Super glad to be a part of this. Our MicroPulse Measurement While Drilling Systems have been used to drill numerous wells for Fervo. We also developed a first of its kind navigation system for the first full scale Eavor loop in Germany.
I have been following this company and several others (Quaise, Fervo, Sage) in the EGS Space for a little bit now, and I think we are on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in baseload renewable energy. This site in Utah is one of the largest test cases that expands the use of EGS to a much broader area than just a few geothermal hot spots. Prices are dropping dramatically, and these things are moving quickly beyond the R&D phase. There is a world where every major data center across the Western US has its own base load power supply that has essentially no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste, and no need for complicated permitting. EGS truly could be a game changer in the world's push to decarbonize. I'm super excited.
At least in Tuscany - where there is a cluster of geothermal power plants creating 1/3 of the region electricity (it should reach 40% in a few years) - they had to invent special filters to lower the emission of mercury and hydrogen sulfide https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...
I don't know if it's "no footprint" at all. For what I know, which is not much, but just what a person living here might know, there's a footprint that can be somehow managed. But I'm not an engineer
As a layman, I assume waste heat would still be an issue? Even so I would also assume it's still way less damaging to the environment than everything else.
I'm not quite sure about that. The earths core should generate the same amount of heat (through gravitational friction and radioactive decay) regardless if we tap it or not. If the heat didn't escape somehow already it would slowly get hotter.
Whaste heat from nuclear or fusion does contribute to earth heating, though insignificant compared to any source pf c02.
But my intuition tells me geothermal wouldn't...
Mm. Actually, water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas; and that's how to covert heat to energy. So mabie it would indeed be significant.
TFA states the Cape Station plant (created and operated by a company called Fervo) are closed systems - they capture the emissions so no water is wasted or spewed into the environment as steam.
They deserve big props for this innovation and effort, as historically Utah has frequently been been treated as an industrial dumping grounds. The long-term ecological damage and visual eyesores due to strip mining, chemical dumping and other pollution is significant.
Waste heat is always "an issue", but rarely an issue worth caring much about.
Global warming isn't happening due to industrial waste heat - it's happening due to CO2 emissions being a massive leverage for messing with how the planet absorbs and emits heat.
Complicated permitting as compared to what? I would assume it's much more complicated than solar, and less complicated than... is there anything else available at small scale?
Nuclear is the comparable power source -- both have high upfront costs, long build times, low operating costs and clean generation. If deep geothermal can come in cheaper than nuclear, there's basically no reason to do nuclear.
Not really an issue in the US at least. Their primary geothermal basins already have earthquakes far stronger than any that might be triggered by fluid injection. They also have earthquake swarms due to natural circulation of geothermal fluids in some of these areas.
It is mostly an issue in places like Europe that do not have a history of strong earthquakes and therefore lack seismic resistance civil engineering. There are a few places like that in the US (e.g. New England) where a minor M5 earthquake can cause damage but those don't overlap with areas with high geothermal potential.
For sure! I’ve been following this tech for decades. The advantage of high-quality geothermal basins is maximizing the ROI and efficiency of the first installations, which places the product in the best possible light for marketing purposes. It also provides a comparison against more conventional geothermal power generation which is deployed in the same environment.
I understand the problem to be energy RoI. The larger the size of a wind turbine’s blade, the more energy it produces compared to the cost of producing it. Small wind systems just can’t avail themselves of these economies of scale.
Most wells at Cape Station are between 8,000 and 9,000 feet deep, and the deepest one extends a mind-blowing 15,000 feet below the surface. That is about the depth you'd get to if you stacked 50 Statues of Liberty on top of each other!
For those who prefer a less American-centric metric: 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers. 15,000 feet is about 4.5 kilometers — roughly the height of 14 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other!
It was the tallest freestanding structure in France from 1889 to 2004 (when it was surpassed by one of the pillars of the Millau Viaduct; it's still the second-tallest). Must have been absolutely mind blowing at ~312m when it was new - the record was around 150m for centuries before it.
Internationally ambiguous though, the world at large equates football with FIFA and Australians picture something much larger with more foot to ellipsoid than a tiny US handegg court.
One statue of liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, Liberty Island, NYC) is approximately 4 times the size of one statue of liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World replica, Île aux Cygnes, Paris).
I think the idea is that nobody has any sense, even a very rough one, of how tall the Statue of Liberty might be. It's not like you ever see it in person, and if you did most of it would be in perspective, which ruins your chances of determining its size.
Most people have enough trouble believing that their foot is the same length as their forearm. You never see your feet close up, either.
> 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers.
The usual value for the geothermal gradient is 25 to 30 degrees C per kilometer. So at 2.5km, in most locations they might be able to get boiling water, but not superheated steam.
Most of the geothermal enthusiasts are talking about needing to go down 4 to 12 kilometers. Is there something special about the geology at this site?
The site is part of the largest high-quality geothermal basin in the world. It is larger than most countries, encompassing almost the entirety of Nevada and large parts of adjacent States. The geothermal potential of the region is enormous, even just using classic geothermal technology.
