Geothermal Power Everywhere: Tech Advances Rapidly
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- Опубліковано 13 тра 2024
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Geothermal energy is everywhere, just right under our feet. So could it be the solution to climate change? I used to think it was just too difficult and expensive to make much sense in most places, but some recent advances have made me rethink. Let’s have a look.
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#science #sciencenews #tech #technews - Наука та технологія
But of course, any news about drilling is ground-breaking news, right?
That depends on who or what is being drilled.
Boring though.
I don't know why I laugh at this stupid jokes 🤣
I was hoping she'd dig a little deeper
I see what you did there🤣
Closed loop geothermal is the ultimate clean energy, and it is literally right under your feet no matter where you are. I really, really hope it takes off this time.
The main issue is the high up-front cost. As long as people are ok with sizing their wells to run a generator _after_ output falls then I'm confident that it will be a good replacement for nuclear, but first it needs to pay back that initial investment of energy, so it's a long-term investment instead of a short-term one.
A whole pile of things like this make me a nuclear supporter: we really just need it for a bandaid.
Tell me why when I live next to north America's largest geothermal power plant near the "Geysers complex" in lake county, CA that our local PGE bill is 3x+ higher then national average? And I've heard they sell carbon credits to offset other states production or they sell the power directly to another states 😅🤷
The whole complex generates emough power to keep San Francisco running and our local county is a fraction of that population and despite federal grants and carbon credits we pay the higher price
@@absalomdraconisThe truth be known, geothermal IS nuclear energy. It is the thorium trapped in the crust that generates the heat.
Dude, are you serious? They always say ultimate clean energy, but there's always a trade off. We don't have an effing clue what drilling shite loads of holes in the ground will do.
Off shore wind farms? Not only are they an eyesore, they cause shore waters to de-oxygenate ruining aquatic ecosystems, they cause the air to drop speed so cooling and rain down wind drops.
Solar farms? So much displaced ecosystems, it's a monoculture without the plants. They get smashed in hailstorms, who cleans that shit up?
Morons. The lot of you.
at 2:25 , "They claim that this way they'll be able to drill 20 km. deep in just 100 days".
That would be a new record for how deep we have ever drilled.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole is only around 12 km. deep, so we are talking almost double the depth.
If they manage, it will be truly exciting, but I will believe it when they actually accomplish it.
I suspect that they'll have to install at least one (probably three is better) pressurized sections with plugs to get it to work.
Don’t forget, the current record holder took two decades to drill.
10 k will work just fine in most cases, I do not know why the 20 K brag. The speed in drilling is the game changer, they say they do not have to change drill bits so it will be that much faster. (75 percent of drilling is pulling and replacing drill head and pipe.)
@@paperburn That's true, it is primarily the economics of it, that is vital.
If they can just cheaply drill down to a depth of around 60-70 degrees Celcius, that will already be enough to supply all the heating needs for residential buildings, including hot-water.
And even if they can just super-cheaply drill down to maybe 30 degrees Celcius or so, it can be used as a supergood "heat-source" for a heat-pump, that would then be able to run at a very high efficiency, even during cold winters.
I assumed the meant drilling say 10 holes 2km deep, not 1 hole 20km deep.
One of the apparent benefits of the microwave drilling is that it melts the rock and creates a heavy glass-like tube around the drill hole. The claim is that this would last for decades. It’s a gamble we should take.
The beauty part of the Quaise system is that we could repower any thermal plant; coal, natural gas, or nuclear.
How are they going to remove the cuttings? Rock's already pretty dense, are they going to be able to successfully push all those cuttings into the wall? if not, how to get rid of them?
@@originalnickname1There are no cuttings with microwave drilling. The rock is vaporized.
@@steveb5972and the glass "filter cake" keeps the formation pressure back? Its cool if it works, but what happens during a well control issue, would be difficult to see signs of a kick, and harder to control when it happens
They plan to blow a gas down the wave guide to force the vaporized rock out of the hole
@@originalnickname1 See 01:45 for a diagram. They blow Argon (not a cheap gas!) down the centre tube and it carries the rock chips up the outer tube.
My little hometown uses geothermal in their downtown so the sidewalks don't get icy in the winters. Klamath Falls Oregon isn't well known, but geothermal has been a thing there since the 90s, after looking it up I discovered that apparently geothermal has been used there as far back as 1900, mind blowing.
Klamath like thé village in Fallout 2 ? Nice .
Wow I grew up in Oregon and didn't know about it, but that isn't unusual for a child growing up to not know all of the cool things occurring in their state. Thank you for sharing
@@renaudfilippi2599Fellow Fallout nerd! I was going to mention the same thing. ^_^
@@renaudfilippi2599 yes that's the one, haha
Geothermal energy is available now. The dream of fusion energy is, has, and always be 30 years in the future.
The problem of geothermal is not the when but the where
And , of course the "where" is a three dimensional determination. If drilling, and the installation of geothermal collection infrastructure is simply the application of existing and/or achievable new technologies, then the "where" of geothermal energy broadens to the point that an enormous amount of the world's energy needs can be met with earth's heat.
china will do it in 5
Why always? How do you know?
Get back to me 30 years from now and then refute my statement. Otherwise, go ahead and invest a lot of money into one to of the "fusion energy" companies if you have enough engineering background to make that decision, or just feel lucky.
many houses here in sweden use geothermal closed loop heatpumps with compressors to extract the heat. but a simple household hole is only about 200-300 meter deep
Yeah en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump are really popular all over Europe.
Really that deep? In the Czech Republic, bores for home heating are more like 100, maybe 150 meters AFAIK. It's enough to heat a house. Mine are only 50 meters as I use them for cooling in the summer so I don't want the water too warm but I've got four of them situated under the house. The ground under the house acts as an accumulator and I've got a custom air/ ground hybrid so that I can use cheap heat from warm summer air to get hot water and to regenerate the bores using mostly just a circulation pump. Air is routed under the roof so that it gets even hotter, originally devised for removing snow from solar panels in the winter. Anyway, bores this shallow (100-300 meters) are not really geothermal as only about a third of the energy comes from below.
@@jobicek Sweden is cold, you know. ;-) Also, in densely populated areas all your neighbors already have geothermal pumps so you need to go deeper to counteract the loss of efficiency caused by the heat stolen by those pesky neighbors. :)
But sure, 300 m sounds extremely deep.
