this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
195 points (94.9% liked)
Futurology
1961 readers
497 users here now
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm a huge nuclear energy advocate, but if there is an even better way to get baseline power to fill in the gaps between solar and wind I am all for it. My only question would be the downsides (if any) of using the earths core to power things.
Like if every country starts slapping these things down all over the place would it even start cooling the core in any meaningful way? Would that potentially lead to problems later?
My gut says no, but I would rather at least ask the question and get laughed at than never consider it and have it bite us in the ass later.
The technology for drilling deeper is getting better fast. There was a breakthrough by using microwaves to vaporize rock. It's a triple duty method that cases the walls with glass rock, pressure from vapor pushes the condensed dust upwards and removes the material.
It eleminates the need for drilling sludge, excessively long metal rods etc. It's still cheaper to drill conventionally for 3km but to reach the 10km for EGS it's a lot cheaper. Drilling conventionally becomes exponentially more expensive with depth
The total geothermal power produced within the Earth is around 47 TW, and humans currently average around 21 TW usage, which is actually pretty close. However the Earth is absolutely huge and has billions of years of thermal energy stored in it. I imagine if we massively scaled up geothermal generation we'd slowly deplete the energy near the surface and would have to go deeper, but that would probably be on a timescale of thousands of years.
We are insignificant flecks of nothing compared to the molton core of the earth.
Abject nothing.
At one point, climate change was dismissed based on the same logic.
Its worth thinking ahead and doing the math.
That's a wild comparison, but okay.
The top layer of the crust of the earth and atmosphere are also nothing compared to the molten core of the earth.
No it wasn't. At least not by scientists. The math is very clear here.
Also, like how we can pump the heat out...
We can pump the heat back in too. It works both ways, and resistive heating is pretty much 100% efficient.
Yeah but this is just like, not understanding the scales and orders of magnitude we're talking about here.
I understand the scales involved. Hence my pointing out that it probably doesn't matter, but I would rather ask and be mocked then never ask and potentially have it fuck us over later. No harm in double checking man.
Edit: spelling
No, this is a hold my beer kind of thing.
Give me unlimited energy from the molten core of the earth and I will fuck around and find out.
LOL, talk about scale...
Look at Earth from space. The atmosphere is the paint on a marble, the rest is almost all core.
Lemmy: But we might use it all up!!!
And never mind how and why it's hot.
I think you're not understanding how billionaires work. If energy gets cheap enough, the next Elon Musk will probably try to desolonate an ocean or change the Earth's rotation to get more sunlight through their favorite window in winter.
Like I read somewhere else on lemmy: "We have like 7 Lex Luthors and no Superman"
I think the biggest issues is access to heat and permeability of the rock containing the heat. According to Google the earth's temp rises by 25°C for every km down, so you'd probably want to go at least 4 km down to get enough heat to boil water (in my experience, it isn't 25 degrees hotter 1km down, but you get the idea. ) your also need to consider the pressure of the water and the heat you might lose as you lose pressure coming back up.
You also need to create a circuit where you pump cool water in one end and hot the other. So you can frack the rock like in a gas well, but that can cause seismicity and affect the local hydrogeology which other industries and the towns may rely on. This would enable the water to pass through the rock to soak up the heat.
I guess you'd also need a supply of water as you'd doubtless lose some water as it passes through the circuit, though I'm not sure what the retention losses are actually like and would depend heavily on the local geology
I can't find where I read it, but I remember it being something like: if all of humanity consumed the same amount as an energy hungry American and then doubled it while getting all of its power from geothermal then we have almost tapped 1% of the crusts potential, rounding up.
I did some looking around. Looks like I was a factor of 10 off. As in- not 1% but 0.1% and that could be sustained for millions of years
https://www.contrary.com/foundations-and-frontiers/geothermal
https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/geothermal-faqs#:~:text=4.5%20billion%20years.-,This%20heat%20is%20continually%20replenished%20by%20the%20decay%20of%20naturally,essentially%20inexhaustible%20supply%20of%20energy.
There is also a great pdf over at www.worldenergy.org under their geothermal - world energy council that is a little old but still points out the math on just how immense the energy output of earth is. We could each run our own small AI data center on geothermal power and the earth would still have extra. And we are only talking about tapping into the very top of the crust.
Now add AI technology and crypto mining and anything else we might come up with in the near future.
Americans use those so it's already accounted for.
That's sounds about right.
Earth is big big and we only occupy the tiniest outer layer.
Is that 1% replenished? If not then we would have problems in a short couple decade.
At what % does the crust start to experience cooling? What biological systems could be effected? What about tectonic systems?
Tons of real legitimate questions here.
It does cool down the surrounding rock, which means there's less potential power output the more you try to use it.
But it's also a rock floating on a pool of magma, it warms back up relatively quickly.
