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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.
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.
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.
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...is also useful to generate cobblestone, especially on some pvp maps.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
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?
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.'"
Uranium isn't unlimited either.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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