[HN Gopher] What is FORGE?
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What is FORGE?
Author : manicennui
Score : 62 points
Date : 2022-01-28 06:37 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.energy.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.energy.gov)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Fracking for geothermal basically.
|
| Probably better than fracking for fossil fuels, for multiple
| reasons, but still a mildly ironic repurposing of the tech.
| conradev wrote:
| Mildly ironic and also a clever way to repurpose existing
| infrastructure and training
| Dangeranger wrote:
| EGS precedes fracking technology by decades.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Are you sure?
|
| You mention the first test well in 1977 which is decades
| after it was originally used to extract gas.
| fghorow wrote:
| True.
|
| But, until the practice became the mainstay of new shale
| gas production hydraulic fracturing was about as
| uncontroversial as drilling itself. (Yes, there are
| deliberate ironies in that statement.)
|
| Geologically speaking (roughly), a gas or oil "play"
| involves source rocks (which are the locations where the
| hydrocarbons were deposited and matured) and traps (which
| are locations where the oil and gas migrated to in
| economically recoverable quantities). Oil and gas, being
| less dense than water, migrate upwards as buoyant fluids
| in the overlying rocks until they are trapped by
| impermeable layers. There are other styles of trap, but
| that gives you the gist of it.
|
| Old style oil and gas plays exploited the traps. Fracking
| plays now exploit the (mostly shale) source rocks.
|
| In my opinion, what caused the recent controversies are
| the sheer numbers of wells being drilled for fracking. In
| addition to the new locations where development takes
| place -- at least in recent memory in places like
| Pennsylvania -- there were also a larger number of
| accidents per unit time. Perhaps there was an element of
| less-experienced operators drilling and fracking wells
| that also increased the rate of accidents.
|
| EGS geothermal plays fracture rocks, yes. (Heck, so do
| quarries for things like road metal.) But the resource
| value proposition is so weak compared to hydrocarbons
| that geothermal people realize they MUST do things right
| or they will be shut down. Hence, better casing designs
| -- leading to far fewer leaks -- and a reluctance to use
| nasty chemicals.
|
| Everything is a tradeoff. Geothermal is not a fossil
| fuel. But it is not a panacea either.
| cgriswald wrote:
| The important point is that a lot of _current_
| infrastructure and expertise is in fracking, which can be
| repurposed for EGS, irrespective of which technology was
| technically first.
| fghorow wrote:
| Regarding "repurposing". You have it backwards. Hydraulic
| fracturing for geothermal -- then known as Hot Dry Rock, but
| now called EGS -- has been around in practice since (at least)
| the 1970s [1]. It's basically the creation of permeable
| pathways for water to flow through in order to mine the heat.
|
| "Fracking" for natural gas took off in 2000's. The essence of
| the process is the same -- creation of permeable pathways. But
| many of the more controversial practices (high volume flow,
| slickwater, heavy use of biocides) are avoided by EGS projects
| specifically for environmental reasons.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dry_rock_geothermal_energy
| erellsworth wrote:
| "The intent is to use this collaborative site for transformative
| science that will create a commercial pathway for large-scale,
| economically viable EGS."
|
| So, public funding for commercial interests. Cool cool.
| [deleted]
| mandernt wrote:
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Yes, it is cool. It's not like they're singling out an existing
| commercial entity and just showering tax dollars on them.
| They're getting the tech to the point where private companies
| can run with it.
|
| You could chalk up a lot of what NASA had done over the past 50
| years as "public funding for commercial interests". Are you
| against NASA too?
| morning_gelato wrote:
| Current geothermal technology requires very favorable
| geological conditions which significantly limits where it can
| be deployed. If EGS turns out to be both safe and viable it
| will mean that geothermal power plants can be widely deployed
| across the globe. I believe this research is also in the public
| interest as we want clean highly-reliable power, and EGS is one
| of the few technologies that can potentially provide that.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| Public funding of risky R&D has been a winning strategy since
| the space race of the 1960s.
|
| Many industries would not exist today without this approach.
| erellsworth wrote:
| I don't disagree with the approach in general. I just think
| there's too much selective memory when it comes time for
| those industries to pay taxes, or be regulated in any way.
| Then suddenly it's all about the virtues of the mythical free
| market.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| There should also be a general policy requirement that the
| government gets say 20% of the equity of any venture based
| on govt-funded R&D. Currently the govt gets all the
| downside and no (direct) upside to these things.
