Could Geothermal Power Revolutionize US Energy Consumption? (msn.com) 95
That
massive geothermal energy project in Utah gets a closer look from the Washington Post, which calls it "a significant advance for a climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the United States."
Once fully operational, the project could generate up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2 million homes. In addition, the BLM proposed Thursday to speed up the permitting process for geothermal projects on public lands across the country. Earlier this month, the agency also hosted the biggest lease sale for geothermal developers in more than 15 years...
White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."
The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."
White House national climate adviser Ali Zaidi said in an interview Thursday, "Enhanced geothermal technology has the opportunity to deliver something in the range of 65 million homes' worth of clean power — power that can be generated without putting any pollution in the sky. So we see it as a really meaningful contributor to our technology tool kit...."
The developments Thursday come as tech companies race to find new sources of zero-emission power for data centers that can use as much energy as entire cities. With major backing from Google parent Alphabet, Fervo recently got its first project up and running in the northern Nevada desert... The advanced geothermal technology that Fervo is trying to scale up is an attractive option for tech firms. Enhanced geothermal plants do not pose all the safety concerns that come with nuclear power, but they have the potential to provide the round-the-clock energy that data centers need. The challenge Fervo faces is whether it can bring this technology online quickly enough.
Fervo (a seven-year-old start-up) was co-founded by Tim Latimer, who previously worked as a drilling engineer, according to the article. But "Early in my career I got passionate about climate change. I started looking at where could a drilling engineer from the oil and gas industry make a difference," Latimer said during a Washington Post Live event in September. "And I realized that geothermal had been so overlooked ... even though the primary technical challenge to making geothermal work is dropping drilling costs."
Good thing of course (Score:3)
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I think that will be built by 2030 right? And will produce 1-200MW -- or about the same as 10 large wind turbines?
The "too long" issue still seems to be there. Of course, it is still worth trying new technology because who knows; it might turn out to be competitive.
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Not even. This source has it rated at 60MWt [scmp.com], and it will have a 10MWe turbine. And they're expecting first criticality in 2029. Let me go ahead and spin my index finger in a slow circle for a single bespoke research reactor with electrical output that could be replaced by 4 or 5 wind turbines in a few months rather than 5 years.
It's a prototype to even see if a thorium fuel cycle will work, and what issues to anticipate by using CO2 gas cooling / molten salts. Any scale-up of the design will take anothe
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Meanwhile in China they are building nuclear power plants that are capable of using thorium for fuel.
Sure, like we did in 1964, and the Indians did in 1996. Granted those were experimental reactors, but the reason we didn't go further down that path wasn't that we didn't know *how*. It's that it wasn't economical given the price of uranium.
I'll see opponents to nuclear power claim how nuclear fission power plants take "too long" to build and require scarce uranium fuel. China seems to have figured out how to address both issues. Why can't nations like Germany and the USA figure this out? I believe they will in time.
Don't count those j before they hatch. China has a long history of doing economically dubious megaprojects for political glory. It is true that thorium is potentially a solution to uranium depletion in a future, mainly fission-powered economy, but that's not a probl
Research shut down by Clinton (Score:1)
... we didn't go further down that path wasn't that we didn't know *how* ...
We did not go further because Bill Clinton shut down research as payback to his supporters from the environmental lobby.
Re: Research shut down by Clinton (Score:2)
Another fine product of US edjumikation I see.
Clinton promised to abandon nuclear research (Score:2)
We did not go further because Bill Clinton shut down research as payback to his supporters from the environmental lobby.
Another fine product of US edjumikation I see.
Guess again. Or do you have a Clintonesqe redefinition of "campaign promises to abandon research on nuclear power"?
"The environmental lobby does not accept the claims being made on behalf of iFR and is concerned that the administration may back away from campaign promises to abandon research on nuclear power."
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Try the Carter administration and before that the decision to not go with Thorium.