I read a proposal a while back for using the Yellowstone magma chamber for geothermal power generation. It's not currently in danger of erupting as a supervolcano, but the paper worked the numbers and showed that it would actually be feasable with realistic engineering to tap enough heat from the magma chamber to literally "defuse" it if it actually came to that. And turn a profit while doing so.
I am very pro geo thermal. Been following Quaise drilling for a long time. The biggest downside to geothermal is that in the process of running water up and down, the water can come up with some green house gases, generally sulfur based compounds. Overall, not nearly as bad as the current options, but it’s not like geo thermal is perfectly green. We should still consider it over any fossil fuel and possibly nuclear.
I'll take a little sulphur over the radioactive poisoning from coal plants any day of the week.
I swear if I have to explain nuclear fuel disposal one more time!
Never mind. You get to live.
I'm a nuclear power fan lol. I know all the talking points because I have to argue with my family every time lol
I may be wrong here but I believe a lot of the heat at the core is generated from nuclear decay. so it should be self replenishing, not to mention the scale of which is probably insignificant.
hey, maybe we take enough away it stops a few volcano's exploding :)
My gut says yes. You subtract energy from a system. That energy did something, had a function. Now its not doing that thing anymore.
Same goes with wind: how much wind energy can you remove from the climate and ar which point does it affect the climate system? Handwavium. Never red a serious investigation about it.
Solar: same. That energy we're now converting into electricity, didn't that had another function? Is it cool we're using it differently now?
Coal and oil: that has been answered! Releasing the stored energy captured in those, expelling the contaminations and radiating of the excess heat did something!
You've never seen anything about solar and wind because it's a zero sum game. Both are dependent on the light and heat output of the sun, which is estimated to burn for more than 4 billion years more. So, basically it comes down to earth's ability to retain the light/heat of the sun versus the sun's output on the grand scheme of things. And on the local side (the energy consumer) it comes down to the first law of Thermo dynamics: Energy can't be created or destroyed, only reformed and/or transferred. So basically, since the amount of energy is set by the dynamic of the sun Vs isolation, for humans it equals out, because all we do is reforming energy and transferring it.
So then, how about geothermal and fossil energy (and nuclear)? Well, for both of them, they are stored energy. Fossil is stored sunlight from 500 million years ago, as in stored in chemical compounds created by the life that existed at that time by eating plants that harvested the sunlight by photosynthesis. (The same things our silar panels are doing after all).
For geothermal it becomes a bit more complicated, as it is part chemical energy of the matter that makes up the earth, and part kinetic energy left overs from the creation of the planet. Only very well isolated by the crust.
And here is the crux of the question: how much energy is stored in the core and will human intervention be able to change anything in the equilibrium of the core? In a way I want us to be able and in a way I don't. Because if the human outtake of energy is miniscule it won't matter and then the problem is moot. However if we are able to affect the core, we could possibly charge the core and its ability to deflect the solar wind, which might come in handy...
Regardless, for all of them, they release more energy into the atmosphere than the sun put there and thus will affect the energy equilibrium. But that is probably such a small problem that it might not do any difference in total. What is it they say? 1% of the energy that hits the earth from the sun would supply all our energy needs? So probably not that much of effect.
You say probably a lot. And that was my point. We dont know. We say "probably".
And the whole law of thermo dynamics was also my point: you cant reuse energy twice magically. It does something, now, in our climate. We are removing that energy and converting it into something else. So what it did before, whatever purpose it was, doesn't happen now. Does it matter? Probably not. We dont know for sure.
What's the problem with only 1 degree median temperature rise? Probably nothing, we said.
Well... That's come back and kicked us right in the nuts now didn't it?
There was a time, once not very long ago, when we also said "it probably will not matter if we burn this oil."
We dont know. Were fucking around with systems we dont understand and which exist in a current state of equilibrium. And we dont know how much we can wiggle the scales. So we say: it will be fine, probably.
Am I saying to not do it? Nope, the other options are proven to be bad so lets try something else. All for it.
Yeah, I did say it twice about the same thing. You got me there. However, energy is not created by solar or wind. It is merely transformed. And is transformed again when it's used. You don't have to question that. It's still doing the same thing it did before, we merely rerouted it a bit.
There has never been a serious investigation into how much wind or solar you need to remove from the climate system before causing a noticeable impact, because it isn't a serious concern. There is probably some theydidthemath type content to show how ridiculous the idea is.
Especially solar… light -> heat. We know that, so with solar it’s light -> electricity -> heat just like nothing every happened lol
With me not being climatological, climate change caused by our greenhouse gasses is trapping energy from the sun as heat, heating things up. Some of this energy becomes wind. So using wind power and solar power is helping rebalance the system.
What about the fact that baseload power is much talked about in the media and among lay people, but academics have known it to be a myth for over a decade at least?