@@jobicekwould be very interested in any diagrams or data and how you built your system. It must make sense to trap excess heat in the summer, wherever it is, and using 'cheap' readily available materials to store and insulate it. We don't have the option to put pipes under the house nor a long garden but in all likelihood an insulated sand heat battery connected to a heat pump might do it
I did mine myself, 2 meters deep as slinky pools. Costs around 4000 Euro all in all. Feeds my 12kW heat pump easily. Clay soil is a must tho.
Cooling as well.
Hi from the side of Menengai Caldera in Nakuru, Kenya.
There's a few geothermal for electrical grid projects underway here, something for direct input to cement production and an expansion of the existing Olkaria facility in nearby Naivasha.
It's already a significant part of the electricity mix in what is a pretty clean grid.
Hi from Germany, thank you for sharing!
Thank you for telling! It feels kind of comforting to hear that Kenya have started going down a route of clean energy, instead of following the same bad route with non-clean energy as the West did. A lot of the growth of energy systems is going to happen in Africa, so getting them right is crucial.
Yep, but sitting on the African Rift is pretty much the jackpot of geothermal energy
I was a planning engineer on two geothermal power facilities, each 100 MW, in Indonesia. When they were commissioned I felt a real sense of pride that I had contributed to “greening the planet”. I hope there will be many more built.
This is my favorite baseload option. No real downsides once the kinks are worked out. Small footprint. Constant power with no emissions.
No downsides? It will give the mole people a strong incentive to counter-attack.
What I like about geothermal is that it's unsubsidized LCOE is almost as cheap as gas combined cycle, cheaper than coal and far cheaper than nuclear right now.
That and build time is comparable to gas combined cycle at 5 years.
constant heat emissions might be an issue with this technology.
but once we work out how to dump this heat into the atmosphere without increasing global temperatures it will be set to take off.
@@echelonrank3927 a good point! I’m hoping that if used mostly for baseload electricity generation and potentially extracting more heat from it if it’s located somewhere that district heating can be employed, it should have much diminished heat loss. However, your point is still a good one, that solar and wind are much more efficient and cause less heat pollution which is still an important factor.
@@brothermine2292 Do not overlook the Terries and Fermies. They will be heartbroken if flooded out!
Served at Naval Air Station (NAS) Keflavik in 1979-80. The entire NATO base was heated by the hot water heating loop from the local geothermal electric power plant. Wastewater from the power plant formed the Blue Lagoon.
This is the loop that was destroyed in the Grindavik lava flow, I believe. But they may have fixed it already for all I know.
@@tvuser9529: I think that bits of that plumbing have been fixed at least twice since the eruptions started. It's a major power plant, so they don't have much choice.
When I first heard of this tech two years ago, (Quaise Energy) I did a deep dive into it and have been talking about this for 2 years on X, but my reach is limited. So glad to see you focus a video on this. I hope the new geothermal gains traction and voices like yours will go a long way toward this. Thank you!
I wish the people and companies pursuing Geothermal well. In 1979 while finishing up a BS in Mechanical Engineering I worked at a Geotech testing facility. We tested permeability of the rock (mostly sandstone from promising geothermal sites). Using different drilling fluids while simulating insitu conditions (hot and high pressure). Standard drilling fluids (Betonite) tended to bake and just plugged up the pores. The potassium based fluids we tested were very good at not restricting flow but were incredibly expensive. Current drilling techonogies were also not up to the downhole conditions. I wrote a paper on what I saw as challenges to Geothermal at that time and tried to point out where more money and research were going to be needed. One professor claimed I was anti-Geothermal. I haven't seen a lot of progress on the laser drilling although it was being tested back in the 1970's. You can blame big fossil if you want but that is not the only problem. Also, I'm not sure about the most recent installations but most existing Geothermal Power Plants are binary cycles meaning that the brine temperature can't really get water to useful steam conditions so the hot brine is used to heat a fluid with a low boiling point (iso-butane was popular and still is). There is some disagreement with how harmful iso-butane leaks are to the environment. Very deep holes will work, if you can afford to get there.
Honestly, I wish people would experiment with rocket drilling more. It seems much more likely to be easy to use than laser-based drilling, and might be more efficient too.
There was a brief resurgence of interest in geothermal about 2000 to 2008 (when it became clear that in Australia it could never compete with solar PV).
Several companies investigated drilling into shallow granites (only about 1 to 2 km depth!) and the reason for choosing granites is their inherent radioactivity, which is a source of the heat. The aim was to get to temperatures which didn't necessarily require binary cycle, at depths which were 'easily' accessible with oil-drilling equipment and technology.
Although the economics didn't stack up in Australia, there is one useful side-benefit that wasn't included: the possibility of nuclear waste disposal. As I mentioned, most granite is radioactive, and in Australia some is so 'hot' that it would be considered a long-term health risk. So why not drill some holes nearby to take radioactive waste? It's decay will add to the heat input to the system.
I know the nuclear engineers will tell me that there isn't really a lot of nuclear waste these days, it can be reprocessed and re-used. True, but there is still some, and it's storage is an ongoing and costly problem.
If you are starting to think I'm nuts, here's a suggestion that will confirm it: Drill into the underground nuclear test sites and extract the heat energy, which is 95% still available.
@@davidinkster1296 Nuclear waste contains plutonium, which is very dangerous and shouldn't be used that way. It should be buried forever in a safe location, far away from water that would make it mobile and spread uncontrollably.
Alberta is actually one of the best places for geothermal research - already large energy sector presence, lots of experience drilling, and a government open to testing out new techniques
Banned commercially by the Alberta government, though.
@@bartroberts1514 Good to ban it commercially, natural resource extraction should be nationalized so that all citizens of the region benefit from the profits. It's crazy that middle eastern dictators have been better about sharing oil profits with their citizens than our North American governments have.
@@bartroberts1514 Morons
@@bartroberts1514 Wind and solar are "on pause" as well.
@@TimothyCHenderson ROFLOL!
Some people will believe anything.
"In 2022 wind electricity generation increased by a record 265 TWh (up 14%), reaching more than 2 100 TWh. This was the second highest growth among all renewable power technologies, behind solar PV." -- IEA
I've been watching Eavor for about 10 years now. Their advantage with a closed loop system is that they have 100% control of the working fluid. All open loop systems have to deal with the chemical soup that comes up out of the hole... a soup that is toxic and corrosive as one can imagine.
Also, their working fluid doesn't need the super-critical temperatures water requires so they can operate at much shallower depths and still produce significant power (MW).
If I had $10 - $20 million dollars burning a hole in my pocket, this is the outfit I'd go with and really go off grid!
The issue is drilling and constructing the loop at sufficient depth.
@@Geenimetsuri: Drilling isn't an issue, it's all in the loop. We've had the drilling tech since the 90s.