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But IFR was not about thorium-based power.
Clinton promised to shut it all down.
"The environmental lobby does not accept the claims being made on behalf of iFR and is concerned that the administration may back away from campaign promises to abandon research on nuclear power."
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Shut all what down? The article is about the IFR.
There is no inconsistency. It is referring to a campaign promise for nuclear in general. It is showing it was political payback to certain supporters.
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1964: MSRE, discovered one of the main and unsolved problems with thorium reactors - cracking of all surfaces exposed to the fuel. Turned into a nightmare to decommission. By the 1980s it was leaking radiation and workers had to be evacuated, and by the 90s it was at risk of a nuclear criticality accident. The subsequent decommissioning was described as "the most technically challenging" that the contractor had ever undertaken.
1996: KAMINI, too early to tell what kind of disaster that one is, but their new
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Don't worry, this is also an experimental reactor. It's only rated for 60MWt (10MWe) [scmp.com] and is being constructed and operated by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
If this is their answer to carbon-based energy, it's a pretty shitty one. If it's a setup to learn about thorium fuel cycles and what problems a CO2 / liquid salt moderator / coolant present and how to scale up then it's a worthwhile cause - albeit one that is still at least a decade away from being commercially
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Since when is uranium fuel "scarce" ?
To run every electricity-generating reactor currently in operation in the world, we need ~67500 tons of uranium mined each year. That's less than Botswana produces annually, and they are #13 on the list of Uranium producing countries at ~80000 tons.
Here are the top 5 producers and what they produced last year (country / tons / percentage of world production):
Australia 1,684,100 28%
Kazakhstan 815,200 13%
Canada 588,500 10%
Russia 480,900 8%
Namibia 470,1
Re:Good thing of course (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.gem.wiki/Terra-Gen... [gem.wiki]
https://www.gem.wiki/Beowawe_g... [gem.wiki]
That's the good news, the bad news is the environmentalists don't like geothermal power either, when you actually go to build it.
https://www.rgj.com/story/news... [rgj.com]
Yes, Soviets sent money and influencers to Greens (Score:3)
It has long been suspected that they are mostly led by US adversaries, with hordes of "useful idiots"
It's been proven the Green movements of the 1960s/70s in Europe were secretly financially supported by the Soviet Union and heavily infiltrated. The German Green Party admits that East German Stasi agents working for the Russians were internal influencers.
Germany's anti-nuke attitude is in part of remnant of this activity.
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It has long been suspected that they are mostly led by US adversaries, with hordes of "useful idiots"
It's been proven the Green movements of the 1960s/70s in Europe were secretly financially supported by the Soviet Union and heavily infiltrated. The German Green Party admits that East German Stasi agents working for the Russians were internal influencers.
Germany's anti-nuke attitude is in part of remnant of this activity.
US intel agencies used to call them "watermelons": green on the outside, red inside.
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The Soviets supported any potential source of discord and conflict in their opponents, as do the Russians (and CIA) today. In this case it probably backfired on them, as increased environmental awareness (and concomitant environmental regulations) have overwhelmingly benefited the US. A 2015 OMB analysis [whitehouse.gov] of costs & benefits of Federal regulations showed a 250% to 1400% net benefit:
The estimated annual benefits of major Federal regulations reviewed by OMB from October 1, 2004, to September 30, 2014, for which agencies estimated and monetized both benefits and costs, are in the aggregate between $216 billion and $812 billion, while the estimated annual costs are in the aggregate between $57 billion and $85 billion, reported in 2001 dollars. In 2010 dollars, aggregate annual benefits are estimated to be between $261 and $981 billion and costs between $68 and $103 billion.
And more specifically, the Clean Air Act of 1990 cost around $65 billion over the next 30 years - but saved $2 trillion [epa.gov] (not
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The policies be referred to hear are the anti-nuclear policies, in which the Soviets were very successful and have harmed Germany to this day,
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https://www.gem.wiki/Terra-Gen... [gem.wiki]
https://www.gem.wiki/Beowawe_g... [gem.wiki]
Cool.