The US has long been the world's leading producer of geothermal power, mostly generated from this basin.
I couldn't see anything that said, but... probably.
Beaver County, Utah, has at least one hot spring, and I suspect more than that. I'm pretty sure that the location for this project was not chosen at random.
Found a geothermal potential map of the US.[1] Utah is in a different basin, but Colorado has a nice big hot spot.
It's not a fully renewable resource. It's possible to pull out too much heat too and deplete the resource.
The entire geothermal heating of the planet is only 50 terawatts, which seems big, but it's spread over 500 million square kilometers. Or 100KW/km^2, which is not much. Solar is orders of magnitude larger.
likely it is hot, porous rock that is capped in such a way that injected water will heat to the super critical point for water , or water exists as a super critical fluid there already
One interesting point made here is that the cost of turbines puts a floor price on any form.of generation which uses them, whether renewable or not, meaning in the long run solar has a big advantage: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer. I don't know how accurate that is
If I recall they touched on how US oil drilling companies with lots of experience in horizontal drilling were being used by these companies & the financing that goes into them.
Today I discovered that geothermal energy is a thing, cool! An immediate question that comes to mind is how much "energy potential" does the earth store and "how is it generated"? I'd imagine something about gravity or magnetic waves that move the iron* core and stuff. Anyone know some resources I can read more about this?
Following on to this, enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. So geothermal wouldn’t need to provide all of today’s human energy consumption, just that last bit that renewables, existing nuclear, transmission, storage, and demand response can’t provide for today.
(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours globally as of this comment)
I wonder how much ΔT you need at the crust to meaningfully change Earth's magnetic field by altering convection patterns in the outer core. I don't know enough physics to attempt an answer.
Calculating or simulating how earths magnetic field behaves or is generated is quite a complex task. So im doubtful we can usefully estimate it to such precision. It would be interesting though.
We know that if the convection in the outer core stops, the Earth's magnetic field stops, and removing enough heat from the core will stop the convection.
I've seen a confident estimate in the form of a calculation. They know what kind of compounds (term?) are in the outer core and they know the minimum temperature those compounds need to be at to be free-flowing enough to sustain the field. And I'm pretty sure we know the current temperature of the outer core.
My memory is that the calculation found that if humanity switched to geothermal for all its energy needs, then in only about 1000 years, the core cools enough for the magnetic field to stop, but I am not sure.
(We should definitely deploy geothermal in the Yellowstone caldera though long enough to cool it down enough so that it will not erupt again.)
Whoa, this is a bit scary. As mentioned earlier, it should basically be used in a way where other energy sources are tapped first, and only the shortfall is covered.
That is definitely not true hahaha. The outer core is several thousand km down, and the crust is only 30km thick. And we have the entire mantle below us.
Humanity could max out geothermal for a million years and never make a dent.
The outer core is 2,890 KM (~ 1800 miles) below the earths crust, and has the mantle in the way. The crust itself is only 30KM thick. [https://phys.org/news/2017-02-journey-center-earth.html] The crust is basically a thin layer of slag on top of a giant ball of molten everything.
Even at million+ year timescales, I can’t see any way the temperature of the upper crust could matter to the core at all - even if the crust was at absolute zero.
Dirt insulates relatively well, and the amount of thermal mass present is mindboggling.
> would be a rounding error above absolute zero anyway
Kind of joking: unless there are nonlinear effects near 300K? Fig 4 [1] seems to suggest that the thermal diffusivity of the mantle grows very fast as temperature declines past 300K... but the data stop at 200K.
Reason for initial comment: we could probably set up a spherical heat equation to guess how crust cooling would change heat conduction at the outer core. But I have absolutely no idea how to reason about changes in heat conduction affecting the convection dynamics that generate the field. I was silently hoping for one of the domain experts lurking this forum to see it and share wisdom. (But overall it was a silly question, I know).
My conclusion: Geothermal makes research into plate tectonics and earthquake mitigation considerably more valuable, so we can figure out how to do it in a way that reduces earthquakes rather than creating them.
Alot of the heat comes from radioactive decay. Heavy radioactive elements under alot of pressure and heat. There's also friction from our moon (earth seems to have a more active core than many other planets) and simply being very well isolated. (Rock is a terrible heat conductor)
Also... Iceland. They're massive in aluminium production for a reason. They have basically infinate abundant energy boiling out from the ground. Here in sweden its used by alot of homes for heating; getting a well producing 60c water is pretty cheap. (A single home may have their own well)
The issue is using it for power really only becomes viable when you reach superheated steam temperatures. And at those depths; drills melt, so its use outside of volcanic regions has been real slow.
From a Bill Gates documentary, I saw research with partner companies aimed at improving nuclear power generation mechanisms to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Bill Gates’ endeavors always seem positive and fascinating.
I thought exactly the same thing. Peltier's themselves don't really have a pathway for becoming as efficient as steam turbines but there are other methods currently in research.
One promising idea is to use sodium vapor in a fuel cell style device:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2017.10.022
The maximum COP for a peltier device is 1, in practice it’s far below that.
