Iceland Seeking 'Supercritical Steam' For Power Source (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday December 15, 2016 @01:00AM from the whole-new-ball-game dept.

New submitter FatdogHaiku writes: Already getting over 25% of its electrical power from geothermal sources, Iceland hopes to break new ground using "supercritical steam" from a 5 km deep borehole. Is it just me, or does this sound like the start of a movie where everything that can go wrong does in fact go wrong? It's not like they are new to the tech, but working with geologic sources at 450C to ~600C is a new ball game for anyone. It should be noted that Iceland also uses direct geothermal for most of its space heating. "In this area at Reykjanes, we typically drill to 2km or 3km depth to harness the steam, to run power plants and produce clean, renewable electricity," explained Asgeir Margeirsson, CEO of the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP). "We want to see if the resources go deeper than that." The "supercritical steam" holds more energy than a liquid or a gas. The team wants to bring it up to the surface to convert into electricity, as they believe it could produce up to 10 times as much energy as the steam from conventional geothermal wells.

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Re:renewable? by Wycliffe · 2016-12-15 01:43 · Score: 4, Interesting

Why do people insist on calling those thing renewable? How exactly do you renew sun or earh?
The sun should probably be called reusable as nothing we do on earth can affect the output of the sun. We can block it from reaching the surface with pollution but we can't change it's output. Many of the other "green" technologies I wonder about. Wind power is a good example. How much energy can we take out of the air with windmills before we start seeing an effect on the weather? Is it really completely free? Massive geothermal is another example. How much energy is down there and are we going to screw things up by depleting it? Even if there is plenty of energy down there we are still releasing extra heat into the system so we are still adding to the global warming problem. I wonder if 100 years from now if we find out that some of our free and green energy sources are not as free and green as we originally thought.