You can go off the grid with solar for a whole lot less money.
@@brownro214 Exactly. You could get an oversized solar array, a proper wind turbine and a 1 MWh battery for a fraction of that budget. And it would be an absurd overkill.
I dont think you understand the part about supercriticality. It mainly affects efficiency - of course that has an indirect effect on what is feasible, but achieving SC is for the purpose of the efficiency properties.
Anything where you take a fluid , heat it, and move it, will be many times less efficient than a heat pipe for example. Because the heatpipe uses 1: its easier to move steam , 2: when transitioning to steam, the water gets an extra "power backpack" and can hold relatively more heat per mass. There is a point in the vaporisation process where you dont gain any temperature with more energy, you just gain state transition. So for what qualifies for maybe 3-5 degrees in temperature energy, is just obtained in the transition and temperature is unchanged. Supercritical is the level up from this principle. (Im not a chemist, but I guess you would call vaporization an endothermal reaction)
A water cooled system will need a pump. A heatpipe is completely selfsufficient. So the heatpipe is faster, more efficient and almost maintenance free.
Water cooling is actually decently efficient, its just that heatpipes are genius. Heatpipes uses the same principle as tatoo'ing. Capillary action.
All you really have to do when designing a heatpipe inspired system, is to have a capillary channel to supply the heated area, and then make sure you vapor can "reach" the capillary channel upon condensation.
In the Foundation series, planet Trantor got its energy from the temperature difference between the surface and the nucleus.
There will be no access at all to our planet’s ‘nucleus’.
I guess an advantage of having to change the standard energy generation systems is, is that one finally starts looking more seriously at the many other options that got put aside because they weren't mature technologies and no one wanted to take the R&D risk on them. It wouldn't be surprising if one or two of them actually turned out to be as good ideas, maybe even better then the current to be replaced fossil fuel method , at least if they were developed sufficiently far.
So this is a good time to see which alternatives might be good options and to see who can reach the top in energy production this time around.
Your information on this topic is wonderfully thoughtful and timely. As someone well educated in the field of geology, I have always believed geothermal energy was the redheaded stepchild of energy production.
Geothermal: It's not just for Iceland anymore! When we built our house 20 years ago we put in a closed loop geothermal heat pump system for heating and air conditioning. Four pipe loops, 12 feet apart, extend 100 feet into the ground. They collect heat from or dump heat into the ground where the temperature is a constant 12 degrees (54F). The extra cost was paid for in less than 7 years. It doesn't need to be industrial scale to deliver efficiency and help contain global warming.
That's not geothermal energy, or very little of it is. I like heat pumps (I have one) but tagging them as geothermal is marketing rubbish.
What you have is more correctly known as ground source heat pump. It's not using geothermal energy, it just exploits the fact that deeper soil doesn't change temperature fast, so it stays at the long term average of surface temperatures.
Global warming is caused by the sun. Get used to using your brain
As others pointed out this is not exactly what people refer to as geo-thermal energy but yes, ground heat pumps are very good if you have the space. You either need to dig very deep as you did, which can be very expensive, or you need a lot of garden to lay the needed kms of pipe to heat a house.
@@ZrJiriI'm obviously not an expert so forgive me.
If everyone used these, wouldn't that raise the ground temperature to the point they wouldn't be useful for cooling?
The Rosemanowes Quarry, in Cornwall hosted the Hot Rocks project, a pioneer in geothermal energy research, way back in the 1970s. Go Kernow.
I live in Falmouth. Be ideal if a geothermal project took off on our doorstep
The term 'geothermal' is used as a blanket description of many different technologies. Different methods of drawing heat energy from the earth. From low energy heat difference engines, circulating water through coils of pipes a few feet underground for cooling in summer and heating in winter - right through to base load electricity generation from 'crustal magma bodies' - it's all just geothermal.
THANK YOU! Geothermal is FINALLY getting some attention! Most videos on renewable energy focuses on solar & wind as it's relatively cheap & quick to install (getting a grid connection is another topic altogether!). Geothermal is one renewable tech that isn't intermittent, so a great complement to cheap wind & solar.
There a project in the UK at the Eden Project - featured on the Fully Charged Show. It would be great to get an update.
Around 70 - 80% of people will live in cities by 2050 so it makes sense to site geothermal close to large urban centres or to use geothermal to run turbines that previously were powered by coal - these power stations are already connected to the grid so no extra transmission & distribution infrastructure is required.
Govs captured by the fossil fuel industry have a vested interest in delaying the transition to renewables (going electric will decarbonise about 90% of the economy!). I think they have tried to make the transition as complicated & difficult as possible while ALL the solutions have been available for decades already... But that's okay, it's us "mere mortals" that will pay the price, probably with our lives. But then there are billions of us - 95% of which are quite disposable! Happy days.
I've been thinking abut geothermal for years and only seen stuff abt iceland. It's literally unlimited constant energy!
Exactly! I don't think my town out in the middle of nowhere could afford a multibillion dollar fusion facility.
but where are they proposing to dump the spent heat from geothermal turbines, into the atmosphere?
this is so much worse than solar, i cant believe this option is even on the table.
@@echelonrank3927 Thermal recovery for district heating or for industries that require heat - 2 for 1 deal... it gets better & better!
@@echelonrank3927 bro, the spent energy from geothermal that is left is far less than that of the complex resources needed for a solar panel. Also if it's a contained system, no steam will come out, so the extra energy will be put in batteries or just run into the ground like how lightning discharges. Also solar takes up a lot of area and has risk of clouds, bad weather and generally a lot of maintenance for being subject to the elements. Geothermal is by far the best form of energy collection, we just don't know how effective since all the good funds for bettering the tech were used for worse cooler sounding options like fusion and solar.
What speaks for geothermal energy over fusion is there's actual energy to be gained. What speaks against it is natural difficulties, it's not really likely that you can keep a 20km pipe intact at those pressures and sand/rock/other movements, micro quakes and so on, and it will be incredibly difficult to repair a pipe at 18km depth without starting all over again.
The house I live in has a lot of contact with bedrock, so I essentially get free geothermal heating and cooling, it generally stays within the same 10 degrees (61-71), only deviating a slight bit more when below 0 and above 100 (f) (58 - 73)
Open loop systems, like those I worked on in Mexico, have the problem of groundwater recharge, or more precisely, the lack thereof. You basically have to pump the water back down the well to prevent depletion of the aquifer and to avoid serious environmental issues. There is also a big issue with corrosion. Feasible closed loop systems appear to be using horizontal drilling technology from the oil and gas business. Similar spinoffs are in places like Saskatchewan where existing fracking sites are being exploited for helium and lithium.