Heat pumps go way beyond a COP of 1; an open-loop cooling system with an evaporative cooling tower can have a COP of 7. A closed loop heat pump alone can have a COP of 4.
Peltier devices are a dead end for moving heat around outside of specialized applications where you can’t drag around two heat exchangers, a valve, and a pump (like active cooling clothing). It’s impossible for them to even approach the efficiency of resistive heating (COP of 1).
Heat pump != Geothermal energy generation, or any energy generation at that
Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal
A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy
They certainly don't produce electricity, but they do produce energy. You put in 1 kW of electricity, though, and you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
Now, that energy is coming from somewhere else (in this case, the heat of the ground beneath the house or the air outside), but that's true of electrical generators as well.
They certainly don't produce electricity. However, if you put in 1 kW of electricity, you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
They didn’t say home geothermal, they said home heatpumps. In that setup, the earth is not an energy source, just a very massive source of thermal inertia. They are not the same thing.
‘home geothermal’ isn’t really a thing unless you’re already living on a hotspring, which is quite unusual. (delta-v is not sufficient)
At the point someone is drilling km+ boreholes and installing MW+ turbines, it’s safe to call it commercial.
More than 900 shallow wells have been drilled at Rotorua for space and water heating for private homes, hospitals, schools, motels, hotels, and other commercial and industrial uses. At peak use, around 430 wells were operating. Currently fewer than 300 production and injection wells are operating, for approximately 140 consents takes. About 90 of the wells are less than 200m deep and typically recover geothermal fluid at temperatures of 120 to 200°C.
How does that make it an energy source? It makes it a pump. That still consumes energy to run. And none of the home heat pump setups I’ve seen are tapping into enough thermal inertia (or high grade heat) to do more than keep a house warm. They also, of course, PUT HEAT BACK there in the summer to help cool the house. They’re just moving heat around, and not with any particularly high quality either. If they used the atmosphere for thermal inertia (also common), would you say they were using the atmosphere as an energy source?
Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
It’s like the difference between having a pool in your backyard, and damming a huge river and installing turbines.
The point of a heat pump is to bring more Watts of heat into the home than the electricity consumed. Otherwise you could just use a resistive heater and heat the home with electricity directly. So ask yourself, if more energy came into your home than you put in from the electric socket, where exactly did the extra energy come from?
I did. The question is for you. I've answered it in several different ways in this thread. There is a sibling comment I replied to which breaks it down even more clearly.
You used the energy from the wall socket to pump the heat from outside into the inside, less efficiently than you could use that heat to generate more electricity or do other work later.
Aka you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit. You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
Actually operating one, you'll see that the energy cost of a heat pump becomes proportionally higher as the temperature difference gets bigger, so you spend more energy moving the heat when the source is low temperature and the output is high temperature.
Many people have gotten quite frustrated when they end up chilling the ground in their ground source heat pump too much, and they end up with very inefficient systems.
You could do the exact same thing (with better or similar efficiency) by using some other source of thermal mass. Air sourced heat pumps do it with the atmosphere. It's possible to use lakes and other bodies of water.
No net usable power is being extracted from the earth in this scenario. The earth is being cooled in order to heat your house. And heated, in order to cool your house.
Geothermal power systems do produce actual usable power, and they do so by running a heat engine (the opposite of a heat pump) off an extremely large temperature difference from a very large source of underground heat. You can't run a heat engine on the output of a heat pump and produce net power, anymore than you can hook a generator to an electric motor and produce net power.
>That is not what ‘power source’ means. You probably want to read up on some thermodynamics and definitions. I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
There is no answer in that whole comment to my question. However, you did answer it in the comment I am replying to:
> you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit.
Yes! That's exactly right. But furthermore:
> You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
This is exactly right, and it is also known as the first law of thermodynamics. [1]. There is no way to produce energy. Even with electrical generation from geothermal, we are moving energy and concentrating it a bit, as you say, just in different forms.
> Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
Geothermal systems don’t strictly need to produce energy with steam, I just completed a project to convert some boilers and chillers with heat recovery chillers and a geothermal loop for heating and cooling at a research lab for an S&P 500 constituent. I’m doing another project to replace some existing geothermal heat pumps for another customer this fall, no power generation, just heating and cooling.
That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
The different between these two ideas, is that a heat pump is not producing heat (as it's primary goal). It's concentrating and moving heat from point A to point B. The amount of heat moved may exceed the amount of raw energy used to perform this process (and should, in most situations), HOWEVER, it can not exceed the amount of energy you would get back by trying to reverse the process to extract energy. It is still a net energy consuming process.
This is important, because if it wasn't - you could power the heat pumps off their own output, and you'd literally have infinite energy/perpetual motion machine. Which would be awesome. It is also impossible, near as we can tell.
What actually happens is everything grinds to a halt, because the useful (Actual) energy output from the heat pump is lower than the energy required to run it.
