Seems like a great concept. Hope they are commercially successful.
It reminded me about another geothermal energy idea: dig about 3 or so miles straight down and harvest the heat that is there already. I guess that's a lot harder than making a dirt pile. But maybe it could become practical if there was enough commercial effort and large scale manufacturing of the equipment.
Kind of brings it around full bore though. Why do that kind of project when you can just harvest actual fuel like oil or gas?
I think this stuff can become practical with more scale and wide manufacturing of equipment and development of efficient techniques. But it requires you to do a lot of upfront work based on principal rather than the bottom line.
So anyway again great idea because it eliminates a lot of challenges and costs that come with concepts like "Journey to the Center of the Earth" etc.
> another geothermal energy idea: dig about 3 or so miles straight down and harvest the heat that is there already
Deep geothermal ought to work. Deep drilling is hard, but it's been done. Eavor-Deep got down to where they got 250C water. [1] That was back in 2023. Not much new since.
The problem seems to be that when you drill into really hot rock, most drilling techniques run into trouble. Rock becomes plastic and clogs things up. The drilling tools have problems with the heat. Progress continues, slowly.
There's these guys, trying to drill with microwaves: [1]
On September 4, they're going to do a public demo and try to drill a 100 meter hole.
The other issue is that the steam loses energy as it's pumped over a long distance. Iceland and a few other locations are big users since they are on fault zones with hot rocks relatively close to the surface. Even if deep drilling is demonstrated, it's unclear if geothermal power will become geographically independent.
Forget climate change, the best reason is national security. Russia's war plummeted Europe into gas shortages and price hikes. Many countries would love to not be dependent on them. And since WW2, all war requires vast quantities of oil; maybe drones will reduce that a bit, but you still need to move stuff (and people) around a lot. So you need a reliable source of energy both in peacetime and wartime.
For the US, the best reason is sustainable energy. Gas, oil and coal are not renewable, so you eventually need to adapt a new form of energy. Just transporting it is problematic, with most communities rejecting pipelines. In the meantime you're polluting your local environment and putting workers at risk. Whereas if your energy plan is largely "the sun shines", "the wind blows", and "dirt holds heat", that is ridiculously more sustainable.
The biggest problem we have is we demand too much energy. AI has made this problem way worse. Nuclear is the only thing that's going to fill the gaping chasm of demand.
Sure, if that's what convinces people to do the right thing, so be it. Though the continuation of that thinking tends to cause behavior that's not very friendly w.r.t. climate or environment.
It reminded me about another geothermal energy idea: dig about 3 or so miles straight down and harvest the heat that is there already. I guess that's a lot harder than making a dirt pile. But maybe it could become practical if there was enough commercial effort and large scale manufacturing of the equipment.
Kind of brings it around full bore though. Why do that kind of project when you can just harvest actual fuel like oil or gas?
I think this stuff can become practical with more scale and wide manufacturing of equipment and development of efficient techniques. But it requires you to do a lot of upfront work based on principal rather than the bottom line.
So anyway again great idea because it eliminates a lot of challenges and costs that come with concepts like "Journey to the Center of the Earth" etc.