I'm very skeptical about a 20km deep well. There aren't many metals that have the appropriate strength required at the proposed temperatures that are a) affordable and b) totally non-reactive. Also, in passing, I note that we're not sitting on a ball of molten anything, except for a few places on Earth where the presence of water and the release of pressure causes melting. Virtually all the crust and mantle are solid. Only the outer core is liquid, and that's a LONG way down.
I remember reading about this a few years ago when it came out.
The videos of them blasting holes in bassalt with a microwave gun were pretty impressive.
I agree with you about thermal energy from drilling. Why this isn’t done almost everywhere has always stumped me. The excuses about drilling being too expensive is just that, an excuse. Most holes in the earth are drilled using concepts that would be understood thousands of years ago. Serious R&D would no doubt accelerate the process and bring down the cost substantially. I cannot believe that perfecting fusion energy is less complex than finding a cheaper way to drill holes in the earth.
Closed loop could be very big. There are problems with taking water out of the ground, which tend not to be talked about except where geothermal is happening. Rotorua used to have a lot of domestic scale geothermal, until they discovered all the household heating installations were taking water away from the geysers which were what made Rotorua be a town in the first place.
Most geothermal systems, after learning from mistakes made in the 80s, tend to reinject all of the water back into the ground, essentially making it a closed loop. Household geothermal uses the shallow groundwater, which unfortunately has a direct impact on springs. These are two similar, but different, technologies.
@@petesportfolio9062 Well that's good to know. Do we trust them to reinject the water properly?
@@michaelwright2986 I guess it depends on which country the plant is built in and their regulations. However, it is in the company's best interest to inject properly, otherwise it's lost money and that would be an inefficient business model.
Geothermal heat vs Geothermal power generation are two separate things due to the pressure and temperature required. Currently, geothermal power generation needs high-pressure steam for steam turbines hence the great depth for drilling, while even the ground source heat pump (few meters down if horizontal orientation) is also called "geothermal". Also potentially, if fracking is causing people nightmares, good luck with this one.
You don't necessarily need steam. You can use heat exchangers to cause a motor fluid with a lower boiling point to push the turbine, significantly reducing the needed temperatures. Fracking is also a bit misleading in a typical geothermal system - at least here in Nevada. Fracking gets a bad reputation when used for natural gas extraction because of the potential for releasing chemicals into shallow groundwater. Structurally complex geothermal systems are very different geologic settings than the typical natural gas reservoir and don't run into the same contamination issues you see on the news... But it's unlikely the common citizen will ever know the difference, unfortunately.
5:29 well that got..... dark..... Sabine giveth, then taketh away 😅
I’ve been a big fan of Eavor for a couple of years now and I’m watching their German project closely. I also love the irony that they’re taking precision directional drilling tech developed for the oil industry and repurposing it for a great, reliable renewable technology.
Eavor is literally pronounced "ever". Had a chance to meet them and they are great folks.
It'll be interesting to see what side-effects are produced if geothermal starts getting used large-scale. When we first started using hydro-electric, no one was talking about how we could affect the planet's rotation by damming waterways. Makes one wonder if cooling the crust, even minutely, will have an effect on the magnetosphere or something else that we can't even think of... We won't know until we try. The only thing that really worries me is unlike fossil fuels where we can, theoretically, undo what we've done, I don't think there is an easy way to put the heat back into the crust once we've started using geothermal.
Hooking solar-thermal to closed-loop geothermal is an easy way to put the heat back in.
@@absalomdraconis "Hooking solar-thermal to closed-loop geothermal is an easy way to put the heat back in."
Having difficulty imagining that one. Can you draw us a diagram, please?
Using solar to inject heat back into the Earth's core.
@@Enzoa123 Sounds like a completely crazy idea to me. Solar has earned a reputation of being "relatively cheap." But that doesn't mean it's economically sensible. It's just cheap compared to the mad practice of extracting and refining fossil carbon into engine fuels and then making the planet into a spagghetti of roads and railways with airports for sauce, whilst indulging ridiculously inappropriate architectural creations so that all the newly mobilized people have something to travel to see.
Building large ranges of solar panels over fertile pastures, as they are doing around where I live, to 'inject heat back into the Earth's core' is just piling one bad idea on top of another and selling it as a 'solution'.
Far better to think before acting and realise life was better when we didn't have all this crap.
I wouldn't worry about the crust affecting the magnetosphere, it's just a few dozen kilometers thick compared to the Earth's total 6400km radius (less than 1%). We'd have to cool the liquid core significantly and then we'll end up like Mars... In a few billion years. Most geothermal heat comes from radioactive decay deep in the mantle, so unless we suck up all of the potassium, thorium, and uranium, we should be good to go for some billions of years.
Finally geothermal is getting the attention it deserves!
The problem with geothermal is that once the water passes through the deep layers of rock, it often comes back with a bunch of substances dissolved and that crap comes out of solution at low temperatures or pressures. Dealing with these byproducts is bound to be a major challenge for operators.
The answer is closed-loop systems, so that the stuff never gets dissolved in the first place.
@@absalomdraconis you still need to figure out how to dress the borehole while under high temperature and pressure while maximizing the heat exchange surface area. It sounds like mere details, but it's actually quite a challenge.
Eavor, a closed loop system, based in Canada, has it's first commercial plant in underway in Germany. I have high hopes they have the system we can use anywhere, no fracking needed.
I don't support the anti-fracking movement (there's a lot of FUD, and even lies, in that movement), but closed-loop geothermal is the way to go. I agree that open-loop is mostly a clumsy attempt to be cheap.
I used to live in New Zealand near Rotorua. Geothermal energy was championed. However, the ground started to cool, and the geysers started to fail. The council cemented many of the equipment down.
Do you know how deep those drill holes go? I guess if you drill deeper you can tap out more energy without it cooling.
@@JosefEngelfrost I do not, but Rotorua is in a hot spot, so I suspect they did not need to go down that deep. Lots of homes had geothermal heating.
That is a sign of the limitations of geothermal power no one talks about. Yes there are huge reservoirs of thermal energy down there but once you tap them they are replenished very very slowly. The average heat flux from Earth's interior to the surface is less than 0.1 watt/m²! That is why many geothermal projects worldwide became unprofitable and were shut down eventually.
@@venietvideo interesting! this might be the reason experimetns in Iceland trie to tap into the lava: molten lava does not have this replenishing problem....
Rotorua is actually a good example of a system recovering heat after adopting a more responsible extraction and injection strategy.