Do note that those are between 4, 6, 17, and 65 MW, while the ones discussed in the summary are 2GW, nearly two orders of magnitude larger.
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That's the good news, the bad news is the environmentalists don't like geothermal power either, when you actually go to build it.
People need to realize that there is no such thing as "clean" power. There's no such thing as a consequence-free method of getting the juice for our stuff. Everything we do... gasoline, nuke, coal, solar, wind, geothermal.... has some side effect that someone will object to. Every method is "dirty" is some way, either in the use of the energy source, or in the methods of acquiring needed materials to operate it.
Fracking is turning into Geothermal (Score:3)
But I remain skeptical until it's on-line and producing power.
It's already real enough. Pump water into a fracking site and it comes out hot. There are companies working to repurpose decommissioned fracking sites for geothermal power generation. Hopefully they will do something other than mine bitcoins.
don't get too excited (Score:1)
Their is a cost to the environment.
You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences.
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You're not technically wrong here, but can you provide any actual examples of this happening? Usually operators are bound by environmental regs and are on top of that kinda of thing. Usually.
> You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences.
Well nobody's proposing an infinite amount of anything so we're good there at least.
=Smidge=
Re:don't get too excited (Score:5, Insightful)
My personal takeaways were thus. Open systems always lose efficiency over a number of years.. bascially the pressure inside the open system drops and the electricity outputs therefore also drop over a period of time. So the "answer" was to create closed systems, ie. put stuff in tubes, then circulate the stuff, almost exactly like a heat pump or refrigerator. Seems like a pretty good idea. Getting thru the municipal regulations , environmental reviews (how it affects migration routes or native wildlife species), cultural reviews to make sure it's not on a native burial ground or similar, meeting the local regulations and reviews was non trivial, and costly.
However, even in the closed loop systems, the excess heat was a chronic problem not anticipated in the design, but quite obvious once the demo sites were running. So then the company actually pivoted towards industries that needed that (excess) heat. For instance now you might sell and pump that heat into greenhouses or use it to dry out "brownfields" (areas of land contaminated with various chemicals from defunct factories).. So that may cause a new problem too. So the idea was to heat the brownfields, and then the volatile organic compounds in the soil evaporate..which is the whole idea, however, if you think about it, you really are just adding to amospheric pollution by taking those chemicals out of the ground. You solve one problem by creating another, which you quickly sweep under the rug.
There also, of course, is the problem of where to build a geothermal plant, because you need to find areas of the earth's crust where heat is close to the surface. Drilling is one of the main construction costs.
So there are many constraints to geothermal energy production that don't immediately meet the eye. I think there could be viable applications and areas where it's quite applicable, but for certain pumping excess heat into the environment will definitely cause new problems. There's always some jackass who will show up and say that the ocean can absorb ANY amount of heat. Everything has limits, even if they are quite distant.
In favour of geothermal vs nuclear was the cost. The projected budget to construct a geothermal plant with a closed loop system was by comparison quite affordable vs nuclear... I don't recall the details, but the construction cost for geo were approx 250Million per plant vs 35Billion per plant for nuclear. Obviously, you must compare energy output, but if you could build 150 geoplants for every 1 nuclear plant... it offers a lot of flexibility.
I wouldn't rule geo energy out at all, but the devil is in the details and it's not a full replacement for anything as much as another tool in the mix.
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Well nobody's proposing an infinite amount of anything so we're good there at least.
That's not quite true. Either there's an infinite amount of human stupidity, or we can harness energy from Albert Einstein spinning in his grave.
Historical open circuit (Score:3)
Much of the downtown had hot-water heat from the power plant of the Chatham, Wallaceburg & Lake Erie Electric Railway.
