Is It Time to Tap the Earth's Ass?

It's Rhetorical Questions Day.

There's a huge amount of energy -- heat -- inside the earth. And not just in the molten core, but in the layers beneath the surface crust of the earth. If we can dig deep enough, we can make steam engines that produce energy from the earth's heat.

But you have to dig pretty deep.

In a sagebrush valley full of wind turbines and solar panels in western Utah, Tim Latimer gazed up at a very different device he believes could be just as powerful for fighting climate change -- maybe even more.

It was a drilling rig, of all things, transplanted from the oil fields of North Dakota. But the softly whirring rig wasn't searching for fossil fuels. It was drilling for heat.

Latimer's company, Fervo Energy, is part of an ambitious effort to unlock vast amounts of geothermal energy from Earth's hot interior, a source of renewable power that could help displace fossil fuels that are dangerously warming the planet.

"There's a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it," Latimer said. "Geothermal doesn't use much land, it doesn't produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power. Everyone who looks into it gets obsessed with it."

Traditional geothermal plants, which have existed for decades, work by tapping natural hot water reservoirs underground to power turbines that can generate electricity 24 hours a day. Few sites have the right conditions for this, however, so geothermal only produces 0.4% of America's electricity.

But hot, dry rocks lie below the surface everywhere on the planet. And by using advanced drilling techniques developed by the oil and gas industry, some experts think it's possible to tap that larger store of heat and create geothermal energy almost anywhere. The potential is enormous: The Energy Department estimates there's enough energy in those rocks to power the entire country five times over and has launched a major push to develop technologies to harvest that heat.

Dozens of geothermal companies have emerged with ideas.

Fervo is using fracking techniques -- similar to those used for oil and gas -- to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs. Eavor, a Canadian startup, is building large underground radiators with drilling methods pioneered in Alberta's oil sands. Others dream of using plasma or energy waves to drill even deeper and tap "superhot" temperatures that could cleanly power thousands of coal-fired power plants by substituting steam for coal.

...

Near the town of Milford, Utah, sits the Blundell geothermal plant, surrounded by boiling mud pits, hissing steam vents and the skeletal ruins of a hot springs resort. Built in 1984, the 38-megawatt plant produces enough electricity for about 31,000 homes.

The Blundell plant relies on ancient volcanism and quirks of geology: Just below the surface are hot, naturally porous rocks that allow groundwater to percolate and heat up enough to create steam for generating electricity. But such conditions are rare. In much of the region, the underground hot rock is hard granite, and water can't flow easily.

Three miles east, two teams are trying to tap that hot granite. One is Utah FORGE, a $220 million research effort funded by the Energy Department. The other is Fervo, a Houston-based startup.

Both use similar methods: First, drill two wells shaped like giant L's, extending thousands of feet down into hot granite before curving and extending thousands of feet horizontally. Then, use fracking, which involves controlled explosives and high-pressure fluids, to create a series of cracks between the two wells. Finally, inject water into one well, where it will hopefully migrate through the cracks, heat up past 300 degrees Fahrenheit and come out the other well.

This is "enhanced geothermal," and people have struggled with the engineering difficulties since the 1970s.

But in July, FORGE announced it had successfully sent water between two wells. Two weeks later, Fervo announced its own breakthrough: A 30-day test in Nevada found the process could produce enough heat for electricity. Fervo is now drilling wells for its first 400-megawatt commercial power plant in Utah, next to the FORGE site.

I have two reservations. First, this is being pushed by Greenies. One "expert" cited by the Times notes the "declines" in the cost of wind and solar, without noting that these "clean energy sources" produce little energy.

Another jerkoff pushing this is Lisa Murkowski, for some reason. Does she not know her state relies on the price of oil being moderate to high? But she's a hard liberal -- a hard liberal protected by Mitch the Bitch McConnell -- so she doesn't care. She's all about global warming.

I don't believe anything these people say. They are fanatics. They are not interested in energy production, they are just interested in stopping conventional energy production. And they'll lie (to us and to themselves) about the feasibility of anything which might, possibly, reduce the production of conventional energy.

One worry the Times mentions is that drilling so far down could cause earthquakes, which sounds like the plot of a Superman sequel, maybe Lex Luthor's latest real estate swindle, maybe the Mole Men trying to wipe out the Surface-Dweller Fools, but who knows, maybe it's possible.

I'm not a scientist like Noted Twitter Omnipresence Dr. Guy P. Benson, esq., Ph.D.

posted by Ace at 04:39 PM

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