I think any geothermal systems that aren't closed loop are reckless and dangerous but closed-gloop systems are the most likely way we are going to have to transition our electrical production to
Open loop means mineral filled water that precipitates onto pipes & valves plus has corrosion problems
@jwarmstrong
Reading skills please
He said "aren't closed loop" as in "those that are open loop"
@@pedrolopes3542 Critical thinking skills please. jwarmstrong is simply giving a supporting fact, he's not arguing against what gweebara is saying.
Skill issue
My money is on closed gloop option, bound to be a winner.
5:21 I never thought we would be playing catch up to tube worms. You know, the ones that live near geothermal vents.
For just a second there, I thought you were talking about the ones that live in RFK jr's brain...
They did two test drillings in the 2000´s in Switzerland: first near Basel, which they had to stop when a earthquake > 3 happened, then they had another test drilling farther inside Switzerland again with having an earthquake > 3 Comes out that as Africa is pushing Italy north creating the Alps it is not a good idea to drill close to a fold under the river Rhine.
Beautiful weather and my favorite science channel - best way to start the morning.
It´s evening though 😅. I love, that Sabine´s audience is spread over the whole globe.
Beautiful sunset...with good news!
If we had invested as much in geothermal research and development as we have in fission, we would have solved this problem long ago.
Thank you this I live in the UK and I have been keeping an eye on Iceland geothermal energy.
Alberta just announced a research facility for geothermal. Its really one of the ideal places to test since we have so much data available already from decades of oil drilling along with having the equipment local to drill and the qualified workforce to do the drilling.
What’s wrong with a few extra volcanoes?
Nothing is wrong with volcanos. It's volcanic eruptions that are problematic.
There are only so many natural mantle plumes . The Earth's vents that are actually the center of volcanos like a pipeline that runs from the top of a volcano all the way through the mantle of the Earth down to the hot molten magma that surrounds her iron core. Drilling is not only expensive, evidently it is not even really possible... so far as I know. I learned they have tried to drill to the core and they have only made it down so far and it got so hot it has melted the drills. The Earth is heating up folks. Not only on the outside. Some mantle plumes aren't all the way up through the surface of the Earth yet, but are definitely started on their way to becoming sufficient ventilation. Can you imagine if we could drill to the top of an unopened plume? Think of a tea kettle whistle... The steam alone I'm sure would be deadly. Still They were
sure brave for trying.
If we can bring magma up that easily, well, the tech would actually prove out
@@vincentcleaver1925 all of this kind of thing would only further F* up our already broken eco system anyway. Lest we forget & Lets not disappoint eh? lol :)
Yes, more tourist income.
Geothermal heat pumps are underused tech. They aren't cheap to install, but they pay for themselves after 5-10 years and have lots of other advantages. They're quiet, and work well regardless of the outdoor temperature because ground temperature is constant once you get several feet down.
They definitely give you plenty of problems over that ten years. Clogged or mashed buried lines are the biggest issue. Failed water pumps every 4 or 5 years. Failed heat exchangers in 5 years. I own a HVAC company. They aren't paying for themselves around here but we aren't in a Frigid area.
@@Bryan-Hensley I've had good experiences, but if you work in the field you'd know more than me.
@@fwiffo a dual refrigerant system (which hasn't been invented) would work as good. The only reason a normal heat pump starts losing output around 10 degrees f is due to the boiling point temperature of the refrigerant. If it could somehow switch to a lower boiling point refrigerant, it would put out normal output at sub zero temperature.
Geothermal is for sure worth trying, but sometimes I read about projects claiming gigawatts of power using old oil survey wells and reservoirs having only warm water. It doesn't add up
A geothermal company near me, Cornwall UK, are making use of a naturally radio active layer of granite to provide energy.
In before "Just Stop Drill" accuses us of making Earth too cold by stealing the internal heat.
Which is to balance global warming tho
i mean it would probably make the atmosphere hot since we are releasing heat from the ground
Who knows, Mars may have had humans in the past and that's how they "froze" Mar's Internal core.
@@andra9694it would reduce the magnetic field around earth, stripping the atmosphere away. That's what happened to Mars
All jokes aside, the amounts of energy we're talking about are so mind-boggingly huge that you will never make a dent in Earth's magnetic field even if you try really hard.
Are there any issues with a lot of large scale plants removing heat from the core?
yes we will run out of heat in a few billion years 🥴,there is talk of , mico earthquakes if you use open loop system or contamination of water supplies.
If we suck up all the uranium, thorium, and potassium from the mantle, then we could have some issues. However, that is unlikely to be related to the geothermal energy industry.
We should have some unusually attractive scientists around, just in case. That always works in the movies.
I'm glad to see you finally covered Eavor-loop, but you failed to mention that the closed loop feature allows for these geothermal plants to be located in many more locations than typical geothermal and allows for cold starts amongst other advantages. If this technology works out I see it replacing Fusion. The cost and technological expertise needed are so much lower it's unimaginable.
I must admit that I am very concerned about geothermal energy. I know that mostly it is my lack of knowledge, but there are two things that worry me. First thing is the open-loop system, where it can lead to a great pollution and contamination of underground water. We all know that things like these are not perfect and we humans are less so. When you hear that a fossil-fuel company is joining in, that just adds up to my concerns. Second thing is that when we use geothermal energy, we are in fact cooling down the Earth's core. However little our consumption is at the beginning, if this takes of, it will be more and more. And you need to calculate in all the energy that will escape, not just the one that we will manage to use. Again, looking into the past, I would expect that a lot of energy will be lost. How much energy we can use until we get to the point that this will affect Earth's magnetic field and how will that affect life on the planet? How long till Earth's magnetic field provides less protection from the Sun? I know this looks insignificant now, but how does this scale? First people burning coal certainly didn't think that it will eventually trigger a global warming...
I can't help you with misgivings about open-loop, roughly equivalent to fracking in its implications.
I can't help you with misgivings about fossil companies getting involved.
However, cooling the Earth's core, I can help out. All of the heat in the Earth's core is so great compared to human ability to tap it with geothermal generation that we need not worry very much, especially since that heat is replenished by natural fission. By itself that's not much of an argument. That this heat would have come to the surface eventually, too is only part of the solution; it is coming out at a higher rate.
However, the heat of this geothermal emission is a rounding error compared to the heat of GHGs. For every unit of energy obtained by burning carbon, GHGs resulting from that burning produce over ten thousand times that heat eventually through the greenhouse effect.
So a four order of magnitude improvement comes from shifting away from fossil and to geothermal.
@@bartroberts1514 "For every unit of energy obtained by burning carbon, GHGs resulting from that burning produce over ten thousand times that heat eventually through the greenhouse effect."