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>> Closed systems don't have the same problem
You didn't bother to read the links? This system reportedly is closed loop (also known as enhanced geothermal), so you can relax.
But it will take at least another 4 years to build it so I don't know why this article is interesting.
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From the linked article;
"The BLM on Thursday proposed to exempt many geothermal projects from lengthy environmental analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act — part of a broader, controversial push to accelerate the permitting process for energy projects nationwide."
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You’re not wrong, of course, but problems with waste heat are hardly limited to geothermal power - any power plant using heat transfer has similar issues to a greater or lesser degree, including coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear. Even solar power systems that rely on solar energy to heat up a furnace will have to get rid of the heat somehow.
Geothermal also has the potential for producing waste water contaminated with sulphur, metals, or other pollutants that get brought up with the heat transfer
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"You can't dump an infinite amount of heat energy into the environment without consquences."
You can't? The sun does it every day...
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And we all get sunburns as a result.
The more careful get wonderful tan lines
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Closed system are being developed (Score:2)
Seven-year-old startup? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not So Much about Age (Score:2)
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I feel like until it makes money.
It's a start up as long as people are willing to fund it on the promise of one day being profitable.
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How many years before a startup become no longer a startup?
Is Microsoft a 49-year-old startup? Is Shell a 117-year-old startup?
Is Kongo Gumi a 1400-year-old startup?
Being a startup is not defined by age. I have encountered ten year old startups. Most investors are not that patient. They require an exit within a reasonable time usually an IPO or by being acquired by a larger company. It gets murky when companies get big without going public. SpaceX is 22 years old and valued near $200B but is still private. Is it still a startup?
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I have encountered ten year old startups.
I think that stretches the defintion of startup too far. A 10 year old company isn't a startup, it is at best a 10 year old, unprofitable company living off investor cash. That's how I'd bill the one I worked for...
SpaceX is 22 years old and valued near $200B but is still private. Is it still a startup?
No.
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How many years before a startup become no longer a startup?
It's not a time based title.
https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com]
Re: Seven-year-old startup? (Score:2)
Wait! What? (Score:2)
2 gigawatts of electricity â" enough to power more than 2 million homes
That's 1kW per home. That might be a valid number if people haven't converted from gas heating/hot water/clothes drying/cooking.
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Yeah, that seems low, but they're probably thinking mostly apartments/small homes. Still, 1kWh average is a lot. If your electricity+delivery cost was 12 cents per kWh, your bill would have to be upward of $88+fees (most likely around $200) if you used an average of 1kW/hour. But most people who live in apartments' cost is less than $200
Now that I've put my usage in numbers, I'm really wondering what I'm doing that's using 3.5kWh/hour. I guess it's time to get back to my panel sensor project ...
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I'm doing that's using 3.5kWh/hour.
Save yourself some typing, just say kW rather than kWh/hour.
It is also 1 kW average, not kWh in this case. Power vs energy.
1 kW * 30 days * 24 hours = 720 kWh/month, $86.40@$0.12/kWh.
I know in my area SFDs average closer to 1k kWh/month.
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The average electricity consumption of US households is 10.2 MWh in a year (data for 2023 https://shrinkthatfootprint.co... [shrinkthatfootprint.com] ). A continuous production of 2 GW makes 17.5 TWh in a year, which covers the spending of 1.7 million of such average households.
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That's the typical number used in these sorts of press releases. IIRC, the actual number in the US is about 1.1 to 1.3 kW, which is not any peak, but an average from total kWh for a full year divided by 8766 hours.
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An average, not a peak. Because residential electrical demand has about the worst load factor (peak vs average demand) of anything connected to the grid.
When I see a number given in terms of number of homes served, I know some PR people are spreading b.s.
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n 2022, the average annual amount of electricity sold to (purchased by) a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,791 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of about 899 kWh per month.
That works out to 30 kwh/day, so 1.25kw average rate. Someone probably just liked a nice round 1kw number to use.
