Reposted by CFACT
By David Wojick | December 14, 2020 | Energy |
A revolution is coming in geothermal energy. How big it will be and how quickly it can grow remains to be seen, but the revolutionary technology is here now.
We already know the new technology by name – fracking. But that’s fracking for oil and gas, the energy transition that we are already living on and that the Greens hate. The geothermal revolution is looking for heat.
Here’s the tech bit. The earth’s crust on which we live is just a thin film wrapped around a molten sphere 8,000 miles in diameter. In some places under the deep ocean, this crust is estimated to be about 3 miles. It is a little thicker under the continents, but the point remains; It gets hot quickly when you drill into the crust. This heat is geothermal.
We have used geothermal energy to generate electricity for a long time, but only in tiny amounts. California has the greatest power in the US, and its total generating capacity is about the size of a single large coal-fired power plant, about 3000 MW. The whole world is said to have only a tiny 15,000 MW.
The barrier to more has been that useful sources of energy are difficult to find. You need a limited reservoir of hot water in broken crustal rock. The size of the reservoir, the location and the temperature of the water are determined by nature. There were very few suitable locations.
Now that has suddenly all changed. With hydraulic fracking (or fracking) we can make these geothermal reservoirs where we want them, in whatever size we want and where the heat is the temperature we want, especially very hot. This includes the so-called “supercritical” water at 400 ° C, which is used today in the most modern power plants.
It’s like the difference between living with wild food, if and when you can find it, and farming. Fracking for Heat is literally a whole new world. Of course there are still annoying things like cost, feasibility, and regulation, but the principle is clear; The technology of revolutionary thermal energy has arrived.
The greens are a bit tied here. Geothermal juice seems to be the ideal renewable one. In contrast to wind and sun, geothermal energy is always available and not a country pig. But the greens despise fracking and have called it nasty. Some states and even entire countries have banned oil and gas fracking. Whether this applies to fracking for heat remains to be seen as the fracturing processes are quite different.
How this dichotomy will play out is unclear. As they say here in the mountains: “What goes around comes around.” That said, don’t worry lest it bite you in a soft place. The greens desperately need geothermal fracking, they just don’t know it yet.
The US Department of Energy has a geothermal technology bureau and they are understandably optimistic. They forecast an advanced geothermal juice capacity of around 60,000 MW by 2050. However, this is still small as our current generation capacity is around one million MW.
The amount of geothermal generating capacity installed by 2050 could be much larger for one simple reason. This is probably the only way to get the wind and sun working. A number of analysts, including myself, have suggested that electricity storage on the scale required to supply America with intermittent renewables is impossible. However, many states have prescribed a high level of renewable energies, in extreme cases even 100%.
This makes geothermal energy the perfect renewable energy source as its electricity can always be available when the intermittent generators cannot provide the electricity we need. The more electricity we generate from renewable energies, the more geothermal capacity we need. It’s that simple. We could talk about hundreds of thousands of MW. If the technology works in terms of cost, it may be better than unreliable, land-consuming renewable energy.
Fortunately, there is a massive frenzy of geothermal research, in large part aimed at breaking down the obvious barriers. A search in the technical and scientific literature of the last five years for the word combination “geothermal energy” and “research” reveals over 100,000 technical articles. That’s a lot of research.
So there it is. Geothermal energy may be the second fracking revolution. No question about it, the heat is there, thanks to the large molten sphere we call earth. And now suddenly we have the technology to create the infrastructure necessary to use it. How practical it is and how acceptable it remains remains to be seen. Interesting times lie ahead.
author
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and politics. For origins see
http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html
For over 100 previous articles on CFACT see
http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/
Available for confidential research and advice.
Like this:
Loading…
Comments are closed.