That's a rather astonishing statement. Can you suggest any places I can get confirmation of the figures?
@@user-yq2wk6yg8s von Schuckmann, K., et al: Heat stored in the Earth system 1960-2020: where does the energy go?, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 15, 1675-1709, essd-15-1675-2023, 2023.
I'd also recommend the IPCC, or the writings of Dr. Richard Alley, as a start. It's important to note, GHE is slightly logarithmic, though that relationship varies with conditions, somewhere between 3.0 and 5.0 degrees C warming per doubling CO2 concentration.
Note that this is a "with amplification" or "with positive feedback" effect: CO2 itself only directly causes about 10% of the warming that results; water vapor increase in volume and concentration resulting from that 10% rise causes ten times the warming, and then the whole loops until something like 5 C degrees warming results, before it tapers.
Because the CO2 stays in the atmosphere somewhere between 200 and 80,000 years, that is of course spread out. No one is claiming the atmosphere will become 10,000 times hotter than a coal furnace all at once. And of course all coal operations leak methane, which itself is many times more GHE-intensive than coal.
The topics to look at are GWP and GTP (Global Warming vs Thermal Potential).
To check back of the envelope:
On average, one tonne of coal can produce approximately 24 to 25 million BTUs (British thermal units) of heat energy when burned. This can also be expressed as approximately 25 to 26 gigajoules (GJ) per tonne.
On average, burning 1 tonne of coal can release approximately 2.86 metric tonnes (2860 kilograms) of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. This value is based on the typical carbon content of coal, which is around 70%.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the radiative forcing caused by a doubling of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere (from pre-industrial levels) is estimated to be around 3.7 watts per square meter (W/m^2). Earth's cross-sectional area is ~5 x 10^14 m^2.
That's ~5 x 10^14 times 3.7 Watts. Over the lifetime of the doubled concentration, that'd be almost 5 x10^27 kWh.
There are about 17 x 10^12 tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, so dividing out we obtain 10,941 Joules from the Greenhouse Effect for every Joule from burning coal.
I'd round to four orders of magnitude, as uncertainties are large.
I can help with your misgivings about open loop systems. Geothermal reservoirs are distinct from and do not communicate with shallow groundwater aquifers. There are thousands of feet of impermeable rock in between the two fluid regions. Also the worst case scenario is some extra salinity - nothing toxic.
@@petesportfolio9062 We might need those reservoirs to drink one day soon, given what we're doing to what's left of the more accessible ones.
Loved Brilliant. Finished LLM and How Technology Works. Will take your course❤🎉
Question: Is it audio too, and can it be used in different languages?
@@Thomas-gk42 No
It's good the test site in Utah is already established. There have been several attempts to develop geothermal systems, but they were apparently too close to national parks or reserves and environmental groups were able to block them. These new systems that may work just about anywhere sound like a game changer...finally!
Or not... that's the problem with geothermal. Its hard to estimate how economically significant the drill going to be (= difficult to find money in banks). Ask soviets, scandinavians, islanders... how many drills are underperforming straight away or after a few years in service.
Thank you so much for putting a spotlight on Eavor! Using super drilling techniques and closed loop is so much more advanced than the others.
They should be getting boatloads of money from the Canadian government to rapidly expand, but not so much. Germany the first country to do a full scale one, with Texas right behind.
Sabine, your jump to educating over pointless research is so much more valuable. If there is a way to make progress in science the focus rather than a coincidence of research what could be done to change this?
If possible, I imagine encouraging amateur science to be done at a level that produces useful results would see huge gains.
In my opinion, the best argument for stopping oil burning is so as to save it for later use as petrochemical feedstock
Use it as emergency energy should current society fall so that we have a easily extractable energy source, otherwise use it only for production of plastics and roads
Not sure if that's actually financially viable.
@@dwwolf4636 Financialy viable this financialy viable that, bro just develop spaceships get into space make dart programs and get rare resourch rich asteroids steer or orbit Earth 😐 money becomes near useless once vast ammounts of easily acessable resources are avaible, a society that advanced develops into a energy based economy or a UBI utopic society where one can make further credits by selling entertainment and aiding progress technology and in general diving further in their hobbies
@@dwwolf4636 The idea of financialy viable literally is destroying the world right now due to how "cheap" coal and oil are. While more than 2 million people die every year due to air polution problems
@@Aureonw the answer is not removing it completely but reducing usage and allow new or improve upon "older" ideas like geothermal. petrolium is still needed for a vast veriety of other products.
It was at least two years ago that I heard about the US DOE funding several projects aimed at generating power from depleted oil wells. Some of them are surprisingly deep.
Geothermal isn’t all blue sky and green lights. The hot water that is brought to the surface is saturated in minerals. Upon cooling the minerals start to precipitate from the water. If returned to the ground untreated the reinjection well will rapidly plug. To remedy this the solids must be removed and landfilled. The clarified water must additionally be acidified with HCl to prevent plugging.
Dear Americans. What you (particularly your HVAC merchants) often call (incorrectly) geothermal, is actually just ground-source heat-pump, as compared to the more common air-source heat-pump. Both of which are ultimately sun-powered.
Actual geothermal only uses energy that is inherent in our planet, and nothing to do with the giant fusion ball in the sky.
Apologies. Rant almost over. It just drives me crazy that more and more people are confused and think that the heat they get from 6' below grass level comes from molten rocks and not just summer sun heating dirt, because marketing.
I'm one of the not at all confused by I do think of ground loop heat pump as geothermal in a broad sense of the word. And, of course, "real" geothermal doesn't give any advantage for cooling. But yes, caution in the public sphere.
You know the largest geo-thermal field in the world, in terms of energy production, with power generated from steam driving turbines, is in the United States of America, less than 30 minutes from where I am right now. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
@@ispq Then I guess this misuse of the term by your countryfolk probably annoys you as much as it does me?
New conspiracy theory just dropped: Sabine is actually an extraterrestrial, and her whole channel is a long-term plan to gradually accustom people to the idea of benevolent aliens coming to save us from ourselves. The reason she's so skeptical of a lot of modern physics is that she knows for a fact it's been conclusively disproven!
She's just extra special.❤️🤓😽🦜🧬
This would make me identify with her positions more, I think.
Any building with deep basements (for underground parking) and/or foundation piles can be designed to utilize similar principles for saving heating and cooling energy. This approach falls within a well-established field of engineering and does not require any additional R&D. It simply requires a willingness from real estate developers and builders to look beyond short-term profits.
My neighbor (Rural NW Ohio) put one of those geothermal heat systems, years back.