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We don't really understand the effects of cooling earth Crust & Magma.
I believe you don't really understand the scale of the planet.
The Earth is quite large. Much of the heating in the core is from the decay of heavy elements buried in very deep. Maybe we end up poking in a few holes that lower the resistance of this heat escaping into space but that's not likely to make any changes that are detectable beyond the local area.
With abundance of Sun & Wind plus battery technology and fusion in the horizon.
We shouldn't get so much excited, like it was with fossil fuels in the last century.
Fusion on the horizon? That's been a trope of future energy since at least Leonard Nemoy was an actor on Star Trek and the host of In Search of.... Wh
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The Earth is quite large. Much of the heating in the core is from the decay of heavy elements buried in very deep. Maybe we end up poking in a few holes that lower the resistance of this heat escaping into space but that's not likely to make any changes that are detectable beyond the local area.
Sounds like you want to play a game of "fuck around and find out." I seem to recall the last time humanity did this (fossil fuels) it created a global environmental disaster that threatens global mass extinction of multiple species (humanity included). For which humanity has made no real progress in mitigating. Let alone reversing. But might undo itself given enough time which is measured in geological scale.
Now you want to double the stakes by poking holes in the only thing (the thing that makes the Mag
Hasn't this been considered before? (Score:2)
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Cost.
Coal and gas were so cheap that the cost of drilling for, building, and operating a geothermal plant rarely mad much sense. That said, the US has for decades had several times the installed and operating geothermal power than that of Iceland, so it's definitely nothing new either.
But I guess someone's trying to bring sexy back...
=Smidge=
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I can see a potential drawback to this, though: what if the heat source they tap into dies out over time, especially if it does so prematurely? Much investment in a power plant that then would have to be shuttered.
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> I can see a potential drawback to this, though: what if the heat source they tap into dies out over time, especially if it does so prematurely?
If the Earth's mantel cools to the point that we can't extract usable energy from it anymore, I propose there would be FAR bigger concerns than keeping the power plant open for business.
=Smidge=
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Are you dividing the total geothermal output by the surface area of the earth?
The point of this is that it's deeper, hotter and, they reckon, should last longer and should cost less. It's the last two that we really need to know.
Geothermal more viable then nuclear (Score:2)
Not the most expeditious. (Score:2)
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Isn't this about full employment for drillers? (Score:2)
Nothing wrong with full employment, but the cost of geothermal is not competitive with wind or solar. I guess the same could be said for nuclear power and the need to keep those workers employed.
"That illustrates another reason why geothermal could help the U.S. chart a path to a cleaner energy future, said CEO Tim Latimer. A lot of fossil fuel operations will be phased out to fight climate change. And a lot of oil and gas workers will need a landing spot"
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A few years ago, solar and wind were not cost competitive with geothermal. Things change. If they can get the cost down to within 2 or 3 times that of solar or wind, and show that it can be done with a wide geographical distribution, then it will have a place.
Iceland is the place to watch (Score:3, Interesting)
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In fact, the massive potential of geothermal power in Iceland is why I've personally suggested that Iceland should be the location of Artificial Intelligence server farms. And the server farms in Iceland can be connected back to North America and Europe using multiple high-capacity fiber optic undersea cables.
Priorities, priorities... (Score:2)
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Yellowstone (Score:2)
Yellowstone sit atop of a supervolcano. Would that not make a great location to tap into geothermal power? Im not saying do it smack dab in the middle of the park but surely there are some places they could section off to produce power.
Repower coal plants with geothermal already!! (Score:3)
No (Score:2)
Just no.
cost, of course (Score:2)
The issue here is lifetime cost.
In the past, geothermal was limited to very hot sources near the surface, like The Geysers in Calif. The new technology tries to go deeper. It's not clear what the quality of the heat, time span of availability, or drilling cost will be over time. But, time will tell, so let's see what they can do without subsidies.