Might "Drill baby drill!" turn out to be a green energy plan after all?

I just saw this too – it’s good news. Drill, baby, drill indeed!

I looked for other studies about this and found one from the Royal Society which you may or may not be able to see depending on your access to academic publications. The interesting finding to me is as follows:

To sum up, based on our technical and economic analysis, a reasonable investment in R&D and a proactive level of deployment in the next 10 years could make EGS a major player in supplying 10% of US base-load electricity by 2050. Further, the analysis shows that the development of new EGS resources will not be limited by the size and location of the resource in the United States, and it will occur at a critical time when grid stabilization with both replacement and new base-load power will be needed. Adding the EGS option to the US portfolio will reduce growth in natural gas consumption and slow the need for adding expensive natural gas facilities to handle imported liquefied natural gas.

However, they note that Geothermal has been ignored in the US and has advanced only outside the US. There has been very little public investment in the technologies. As a result, there is a perception that it is too technically difficult, but the study says that is not the case.

The conclude: Based on growing markets in the United States for clean, base-load capacity, the panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of approximately $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a time-scale that would produce more than 100 000 MWe or 100 GWe of new capacity by 2050. This amount is approximately equivalent to the total R&D investment made in the past 30 years to EGS internationally, which is still less than the cost of a single, new-generation, clean-coal power plant.

This study projects that enhanced geothermal could perhaps supply 10% of the nations electrical needs. I would point out, that it can also serve for our heating needs, and you only need to dig underground some 30 to 90 feet in order to have enough heat to heat a home or a whole set of homes.

!0% ain’t peanuts, but it also isn’t the solution to our reliance on coal or natural gas.

Ahh, FRACK it! : D

NOTE TO MODS: This is not a gratitutious exclamation. It refers to the process of “fracking.” Google is your friend! : D

As fossil fuels become more and more expensive thank to them being used into scarcity, renewable sources such as geothermal will end up climbing out of the depths.

You’ll have to wait though cuz at the moment all the money is in the hands of the fossil fuel companies. Hence the push for the “clean coal fantasy.” And the unfortunate part about our democracy/capitalist system…. what’s a good idea/right doesn’t always trump where the money is.

Geothermal heat is NOT a renewable resource. I am concerned at tapping the heat of the planet to power our profligate lifestyle. Once, oil was so prolific that it literally just sprang from the ground. It was a nuisance which had to be carted away, pooling all over perfectly good agricultural land. When people first started using it, it seemed inexhaustible. The problem is, once you create a resource, people will find uses for it. This is called the Jevons Paradox.

The heat of the interior of the Earth seems infinite, but it’s not. It’s simply very large. If we begin tapping it, we will progressively cool the interior of the Earth, ultimately radiating it out into space as infra-red blackbody radiation. We will need to dig deeper and deeper to generate the same level of energy. The heat inside the Earth is responsible for keeping the tectonic plates moving, constantly recycling the minerals necessary for life to exist through vulcanism. We also really on our liquid core to generate the magnetic field which keeps solar wind and high-energy gamma radiation from supernovas from scouring our planet free of life. I am very much concerned with the wisdom of making our species reliant on a resource which has the capability, when depleted, of transforming our entire planet into the Moon.

@wundayatta Interestingly, Dr. David D. Blackwell, one of the authors of the Royal Society paper, also was the lead researcher on this work funded by Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

@CaptainHarley Ha! Clever fracking comment.

@tedd Yes, fossil fuels are nearing $40 trillion a year. And they are spending enough of their treasure on junk science and disinformation to delay a switch to renewable and deny global warming that I expect it will either take astronomical prices per barrel or a lgihtning-blot breakthrough like some sort of ethereal energy collector that sits in a little box in your house and draws energy from the vortexes that make crop circles :-) to bring about rapid change. Of course, when global warming hits disastrous levels, that will debunk the deniers’ story; but will it be too late to stop runaway warming?

@SmashTheState That’s a point worth pondering. Of course, the Earth is cooling whether we use the heat energy or not. And our days here are numbered, as the sun will consume the Earth in its outer mantle and absorb its vaporized remains when it runs low enough in fuel to become a red giant. We just have to figure out how to hang in here till we know how to leave, where to head next, and how to get there.

@ETpro The crust acts as an insulator, greatly slowing the rate at which heat escapes. And yes, if our energy needs remained at our current level, it would probably take geologic ages to significantly cool the interior of the Earth—but as the Jevons Paradox indicates, once we make this “limitless” energy available, people will find uses for it. Our use will grow exponentially until 50 or 100 or 500 years later, we are in the same situation we’re in now with our reliance on fossil fuels—except that the repercussions are unthinkably worse.

(And as a side note, I don’t think our future is necessarily “out there.” There’s been quite a bit of discussion emerging out of information theory about the possibility that our Universe is actually a virtual holographic projection of a two-dimensional data matrix. We need only create a virtual universe of our own which operates at a speed fast enough that we can create a still yet faster virtual universe within it, so that we can keep diving deeper and deeper within, never having to worry about what’s occuring on the higher levels.)

@SmashTheState Not only does man kind lack the technology to pierce the “crust” that insulates the core of our planet, any mark we made would be like trying to drain the entirety of oceans on the planet using a single pin sized tube. Geothermal does not take heat away from the core of the planet that would otherwise have remained, that isn’t at all how it operates.

Geothermal taps the already occurring outflow of energy from the earths core, and processes it for heat.

Your argument is akin to saying we shouldn’t use solar power, because eventually we’ll drain all the power from the sun.