On that map, we not a hot spot, either.
I reckon it works fine, just a relatively complex system (lots of expensive break-y parts? Lol).
Unlike solar and wind, geothermal energy flow can be maintained regardless of the immediate environmental conditions and thus obviates the need for energy storage systems.👍
Anything will help this does sound like a pretty good idea if successful
Geothermal energy is excellent for heating buildings, the university of Delft is implementing such a system right now for the campus to replace the natural gas system
THANK YOU Sabine for covering this VERY IMPORTANT Topic...! 🙂👍👍
This sounds like a very good idea. 🌋💧💧💧
Why end with speculating that thermal will leave wind and solar “in the dust”? Its pretty obvious that different sites has different advantages and the right MIX is the panacea, not a single source.
Geothermal has more potential to become cheaper, more reliable and able to be deployed in more areas while wind and solar don't have a huge potential for advancement. That doesn't necessarily mean it will, but maybe!
I heard last year that Canada has a company with a really good way of doing geothermal. I forget the name. They already have a POC and working on a bigger POC too. Oh I spoke too soon. Sabine mentioned them; company Eavor. Beginning construction of first commercial site in Munich Germany. 👍💪
I really like the closed loop idea, this fixes the downside if conventional geothermal where it still releases both air and water pollutants.
Good luck fixing a cracked pipe down there. Conventional geothermal doesn't release air and water pollutants anymore (at least the newer binary plants). All water is reinjected at depth and is never exposed to the atmosphere.
Shallow bore geothermal closed loop can also be worth while for public & industrial buildings ie circa between 100 to 300 meters, where there are aquifers. You don’t have to go large strategic power production. These have been used in individual house heating.
Can geothermal energy be a good fit for desalinization?
Yeah, but who wants to have a shallow bore around all the time?
Every time I hear the word aquifers in the context of engineering infrastructure I shake my head in disbelief at the carelessness of humans for looking after their own essential natural resources.
@@user-yq2wk6yg8s there is nothing wrong with exploiting an aquifer by only removing its heat, or for storing heat, this heat can only be used for warming or cooling buildings not generating electricity, unless a Stirling engine can be employed, but even then water is not extracted.
@@jefflittle8913 yes
My father worked with the US geological service and the DOE on a geothermal project in Louisiana. They found they got more energy out of the dissolved natural gas in the water that came up then the water had in it per unit volume. At the time it wasn't economical to pump the wastewater back down into the Wilcox formation it came out of. And the wastewater was too troublesome even by middle 1970 standards to just discharge.
There is already been over 100 years of drilling. There are at least a hundred thousand abandoned gas and oil wells in the continental US that have close to 100° c temperature differential between their tops and bottoms, that just is not enough to make them economical sources of power. I guess we're waiting for someone to discover how to economically use r290 in Wells.
I'd like to imagine Sabine in different silly hats every time there's a thematic to a thumbnail, like now with a hardhat and a hand drill
I'm in hvac and my instructor was telling me about geothermal heating and air conditioning. Pretty crazy, you can use the earth itself to heat and cool your home lol
Love the volcano humor coming out of left field when you least expect it. Bravo!
I erupted with laughter
In Belgium, the Vito research institute is looking into this too. But cheap gas and expensive drilling are somewhat of an economical restriction.
And risks of earthquakes too…
Don't forget the worldwide shortage of clean water.
I thought this for so long, it is a relieve that a person way smarter than sees potential.
I like the way that you invented the word spin-out. It's a good word.
It's usually called a "spinoff" (or "spin-off") - but that's usually applied only to television shows - mostly. I think that you've just invented a very good word - in English. Really.
Geothermal energy is amazingly and I hope it gets utilised more in the future.
There were geothermal projects near Strasbourg, on the French/German border. But, for the same kind of reasons as fracking, it caused small earthquakes (magnitude 3 to 4) in a quite dense population center, which forced the authorities to shut the project down due to massive complaints.
And after that kind of publicity, people are less enthusiastic about geothermal energy in general
Closed loop systems _should_ solve that issue.
Thank you for reviewing the full depth of this technology.
The key to geothermal energy is finding and using an appropriate heatexchange media. Think mineral oil rather than boiler feedwater. Water dissolves rock and the minerals precipitate out in very inconvenient places.
This works for shallower wells too. Just need steam to gen electricity. If plasma drilling or any other method can be cheap enough, everybody can have their own well and we can stop using grids. (Every technology ever developed gets distributed as soon as it works well. My fave is water wheels with long drive shafts spanning the factory ceiling to drop belts to each spindle.)
I love these ideas. What if it works?! Best of all: once it works, what fun unexpected applications will arise?!?!
Also, does rotation slow as we cool the interior? By how much? Does it affect gravity? 😎☕️
It affects the magnectic field of Earth but only noticeable with ultra large scale operations for centuries
The grid isn't going away, because expecting people to maintain their personal systems is worse than the grid.
@@absalomdraconis I'll bet you're right! I always forget about that. Surely people will do neighborhood or community power, if it's cheaper, no? I guess that's a new business model too, maybe. Like a gas station but to power ...just 100 houses at a time, or an apartment complex, etc...
Lucky to hear, that there´s movement, you have reported about this several times, recently about the Iceland projects to get water supercritical. Most of your reports were quite sceptical. One problem, you mentioned was that those deep drillings are a potential source of natural CO2 emmissions. I wonder, if that can be solved.
Not drilling? Releasing co2 kinda defeats the purpose of drilling to get heat
@@davidblahota5655 yes, but perhaps it´s possible to seal it up. Needs more research, I think.
Still better than drilling to pull out methane deliberately tho.
@@Thomas-gk42one way to seal a hole is not drilling it 🫠
@@ZrJiri you´re totally right!
I'm surprised that closed loop geo-thermal is so underutilized. I'd always assumed that there were technical roadblocks preventing it's proliferation.
It's less about technical barriers and more about regulatory and financial barriers. Geothermal lobbying got bullied out by oil and mining back in the 80s and hasn't recovered yet.
Fenton Hill! Enhanced Geo Thermal was being worked on the 90s but it lost steam :). Look up Hot Dry Rock.
If today we suddenly had 100x as much energy available, it wouldn't take ten years before our infrastructure was completely dependent on it. It is mind boggling that anyone could think anything will "solve our energy problems." Our usage always grows to quickly use up whatever is available. We'd have flying houses and everyone would be driving battleship-sized flying cars, or it would all be used for crypto mining.
If you build it they will come.
Jevon's paradox.
And life would be better if you had a battleship-sized flying car, no?
