Like solar thermal power, geothermal power is too often neglected. Indeed, the Bush administration has proposed zeroing out the geothermal energy program for two years running.
But a major 2007 study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, "The Future of Geothermal Energy" (a 372-page PDF), reveals the potential if we redouble our efforts toward this zero-carbon power source. The MIT-led panel of scientists, economic experts, and engineers found that Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) that use "heat-mining technology, which is designed to extract and utilize the earth's stored thermal energy" could contribute 10 percent of baseload power by mid-century:
The panel thinks that with a combined public/private investment of about $800 million to $1 billion over a 15-year period, EGS technology could be deployed commercially on a timescale 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.
Technology Review has a nice summary piece here. And you can find a lot more about geothermal here.
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
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Solshapiro Posted 12:43 am
08 Sep 2007
There is a process called "geo-engineering" which we can put in place to stop climate change. In what I think is its most likely form, the world would emulate what happens when there is a large volcanic eruption which has been repeatedly shown to cool the Earth. We would place long lived particulates (probably lifetime of about one to three years) into the upper atmosphere to reduce incoming solar flux by about 1 1/2 to 2%. Study and possible deployment of geo-engineering has been edorsed by, among others, the president of the National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb in 1997.
The IPCC and the environmental community do not want to talk about geo-engineering and "sneer" at possible side-effects; but are willing to sacrifice Bangladesh and other low-lying regions of the world as they look only at the laudable long range goal of a sustainable energy base.
Sol Shapiro
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amazingdrx Posted 2:07 am
08 Sep 2007
Recently coal power plants in Australia had to shut down for lack of water.
Wind power needs no water. Solar power can actually be used to desalinate sea water and increase water supplies. While cogenerating heat and electricity.
Wind power can be used to pump flood water up into progressively higher wetlands for hydro power energy storage and to restore aquifers and wetlands.
The only way geothermal can be used is with thermocouple or a closed loop turbine system. And those are much more expensive than wind or solar.
The way to save almost 36% of GHG is to replace fossil fueled heating/cooling with geothermal heating/cooling of buildings. It uses the earth as a heat sink. Either with direct circulation or a heat pump.
A heat envelope system using earth heat can reduce heating loads in cold climates to the normal waste heat from a home. A super efficient home (that produces a fraction of the waste heat of a normal home)can be heated with this method from the waste heat from a solar domestic water heating system.
better to eliminate the need for all that GHG with earth heating/cooling than replacing it with water guzzling drilling projects that also destabilize earthquake fault zones.
Geothermal power plants are one more boondoggle to waste scarce taxpayer capital borrowed from china. Like oil war, the hydrogen economy, fuel farming, and so forth.
National bankruptcy is the neoconman,neo-corporatist plan. leaving elected representatives of we the people mere figure heads (like the british royal family or the resident of the offal orifice (( "bring me the head of Osama in a box on the offal orifice desk", cried the decider)) has become).
Already corporations write our laws and pay legislators to pass them.
Ceremonial governance,as in the Texas governor ship (the leutenant governor evidently runs Texas). That's exactly why the shaved ape from crawdad was appointed. Bonnie prince duuuh..bya. With the evil lord cheney of halliburton pulling the strings.
Fiddle on chimp! burn up the planet for halliburton's bottomline.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Jon Rynn Posted 2:25 am
08 Sep 2007
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gabraham44 Posted 2:44 am
08 Sep 2007
You said it yourself: a closed loop water system does not deplete water supplies. Then it's only a matter of policy, a decision to devote sufficient resources, and according to the MIT study it won't take anything like a century. Meanwhile substantial efficiencies can be achieved to buy time--like your 36% GHG reduction from conventional geothermal. Your other solution -- wind -- is really no solution: wind runs on no better than 20% capacity factor (so divide megawatts generated as asserted by the industry by 5) and produces least during summer days when need most, and produces most (winter nights) when needed least. Its intermittent nature means it provides no baseload power whatsoever. That's why a generation of experience with wind in Europe has yet to displace a single conventional power plant. And there, more densely populated than the U.S., policy is increasingly moving toward off-shore siting to avoid nuisance noise impacts on people. A 60-turbine wind farm slices through 10,000 acres on average, compared to 10 acres or so for an enhanced geothermal steam plant (or a conventional power plant). And the biggest red flag: corporations investing in wind have written the laws providing subsidies for wind all out of proportion to what it can produce, and seduced us into feeling good about electricity generation rates the industry will never achieve.