Chances are, that system isn't even really geothermal (as in using latent heat of the planet) - any large enough mass would do the same thing. People just like to say the word because it sounds 'green'. If the ground was hot enough (for instance) to provide actual heat itself, a heatpump would be a waste for heating the building - and extremely inefficient for cooling it. It would be better to just pipe water straight out of the ground to heat, and use air based HVAC to cool.
Geothermal power generation does produce power - by tapping into a source of heat so hot that the difference between normal atmospheric temperatures and that heat source allows us to generate useful power. A heat pump gets in the way and causes losses in these situations.
Unless you're sitting (quite literally) on a hotspring, this requires going VERY deep into the ground. Which is what this article is about.
> That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
I get the vibe that your definition of "producing power" is electrical power generation. However the original argument is that there is energy being extracted that is not in the form of electricity.
Where Europe is ahead of the US is really in neighborhood wide geothermal for heating and cooling. The US tends to only use networked multi building geothermal for corporate and university campuses while having little central planning for a neighborhood of individuals to migrate to geothermal.
Well its clear you didn't read the article, it explains how this particular type of geothermal is a technological advance. Current geothermal electrical generation is limited to very specific geology, enhanced geothermal is able to be used in many more places.
Super glad to be a part of this. Our MicroPulse Measurement While Drilling Systems have been used to drill numerous wells for Fervo. We also developed a first of its kind navigation system for the first full scale Eavor loop in Germany.
Heres a presentation we did on the system last year alongside Schlumberger. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7852s Potatoe quality but my part starts at 2:10:52.
It’s absolutely awesome deploying our super rugged, super high temp drilling technologies for GeoThermal.
If you’re interested in working on this kind of tech we’re hiring.
> If you’re interested in working on this kind of tech we’re hiring.
All jobs onsite in Houston: https://www.erdosmiller.com/jobs
Interesting that the tech sales job is bilingual (haven't seen that too often).
Thank you!
Hey Ken!
It was great working with you at DigiDrill. Glad to see you're still pushing the frontier of high temp, high G MWD systems.
Keep up the good work!
How do you do inspections on the buried assets?
Not sure what you mean, our equipment is conveyed in and out of the well during the drilling process.
I have been following this company and several others (Quaise, Fervo, Sage) in the EGS Space for a little bit now, and I think we are on the cusp of a huge breakthrough in baseload renewable energy. This site in Utah is one of the largest test cases that expands the use of EGS to a much broader area than just a few geothermal hot spots. Prices are dropping dramatically, and these things are moving quickly beyond the R&D phase. There is a world where every major data center across the Western US has its own base load power supply that has essentially no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste, and no need for complicated permitting. EGS truly could be a game changer in the world's push to decarbonize. I'm super excited.
At least in Tuscany - where there is a cluster of geothermal power plants creating 1/3 of the region electricity (it should reach 40% in a few years) - they had to invent special filters to lower the emission of mercury and hydrogen sulfide https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...
I don't know if it's "no footprint" at all. For what I know, which is not much, but just what a person living here might know, there's a footprint that can be somehow managed. But I'm not an engineer
The plants mentioned in the article are closed systems. They aren’t releasing steam into the atmosphere like the plants you’re referencing.
I wish New Zealand did more of this.
We have a whole fleet of geothermal plants (15ish), making about 20% of our power. However the largest plant is only 160MW.
The impact in comparison to our other renewables seems fairly minimal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealan...
> no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste
As a layman, I assume waste heat would still be an issue? Even so I would also assume it's still way less damaging to the environment than everything else.
I'm not quite sure about that. The earths core should generate the same amount of heat (through gravitational friction and radioactive decay) regardless if we tap it or not. If the heat didn't escape somehow already it would slowly get hotter.
Whaste heat from nuclear or fusion does contribute to earth heating, though insignificant compared to any source pf c02.
But my intuition tells me geothermal wouldn't...
Mm. Actually, water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas; and that's how to covert heat to energy. So mabie it would indeed be significant.
TFA states the Cape Station plant (created and operated by a company called Fervo) are closed systems - they capture the emissions so no water is wasted or spewed into the environment as steam.
They deserve big props for this innovation and effort, as historically Utah has frequently been been treated as an industrial dumping grounds. The long-term ecological damage and visual eyesores due to strip mining, chemical dumping and other pollution is significant.
Well, that's just neat!
Waste heat is always "an issue", but rarely an issue worth caring much about.
Global warming isn't happening due to industrial waste heat - it's happening due to CO2 emissions being a massive leverage for messing with how the planet absorbs and emits heat.
Although, the more greenhouse gases there are, the worse waste heat is.
Oh, yes. Especially if you don't have a generous supply of fresh water, to use in your cooling towers. For example:
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/02/f7/geotherma...
Complicated permitting as compared to what? I would assume it's much more complicated than solar, and less complicated than... is there anything else available at small scale?
Nuclear is the comparable power source -- both have high upfront costs, long build times, low operating costs and clean generation. If deep geothermal can come in cheaper than nuclear, there's basically no reason to do nuclear.
Shallower geothermal has a history of causing damaging earthquakes in some geologies.
Some versions of deep geothermal does also borrow from the fracking industry which has issues with groundwater pollution.