| jspaetzel wrote:
| Any economic growth helps the government in innumerable
| ways, the government isn't meant to be a profitable
| industry with a huge upside.
| cassepipe wrote:
| It is not meant to be profitable but it is meant (we hope
| at least) to provide infrastructure for a society in
| domains that are not profitable for businesses while
| trying not to extract too much wealth from taxpayers.
| Maybe it would be a good thing as it would make the state
| less dependent on being able to get credit at a good rate
| and thus less dependent on financial institutions. Do you
| not agree ?
| alex_young wrote:
| Somewhat similar to the way we currently produce geothermal power
| in Northern California.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
| barney54 wrote:
| The Geysers is one of the handful of places in the US that has
| all the ingredients--the heat, the water, and the right amount
| of fractures. Forge is trying to figure out how to enhance
| geothermal systems so you can have viable geothermal in areas
| without the favorable subsurface rick features.
| manicennui wrote:
| "Our flagship effort over the next five years is the Frontier
| Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) initiative
| -- the first dedicated field site of its kind for testing
| targeted enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) R&D."
| [deleted]
| xendipity wrote:
| "EGS are engineered reservoirs, created beneath the surface,
| where there is hot rock but limited pathways through which
| fluid can flow. During EGS development, the injection of fluid
| into the hot rock enhances the size and connectivity of fluid
| pathways by re-opening fractures. Once completed, EGS function
| just as natural geothermal systems do: fluids circulating
| through the hot rock carry energy to the surface through wells,
| driving turbines and generating electricity. EGS could provide
| up to 100+ GWe of economically viable capacity in the United
| States. This potential could supply green electricity to over
| 100,000,000 American homes, and represents a domestic energy
| source that is clean, reliable, flexible and renewable."
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I can see the headlines from 40 years in the future:
| Geofracking Responsible for Devastation of the State of
| Tennessee as Record Breaking Earthquake Shakes the Eastern
| Seaboard"
|
| Also how exactly is extracting heat from underground
| renewable? What exactly renews the constantly cooling core of
| our planet?
| Lammy wrote:
| Try "from 2019"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30139155
| martythemaniak wrote:
| As others have pointed out, nothing is renewable on long
| enough timelines. The earth will burn out, the sun will
| burn out, eventually the universe will burn out.
| baremetal wrote:
| radioactive decay.
| jeffbee wrote:
| In other words it isn't renewable, it's just very long-
| lived.
| colechristensen wrote:
| So is the Sun.
| connicpu wrote:
| There's no such thing as infinite energy in this
| universe. There's enough deuterium in the oceans to power
| humanity at our current pace until well after the sun
| expands and makes earth uninhabitable, but that is still
| a limit where we'd run out.
| burlesona wrote:
| The core of the earth is essentially a fission reactor with
| quite a lot of fuel available. While this heat source is
| technically finite, so is the sun, and the universe itself.
| If you somehow live to see the heat death of the universe,
| you're probably SOL.
|
| But for humans living on earth today, and in timescales we
| care about (millions of years), the Earth's core won't run
| out of heat.
| kragen wrote:
| Not the core, which is made of stable elements like iron,
| but the crust. You'd think that uranium and thorium would
| settle to the core because they're heavy, but they're not
| siderophilic, so most of them stays in the crust. About
| two thirds of the geothermal heat flux is from fission in
| the crust:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient
|
| Non-sustainable heat extraction is much more likely,
| because the sustainable resource is only about 44 TW,
| while world marketed energy consumption is already 18 TW
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_co
| nsum...). By contrast, there are about 100 000 TW of
| solar energy available. There are billions of years of
| fossil heat locked up in the crust, amounting to
| conservatively many millions of times the total oil
| supply, and by extracting it faster than it was produced
| you can get much higher power.
|
| Like (above-ground) nuclear energy, this is not currently
| an economically competitive source of exergy because of
| the cost of the heat engines required, except in unusual
| cases. It was until only a few years ago, but PV has
| gotten much cheaper since then. It probably won't be
| again until a revolution in manufacturing technology.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| Tangential, but related point.
|
| Centralized deep-well heat pumps could maximize the electricity
| generated by EGS to utilize the latent heat at around 200-300
| feet below the surface, and achieve energy COP in excess of 4.0.
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