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fermiparadox Posted 6:23 am
08 Sep 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 12:04 am
09 Sep 2007
Closed loop is way too expensive. All the condensers make it way more expensive than wind.
Heating/cooling buildings produces 36% of the GHG. Earth heat exchange can reduce the amount of energy used for this purpose enormously, then wind and solar can provide the circulating and heat pump energy.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:48 am
09 Sep 2007
Which makes it kind of a crappy baseload.
Once your start tossing in offshore, storage, etc etc. Geothermal starts to look a lot better.
Also please, lets just leave anything fuel cell related out of the picture.
If something needs backup, then it's not a very good baseload.
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:45 am
09 Sep 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 12:36 am
10 Sep 2007
The cost of drilling enough holes and connecting enough pipe to equal the surface area of natural rock fissures existing in good geothermal generating areas. That is what would have to be done to make a closed loop gethermal generating system work.
With a natural geothermal area like a hot spring or geyser, groundwater pours down into the rock producing steam. To simulate that in a man made system is cost prohibitive.
Remember, we are talking about a serious capital shortage for renewable energy projects. War, corruption, and corporate welfare have dried up credit to the point that it is throwing the economy into recession.
The kwh from every dollar invested in renewables and conservation has to be maximized to replace GHG based energy in time to avert full blown climate disaster that passes the natural tipping point. Once enough arctic ice melts, for instance, the ocean conveyor stops. A number of similar problems are out there.
Methane hydrate ice melting on the ocean floor and under melting tundra, for another. A 23 times more effective GHG, methane release will feed warming, feeding more methane release.
it is important to be efficient with scarce capital in this battle to save the human friendly climate of spaceship earth.
Well the study Gar cited that 95% of baseload power could come from wind, that was with only 8 separate wind farms,proved that wind variability would be absolutely no problem given a grid with thousands of geographically diverse wind farms, providing backup with wind itself.
Solid oxide fuel cells are ready to power the grid now. From waste manure and other sources normally dumped into the environment where it emits still more methane GHG. Fuel cells that run on methane with a turbine secondary cycle are 70% efficient.
Too many links and not enough reading? hehehey.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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jpilmer Posted 6:41 am
10 Sep 2007
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wiscidea Posted 7:04 am
10 Sep 2007
There is already some suggestion that the famed Indonesian mud volcano was triggered by drilling...
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/s2006605.ht ...
Drilling might also contaminate ground water, alter the flow of aquifers, release toxic gases, trigger earthquakes. It seems that deploying an alternative energy technology that involves boring holes several miles into the Earth might not be a good idea, especially on a scale necessary to replace fossil fuel. Would you really want to live next to one of these power plants? Do they know exactly where it is safe and where it is not safe to drill such holes? What's their confidence level?
I realize a lot of damage is done extracting oil, gas, and coal from the gorund. But I thought we were looking for a source of energy that reduces harm to the environment, not inflict a new form of damage that we might not be prepared to cope with.
Just wondering.
Forward!
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wiscidea Posted 7:36 am
10 Sep 2007
What's the limit -- compared with a typical nuclear reactor -- on how much energy can be drawn from a single site? It seems that if you are pumping cold water into the ground, extracting heat to generate electricity, and sending the water back into the ground, the area around the hole should start to cool at least a bit. Or is rock a real good heat conductor? Could these power plants work for decades, just a few miles apart? Or do you have to build new ones or new sites every ten years?
By the way... this is not really renewabe and unlimited. Has anyone done the math? Will human beings hundreds of thousands of years from now be upset because the current generation tapped into the Earth's hot core and caused it to cool faster, thereby triggering collapse of the magnetic field and permitting the solar wind to fry the surface of the planet? Someone should at least make sure the numbers look good. We once thought the atmosphere and oceans were big enough to absorb our waste.