Not really an issue in the US at least. Their primary geothermal basins already have earthquakes far stronger than any that might be triggered by fluid injection. They also have earthquake swarms due to natural circulation of geothermal fluids in some of these areas.
It is mostly an issue in places like Europe that do not have a history of strong earthquakes and therefore lack seismic resistance civil engineering. There are a few places like that in the US (e.g. New England) where a minor M5 earthquake can cause damage but those don't overlap with areas with high geothermal potential.
The deep geothermal people seem to think it can be used ~anywhere, not just traditional geothermal basins.
For sure! I’ve been following this tech for decades. The advantage of high-quality geothermal basins is maximizing the ROI and efficiency of the first installations, which places the product in the best possible light for marketing purposes. It also provides a comparison against more conventional geothermal power generation which is deployed in the same environment.
There's some small wind generation (e.g. designed to go on top of buildings), though I don't think it's ever been a significant commercial success.
I understand the problem to be energy RoI. The larger the size of a wind turbine’s blade, the more energy it produces compared to the cost of producing it. Small wind systems just can’t avail themselves of these economies of scale.
coal or gas i would guess
Nah. Gas isn't comparable and no one in the US is building new coal generation.
Aren’t we getting ”clean beautiful coal”?
The downvotes are presumable because you have misquoted him.
He said ‘BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN COAL’
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1141801993510...
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Most wells at Cape Station are between 8,000 and 9,000 feet deep, and the deepest one extends a mind-blowing 15,000 feet below the surface. That is about the depth you'd get to if you stacked 50 Statues of Liberty on top of each other!
For those who prefer a less American-centric metric: 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers. 15,000 feet is about 4.5 kilometers — roughly the height of 14 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other!
It's so silly to use statues of liberty as a metric when nobody really knows how tall it is either (famously it's a lot smaller than people expect).
Helpful but pointless metrics:
1 Statue of Liberty (including foundation) is roughly 1 American football field (excluding end zones)
1 Eiffel Tower is around 3 Statues of Liberty (each with foundation)... which is almost 1600 bananas
Wow, so the deepest well is about 27k bananas deep. Amazing!
I'm actually shocked how big the Eiffel Tower is.
https://www.size-explorer.com/en/compare/buildings/eiffel+to...
It was the tallest freestanding structure in France from 1889 to 2004 (when it was surpassed by one of the pillars of the Millau Viaduct; it's still the second-tallest). Must have been absolutely mind blowing at ~312m when it was new - the record was around 150m for centuries before it.
Football fields, despite being a meme, are very easy for Americans to visualize
Canadian football fields are bigger
I'll have you know my Canadian friends have told me it's OK, American football fields are average sized (definitely not less than average).
Internationally ambiguous though, the world at large equates football with FIFA and Australians picture something much larger with more foot to ellipsoid than a tiny US handegg court.
One statue of liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World, Liberty Island, NYC) is approximately 4 times the size of one statue of liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World replica, Île aux Cygnes, Paris).
Easy peasy.
The idea is you assume it with the base while they only used the statue itself, making whatever they are measuring look more impressive.
I think the idea is that nobody has any sense, even a very rough one, of how tall the Statue of Liberty might be. It's not like you ever see it in person, and if you did most of it would be in perspective, which ruins your chances of determining its size.
Most people have enough trouble believing that their foot is the same length as their forearm. You never see your feet close up, either.
Whelp, I just had to put my foot onto my arm, so point made.
AU would have been the most universal measurement.
Metric? That unit of measure must surely be imperial?
It's probably done because Statues of Liberty is the ultimate "freedom unit".
> 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers.
The usual value for the geothermal gradient is 25 to 30 degrees C per kilometer. So at 2.5km, in most locations they might be able to get boiling water, but not superheated steam. Most of the geothermal enthusiasts are talking about needing to go down 4 to 12 kilometers. Is there something special about the geology at this site?
The site is part of the largest high-quality geothermal basin in the world. It is larger than most countries, encompassing almost the entirety of Nevada and large parts of adjacent States. The geothermal potential of the region is enormous, even just using classic geothermal technology.
The US has long been the world's leading producer of geothermal power, mostly generated from this basin.
Any resources on total energy potential in the basin you recommend?
I couldn't see anything that said, but... probably.
Beaver County, Utah, has at least one hot spring, and I suspect more than that. I'm pretty sure that the location for this project was not chosen at random.
Found a geothermal potential map of the US.[1] Utah is in a different basin, but Colorado has a nice big hot spot.
It's not a fully renewable resource. It's possible to pull out too much heat too and deplete the resource. The entire geothermal heating of the planet is only 50 terawatts, which seems big, but it's spread over 500 million square kilometers. Or 100KW/km^2, which is not much. Solar is orders of magnitude larger.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/geothermal-energy
likely it is hot, porous rock that is capped in such a way that injected water will heat to the super critical point for water , or water exists as a super critical fluid there already
That’s close to the deepest geothermal wells which are about 5 km deep:
https://en.renovablesverdes.com/iceland-is-drilling-the-deep...
https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202411/07/WS672c6803a310f...
