimate refugees are losing out to crooks and liars.