@@MemeMarine LOL I'm not saying it wouldn't. The point is humans find a way to use (and then quickly need) every watt of it, even if by today's standards it seems wasteful.
@@Steve-xh3by Thank you. I was today years old when I heard of this. Good to know that other people know this "solve our energy problems" thing is nonsense.
There have been multiple attempts at high temperature geothemal power plants - both open and closed loop.
Major issues have been that the open loop systems (using natural hot water or steam) tends to contain a lot of dissolved minerals as well as being very corrosive such that it plugs up and corrodes the piping and equipment. One plant that a Coworker of mine used to work at had sulfuric acid puddles everywhere - and everyone had to wear full chemical protection suits for almost all maintenance jobs. Extraordinarily expensive to operate and maintain.
Closed loop systems have not worked well as you have to have piping and welds that stand up to the very hot and often corrosive ground the pipes are buried in and that are long term reliable enough to not leak or break. Things go downhill rapidly once a circulating pipe or tube leaks or breaks.
While I wish the startups well... I have not heard of any breakthroughs that address these two issues.
Use of lower temperature geothermal is easy with well proven technologies. Should I build a new house it will be geothermal heated and cooled.
Your videos are amazing. I watch them daily. Thank you very much!
Not geothermal to run generators, but a heat exchanger built into the earth is being done at the homeowner level. Coupled with a heat pump, incredibly efficient HVAc.
I'm being simplistic, but sucking energy out of potential super volcanoes seems like a good idea. Small geothermal plants at Yellowstone, and in Iceland, may already be testing this idea.
i'm not even gonna bother doing any calculations, there is no way that that's gonna have any noticeable impact on volvanoes activities
Right?
Yeah, I think that would be like taking drops out of a bucket. It would be great for energy generation, but there's no way it would have any effect on eruption risks.
On the other hand, cracking the rock dome to allow magma pressure to be relieved by many relatively minor volcanic eruptions might prevent a super eruption.
@@brothermine2292 Or it might cause one just big enough to destroy a lot of property, while the risks of "supereruption" are considered almost non-existent.
>ZrJiri : The USGS faq about Yellowstone doesn't mention any risk associated with drilling to relieve the pressure. It just says that would be ineffective because the drill hole would quickly be sealed.
I think geothermal is a great solution and a long term one at that. My only one worry would be that if we fully developed it, people might not through as much research into fusion. Geothermal in theory solves our CO2 problem, but fusion gives us the stars.
If anything, I think fusion is a distraction from practical solutions like geothermal.
The stars aren’t going anywhere, but the atmosphere is currently going to hell. We need to solve the CO2 problem and stabilize the climate before we do much of anything else. :( On the other hand, once we have a truly sustainable global economy, we will be able to go after truly big things like interstellar travel.
Use abundant geothermal energy to produce antimatter?
@@johnburn8031 Ideally we'd do both.
We will always have that need for fusion, but geothermal and fission are excellent bridges. After all, we can't use geothermal to power the colony fleets!
Geothermal in Italy is not open-loop, we already do re-injection of water in my area. It would be cool to be able to reach more places though! We already have geothermal home heating and it is amazing.
The MAIN PROBLEM is heat transfer rate from the rock below to re-heat the rock you are absorbing energy from. Imagine lighting a fire under a concrete walkway, you can likely sit on it for hours and barely feel the heat, it's not that the underside is not hot, it's that its horrible for transferring heat. This is why geothermal is only done in certain areas, its not just the depth. You need to build a multilateral system with a large main bore and many smaller bores off it to have a larger contact volume like an old fashion radiator, and that is no joke to do and very expensive (I worked in corporate innovation at a huge oil company). If not you will suck the heat out and then wait around for months for it to reheat so you can do it again.
Am I the only one who wouldn't like to cool down the core of our planet?
Kidding? I think that´s an unmeasurable small amount, since it´s the power that shifts whole continents since billions of years.
I want Sabine to do the math on how interior energy affects rotational energy. 👀😁🫣
But come to think of it, given the heat is from (?) pressure/gravity, that might be pretty hard to reverse...?! 🤔
Judging by our track record as humans, we will probably end up killing the Earth's magnetic field this way 😂
That's not even funny. No one understands the boundary conditions required to maintain the Earths core. No one. Fiddling with it would be the stupidest thing anyone could propose. More realistically, no one knows the exact conditions and reasons that earthquakes occur....again...NO ONE. So, deep bore tech may be more damaging than burning fossil fuels.
Shallow bore geothermal has been heating hundreds of thousands of homes in the lower 48 for decades. It is proven tech. While expensive to install, it is insanely cheap to operate...literally the fluid pump. Northern States heating bills go from 5 to 7 thousand a year to under 1000. If the pumps are driven by solar derived electricity then the cost may be a few hundred for system maintenance costs.
I've done the math a couple of years ago and as she said at the beginning of the video even if we were to only use geothermal energy only it would last millions of years.
And realistically we only need it for few hundreds years before we solve nuclear fusion for good
Geothermal isn't truly underdeveloped.
here is a comment from a German video:
The mechanical engineering company where I work builds such systems in cooperation with an Icelandic company, and some systems in Germany, Switzerland and Turkey have been in operation for several years. There are many processes with different carrier media, some of which are not harmless, toxic or explosive. This is not just about heating water, for heating or to generate electricity. The processes are still complicated and expensive because all the system components are more or less custom-made. I think we will need a few more decades to find the best process that is also safe for the environment and for life and limb. We are still in the early stages and even the Icelanders are not yet as perfect as some people think.
Also, there's almost always a chance to cause earthquakes. Oftentimes just minor ones but it's necessary to check the ground carefully. A few years ago a small tow near Freiburg, Germany's green capitol in the south western Rhine valley, experienced a lot of damaged houses as the drilling hit a layer of gypsum and the ground was lifted about 2.5 feet.
Geothermal plants extract heat from the earth's crust, so they slightly cool the crust. Under the crust there is lava. When a significant amount of the energy is made like this the crust will cool, and the point where it transtitions to liquid will be deeper. Then we will get a thicker crust with fewer, but more powerful earthquakes.
Whatever happened to OTEC, ocean thermal energy conversion? It was going to be a big thing in the 70s and 80s. It used the temperature difference between surface and deep ocean water to produce energy. (No drilling needed.) Then it all went quiet.
The ROI is pretty bad and salt water damaging the infrastructure is an issue.
Agreed knowledge is power geothermal should be in our energy toolbox.
"Agreed knowledge is power geothermal should be in our energy toolbox."
Great idea! We need to start getting our energy from knowledge.