Forward!
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amazingdrx Posted 11:32 pm
10 Sep 2007
But far more expensive than wind power. Cost is extremely important given the scarcity of capital due to oil war, corruption, and corporate welfare.
And look at the huge area used. These wells purportedly recycle the water. But how much water will leak and have to be replaced?
This presentation states that 10% of US grid power could come from geothermal. With the problems involved in permitting industrial installations in wilderness areas how quickly could this happen?
Solar mounts on rooftops, using only existing developed areas. Wind only uses a small footprint on the ground, leaving the rest of the area free for farming or conservation.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 11:48 pm
10 Sep 2007
In the infamous heat related deaths in France a few years back, that was the culprit. Nukes had to be shut down because of a lack of cooling water. As in the coal power plant shut downs in austrailia. Lack of water.
Only wind and solar use no water and produce no GHG.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 1:18 am
11 Sep 2007
Geothermal operates 95% of the time.
Heh, some more Raser stuff:
http://greyfalcon.net/raser
http://greyfalcon.net/raser2
Basically Raser was originally an electric motor company, they made this electromagnet motor design thats stronger than all existing physical magnet motors, but it only uses plain iron.
So they are capitalizing on it by making drilling motors.
All drilling motors are electric, or hybrid-electric, because they need the torque.
http://greyfalcon.net/torque.png
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amazingdrx Posted 1:39 am
11 Sep 2007
95% of grid power could come from wind according to that study of only 8 wind farms. Despite the variability at each site, combining different sites supplies a steady current to the grid as a whole. So much reliability that only 5% need come from storage or backup generation.
Even if that 5% came from the worst source possible, coal. 95% of GHG from grid generation could be eliminated.
That's reliable enough. That so-called 33% capacity factor is misleading. Given widely dispersed wind farms a 95% capacity factor is possible.
How? A simple math trick. rate the wind system's output at the average speed of the wind throughout the grid. instead of a "nameplate" power rating where a much higher wind speed, over 20 mph is typical. that is misleading.
That's the problem with looking at capacity factor. Better to rate wind by kwh produced over a year. Cost per kwh, the only reliable measure, comes right out of that simpler rating of wind power systems.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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amazingdrx Posted 1:44 am
11 Sep 2007
A thread worth reviving. Please re-write and post this article Gar. with new developments.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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GreyFlcn Posted 2:01 am
11 Sep 2007
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amazingdrx Posted 2:28 am
11 Sep 2007
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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wiscidea Posted 2:48 am
11 Sep 2007
Forward!
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wiscidea Posted 2:51 am
11 Sep 2007
Can geothermal be installed near areas where people rely on groundwater for safe drinking water?
Can geothermal be installed near areas where there are sensitive wetlands or streams that you would not want to contaminate with minerals or gases from several miles below the Earth's surface?
Forward!
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wiscidea Posted 2:55 am
11 Sep 2007
Are supporters of geothermal comfortable with the notion of constructing such a power plant near their favorite stream or lake AND consume fish from that stream or lake?
Forward!
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wiscidea Posted 2:55 am
11 Sep 2007
But perhaps more direct?
Forward!
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GreyFlcn Posted 3:31 am
11 Sep 2007
Why do people always insist that renewables have to be right next to where they are being used?
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wiscidea Posted 4:27 am
11 Sep 2007
Where will the geothermal power plants go? If you are not willing to put them near urban areas dependent on groundwater, not willing to put them in rural areas dependent on groundwater for drinking or irrigation, if you are not willing to put them near sensative wetlands or rivers or lakes or estuaries or bays, if you are not willing to put them in pristine natural areas, if you have to put them over a certain geological formation, if you can't put them where they might introduce arsenic into the water supply, if you can't put them where they might trigger the release of radon, WHERE IS IT SAFE TO PUT A GEOTHERMAL POWER PLANT?
The world is becoming rather crowded. Chances are that most alternative energy options will have to be sited near someone's home or a sensative natural area.
So... would YOU mind living next to one?
Don't you believe this should be factored into the decision making process?
Forward!
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