Actually, 3 miles means a lot more to Americans than 15,000 feet, much like your 2.5 kilometers.
And 50 football fields would mean a lot more, to less measurement-aware Americans.
Both made by the French
> 4.5 kilometers — roughly the height of 14 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other!
Or about one Mont Blanc from sea level
The Statue of Liberty was made by France. This IS us Americans trying to use less American-centric units of measure.
This provides a lot of interesting info on geothermal: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/watt-lies-beneath/
And more: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fracking-aust...
One interesting point made here is that the cost of turbines puts a floor price on any form.of generation which uses them, whether renewable or not, meaning in the long run solar has a big advantage: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer. I don't know how accurate that is
Kinda. We have a lot of existing coal plants that we want to offline to decarbonize, and they've already got turbines.
How hard is it to repurpose those turbines for other sources? And are they in good enough shape to get a long life out of them after being repurposed?
I don't know -- I'm far from an expert on this -- but ultimately they're both steam-driven turbines.
If anyone is interested in some history, there have been geothermal plants in that area since the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blundell_Geothermal_Power_Plan...
Geothermal is not without its dangers, as the story of Staufen (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279963863_Damage_to...) showed, but I am glad there is still good research going on about it.
Reminds me of another geothermal company Quaise: https://www.quaise.com/.
If memory serves me right, the 2024 Energy Geek Out episode touched on this topic. https://www.dotnetrocks.com/details/1931
If I recall they touched on how US oil drilling companies with lots of experience in horizontal drilling were being used by these companies & the financing that goes into them.
Today I discovered that geothermal energy is a thing, cool! An immediate question that comes to mind is how much "energy potential" does the earth store and "how is it generated"? I'd imagine something about gravity or magnetic waves that move the iron* core and stuff. Anyone know some resources I can read more about this?
Assuming we can drill deep enough and harness it, the thermal energy in the earth's crust is essentially infinite.
People said "the Earth is too big, human activity can't change the climate". Now look at where we are.
I wonder, if we draw enough heat out... would the core cool enough to shrink? And if so, would the crust collapse to the new size?
Pure speculation of course, but did the first guy burning coal know the outcome?
Anyhow, I love geothermal, think you're right, but just got tweaked on the word "infinite".
Just some rough physics..
Q = m c ΔT
m = mass of the crust (roughly 10^22 kg)
C = specific heat of crust (roughly 1000 J/kg·K)
ΔT = 1 K
Q = 10^25 joules would be needed to lower the earths crust by 1 degree K
About 10,000 years worth of today’s human energy consumption
Following on to this, enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. So geothermal wouldn’t need to provide all of today’s human energy consumption, just that last bit that renewables, existing nuclear, transmission, storage, and demand response can’t provide for today.
(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours globally as of this comment)
I wonder how much ΔT you need at the crust to meaningfully change Earth's magnetic field by altering convection patterns in the outer core. I don't know enough physics to attempt an answer.
Calculating or simulating how earths magnetic field behaves or is generated is quite a complex task. So im doubtful we can usefully estimate it to such precision. It would be interesting though.
We know that if the convection in the outer core stops, the Earth's magnetic field stops, and removing enough heat from the core will stop the convection.
Yes but calculating the energy draw required for any measurable change in this effect is very different from knowing the rough process it operates on.
We know how weather works quite well, but knowing if it will rain in a week is an entirely different beast.
I've seen a confident estimate in the form of a calculation. They know what kind of compounds (term?) are in the outer core and they know the minimum temperature those compounds need to be at to be free-flowing enough to sustain the field. And I'm pretty sure we know the current temperature of the outer core.
My memory is that the calculation found that if humanity switched to geothermal for all its energy needs, then in only about 1000 years, the core cools enough for the magnetic field to stop, but I am not sure.
(We should definitely deploy geothermal in the Yellowstone caldera though long enough to cool it down enough so that it will not erupt again.)
Whoa, this is a bit scary. As mentioned earlier, it should basically be used in a way where other energy sources are tapped first, and only the shortfall is covered.
That is definitely not true hahaha. The outer core is several thousand km down, and the crust is only 30km thick. And we have the entire mantle below us.
Humanity could max out geothermal for a million years and never make a dent.
The outer core is 2,890 KM (~ 1800 miles) below the earths crust, and has the mantle in the way. The crust itself is only 30KM thick. [https://phys.org/news/2017-02-journey-center-earth.html] The crust is basically a thin layer of slag on top of a giant ball of molten everything.
Even at million+ year timescales, I can’t see any way the temperature of the upper crust could matter to the core at all - even if the crust was at absolute zero.
Dirt insulates relatively well, and the amount of thermal mass present is mindboggling.
if you lived in the Earth’s core (~6000k) the surface (~300k) would be a rounding error above absolute zero anyway
> would be a rounding error above absolute zero anyway
Kind of joking: unless there are nonlinear effects near 300K? Fig 4 [1] seems to suggest that the thermal diffusivity of the mantle grows very fast as temperature declines past 300K... but the data stop at 200K.