On one hand I agree with @SmashTheState – we don’t want to cool the Earth’s core. On the other hand, the current guess is that Earth’s core is being heated by Uranium fission, so could stand to be tapped. I don’t know which is more correct.

@RocketGuy @SmashTheState I don’t think you guys understand. Geothermal energy does not cool the Earth’s core. It simply captures energy that is already leaving the Earth’s core. It is akin to how we set up solar panels to collect sunlight from the sun. We are not expediting the Sun’s burn out cycle by collecting this energy, and it will be coming whether we harvest it or not.

Geothermal power is the same principle, we’re just getting the energy from the core of our planet rather than the sun.

For that matter, we don’t possess the technology to even come close to reaching the Earth’s core in some effort to steal it’s energy. For example, the geothermal tech we use now, reaches some 600 meters into the ground. Controversial “fracking” goes up to about 3000 meters (or 3 kilometers) into the ground. The deepest man has ever dug into our planet is about 12.3 kilometers. The crust of our planet (aka, the skin) is around 100 kilometers thick. In other words we haven’t even come close to breaching the crust of the planet, let alone reaching the core of it, which is a solid 5100 kilometers deep.

@tedd I understand perfectly well how it works. The difference is that sunlight reaches the Earth through space. Heat is transferred from the core to the surface through liquid and solid matter. Drawing that heat to the surface and using it to do work accelerates the rate at which heat is lost from the core to the surface. This is basic physics. And while it may seem like there is a vast amount of heat and we are drawing very little, the Jevons Paradox says that when we make a resource available, we will invent ways of using it up. We will start with a single straw in the ocean, and then the straws will proliferate. It is specifically because this ocean seems limitless that we will drink it dry.

@SmashTheState Look you are very clearly not understanding this. We are doing nothing to draw further energy from the core of the planet. We do not have that technology, nor will we likely achieve that technology for a long time. The energy that geothermal plants obtain is already being released from the core of the planet, and for that matter has already pretty much left the planet. We are harvesting it from around 600 meters, and it’s already traveled 5100 kilometers to get there.

Again, your argument is akin to saying that we are going to use up the sun because we put solar panels out. The energy traveling through space or the solid matter of our planet makes absolutely no difference… it is energy that is being released either way. We can either harvest it, or let it go to waste. Even if we could get closer to the core of the planet, geothermal isn’t some kind of fusion process, it is a collection process, it collects energy that has already been released by the core of the planet, and will go on being released whether we harvest it or not.

Think of it like this. If we moved closer to the sun, say we set up shop on Mercury, and put solar panels there…. Would that make our sun burn out faster? (the answer is no)

I think this is a grand idea! The earth’s internal heat does regenerate; mainly through two mechanisms: nuclear decay of isotopes in the mantle, and friction generated by flexing of the earth’s crust by the orbit of the moon. If we were to draw more energy from the mantle, and thus cool the core faster than these mechanisms warm it, the earth’s core would slowly cool. That would be a new problem. Perhaps that will be the environmental crisis of the next century. It is very unlikely that we could ever draw heat from the mantle faster than it regenerates, but as the argument goes above, we never imagined that the oil would ever run out, either. Should we develop this energy source, our demand for energy 200 years from now might conceivably exceed the rate at which the mantle gains energy. But for now, this seems like one of several options to meet our future energy needs.

Though I still have hopes for cold fusion as the solution for our need for essentially free and unlimited energy that is environmentally friendly and safe.

@SmashTheState – The heat from the core would not be released as “black body radiation”. For a start, the earth is not a black body (unless someone at CERN accidentally did create a black hole and we’re all inside it); the planet is lit up like a Christmas tree!

As has already been indicated, geothermal energy does, in fact, renew – it is derived from nuclear decay and friction.

I suppose you would also advocate that we plug all the Earth’s volcanoes?

I think a more apt analogy is to imagine the mantle as a bathtub overflowing with water due to a faucet stuck on. The “water” being heat being generated my nuclear fission in the core and leaving Earth through the crust. The faucet flows at a constant rate*. If we suck out water too fast, the tub will go empty. So if the mantle cools, we will be in huge trouble. There is no feedback mechanism to “turn up” the “faucet”. So do you want to risk over-sucking heat out of the planet? We have only 1 planet to live on, you know.

*nuclear decay actually decreases asymptotically with time.

@SmashTheState Given the law of conservation of matter/energy, and the fact that geothermal energy taps core heat moving toward the surface anyway, very little heat would be lost to space that wouldn’t have been lost anyway. And the Jevons Paradox doesn’t have to rule if you know it exists and control for it. Finally, it is unlikely that geothermal will be a final solution to mankind’s energy needs. Certainly we will develop controlled fusion reactors. Lacking a crystal ball, I can’t predict what else may emerge as a massive, low cost and environmentally friendly source of energy. But knowing the history of technology, I can reliably predict that if we refrain from blowing ourselves up or melting all the planet’s ice caps and triggering a catastrophic release of methane from tundras and undersea methane clathrates, then new and better energy technology will emerge.

Worrying about accelerated cooling of the Earth by tapping into a very tiny portion of geothermal energy for human use is like worrying about changing the orbits of planets when our space probes are gaining speed via the slingshot effect.

Take a look at the total amount of thermal energy stored inside the Earth plus the annual total human power use and then calculate the number of years it would take to cool down our planet by say 0.001%. This will put things in perspective.

Replacing fossil fuels with geothermal energy is a great idea.