Reason for initial comment: we could probably set up a spherical heat equation to guess how crust cooling would change heat conduction at the outer core. But I have absolutely no idea how to reason about changes in heat conduction affecting the convection dynamics that generate the field. I was silently hoping for one of the domain experts lurking this forum to see it and share wisdom. (But overall it was a silly question, I know).
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
Isn't the atmosphere we're affecting on the order of 1 millionth of Earth's mass?
It'd take multiple orders of magnitude more impact from humanity for us to actually affect the core, no?
There is also the issue that using geothermal energy can cause earthquakes.
Here are some links I found related to this
Pro-geothermal position: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/producing-clean-energy-ca...
Anti-geothermal position: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/05/lessons-south-kore...
My conclusion: Geothermal makes research into plate tectonics and earthquake mitigation considerably more valuable, so we can figure out how to do it in a way that reduces earthquakes rather than creating them.
I think thats actually disputed. I'm not entirely sure though and i dont have the time to look it up right now.
Alot of the heat comes from radioactive decay. Heavy radioactive elements under alot of pressure and heat. There's also friction from our moon (earth seems to have a more active core than many other planets) and simply being very well isolated. (Rock is a terrible heat conductor)
Also... Iceland. They're massive in aluminium production for a reason. They have basically infinate abundant energy boiling out from the ground. Here in sweden its used by alot of homes for heating; getting a well producing 60c water is pretty cheap. (A single home may have their own well)
The issue is using it for power really only becomes viable when you reach superheated steam temperatures. And at those depths; drills melt, so its use outside of volcanic regions has been real slow.
>earth seems to have a more active core than many other planets
Fun fact: Plate tectonics has been proposed as an explanation for why complex life is here and not elsewhere.
From a Bill Gates documentary, I saw research with partner companies aimed at improving nuclear power generation mechanisms to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Bill Gates’ endeavors always seem positive and fascinating.
I hear the voice of Stephan when I read this title.
Pipes, steam, turbines...
We need better peltier devices.
I thought exactly the same thing. Peltier's themselves don't really have a pathway for becoming as efficient as steam turbines but there are other methods currently in research. One promising idea is to use sodium vapor in a fuel cell style device: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2017.10.022
The maximum COP for a peltier device is 1, in practice it’s far below that.
Heat pumps go way beyond a COP of 1; an open-loop cooling system with an evaporative cooling tower can have a COP of 7. A closed loop heat pump alone can have a COP of 4.
Peltier devices are a dead end for moving heat around outside of specialized applications where you can’t drag around two heat exchangers, a valve, and a pump (like active cooling clothing). It’s impossible for them to even approach the efficiency of resistive heating (COP of 1).
The aim here is to get power from temperature differential, not vice-versa
What was the power plant's cost? I can't find it in Google/Kagi.
See site is bill gates. Hard pass.
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It's been very common in Europe for years. People even have individual heat pump at home. US is so much behind on new technologies
You didn't understand the article. A home heat pump isn't a power source.
Nit: yes, home geothermal is a power source, technically. But yea not in the way an electrical generation plant is.
Heat pump != Geothermal energy generation, or any energy generation at that
Home geothermal /could/ be a power source, sure, but I do not believe that’s what OP intended to say when mentioning heat pumps. I’d be pretty surprised if it was becoming common in Europe to have home geothermal
A heat pump (which are more common in Europe, but they’re gaining popularity in the US) is essentially a reversible air conditioner that can take advantage of the latent energy in the air to move heat very efficiently. They’re a great invention, but they have nothing to do with producing energy
They certainly don't produce electricity, but they do produce energy. You put in 1 kW of electricity, though, and you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
Now, that energy is coming from somewhere else (in this case, the heat of the ground beneath the house or the air outside), but that's true of electrical generators as well.
No, it is moving energy. We still obey the laws of thermodynamics in this house.
They certainly don't produce electricity. However, if you put in 1 kW of electricity, you might get 5 kW of heat added to your house. So in a sense, it is producing energy.
They didn’t say home geothermal, they said home heatpumps. In that setup, the earth is not an energy source, just a very massive source of thermal inertia. They are not the same thing.
‘home geothermal’ isn’t really a thing unless you’re already living on a hotspring, which is quite unusual. (delta-v is not sufficient)
At the point someone is drilling km+ boreholes and installing MW+ turbines, it’s safe to call it commercial.
> home geothermal
That is ‘sitting on a hot spring’ if you can go less than 200m down and get 200 c water - that is superheated steam.
How is it not an energy source? The point of a heat pump is to move more heat energy around than was consumed running the device.
How does that make it an energy source? It makes it a pump. That still consumes energy to run. And none of the home heat pump setups I’ve seen are tapping into enough thermal inertia (or high grade heat) to do more than keep a house warm. They also, of course, PUT HEAT BACK there in the summer to help cool the house. They’re just moving heat around, and not with any particularly high quality either. If they used the atmosphere for thermal inertia (also common), would you say they were using the atmosphere as an energy source?
Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
It’s like the difference between having a pool in your backyard, and damming a huge river and installing turbines.
The point of a heat pump is to bring more Watts of heat into the home than the electricity consumed. Otherwise you could just use a resistive heater and heat the home with electricity directly. So ask yourself, if more energy came into your home than you put in from the electric socket, where exactly did the extra energy come from?
That is not what ‘power source’ means. You probably want to read up on some thermodynamics and definitions.
I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
> So ask yourself, if more energy came into your home than you put in from the electric socket, where exactly did the extra energy come from?
I notice you didn't answer this question.
I did. The question is for you. I've answered it in several different ways in this thread. There is a sibling comment I replied to which breaks it down even more clearly.
You used the energy from the wall socket to pump the heat from outside into the inside, less efficiently than you could use that heat to generate more electricity or do other work later.
Aka you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit. You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
Actually operating one, you'll see that the energy cost of a heat pump becomes proportionally higher as the temperature difference gets bigger, so you spend more energy moving the heat when the source is low temperature and the output is high temperature.
Many people have gotten quite frustrated when they end up chilling the ground in their ground source heat pump too much, and they end up with very inefficient systems.
You could do the exact same thing (with better or similar efficiency) by using some other source of thermal mass. Air sourced heat pumps do it with the atmosphere. It's possible to use lakes and other bodies of water.
No net usable power is being extracted from the earth in this scenario. The earth is being cooled in order to heat your house. And heated, in order to cool your house.
Geothermal power systems do produce actual usable power, and they do so by running a heat engine (the opposite of a heat pump) off an extremely large temperature difference from a very large source of underground heat. You can't run a heat engine on the output of a heat pump and produce net power, anymore than you can hook a generator to an electric motor and produce net power.
I quote:
>That is not what ‘power source’ means. You probably want to read up on some thermodynamics and definitions. I’m guessing you think that if you connect the heat pumps output to it’s input, you’ll have infinite energy?
There is no answer in that whole comment to my question. However, you did answer it in the comment I am replying to:
> you pumped the energy inside and concentrated it a bit.
Yes! That's exactly right. But furthermore:
> You didn't generate more energy than you had before. You did make existing energy more useful for you, comfort wise.
This is exactly right, and it is also known as the first law of thermodynamics. [1]. There is no way to produce energy. Even with electrical generation from geothermal, we are moving energy and concentrating it a bit, as you say, just in different forms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_law_of_thermodynamics
> Geothermal turns turbines with steam that then produces massive quantities of electricity. That makes it an energy source. The water way down under the ground in these cases is superheated by the surrounding rock, and provides plenty of high quality heat. There are no heat pumps involved.
Geothermal systems don’t strictly need to produce energy with steam, I just completed a project to convert some boilers and chillers with heat recovery chillers and a geothermal loop for heating and cooling at a research lab for an S&P 500 constituent. I’m doing another project to replace some existing geothermal heat pumps for another customer this fall, no power generation, just heating and cooling.
That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
The different between these two ideas, is that a heat pump is not producing heat (as it's primary goal). It's concentrating and moving heat from point A to point B. The amount of heat moved may exceed the amount of raw energy used to perform this process (and should, in most situations), HOWEVER, it can not exceed the amount of energy you would get back by trying to reverse the process to extract energy. It is still a net energy consuming process.
This is important, because if it wasn't - you could power the heat pumps off their own output, and you'd literally have infinite energy/perpetual motion machine. Which would be awesome. It is also impossible, near as we can tell.
What actually happens is everything grinds to a halt, because the useful (Actual) energy output from the heat pump is lower than the energy required to run it.
Chances are, that system isn't even really geothermal (as in using latent heat of the planet) - any large enough mass would do the same thing. People just like to say the word because it sounds 'green'. If the ground was hot enough (for instance) to provide actual heat itself, a heatpump would be a waste for heating the building - and extremely inefficient for cooling it. It would be better to just pipe water straight out of the ground to heat, and use air based HVAC to cool.
Geothermal power generation does produce power - by tapping into a source of heat so hot that the difference between normal atmospheric temperatures and that heat source allows us to generate useful power. A heat pump gets in the way and causes losses in these situations.
Unless you're sitting (quite literally) on a hotspring, this requires going VERY deep into the ground. Which is what this article is about.
> That is using the earth as a source of thermal inertia, not producing power off earths heat - unless you're going down pretty deep. Again, not power generation.
I get the vibe that your definition of "producing power" is electrical power generation. However the original argument is that there is energy being extracted that is not in the form of electricity.
Geothermal power generation is energy conversion, while a heat pump is energy movement.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Heat pumps are a completely different thing than geothermal energy.
Where Europe is ahead of the US is really in neighborhood wide geothermal for heating and cooling. The US tends to only use networked multi building geothermal for corporate and university campuses while having little central planning for a neighborhood of individuals to migrate to geothermal.
Well its clear you didn't read the article, it explains how this particular type of geothermal is a technological advance. Current geothermal electrical generation is limited to very specific geology, enhanced geothermal is able to be used in many more places.