[HN Gopher] Fusion tech finds geothermal energy application
___________________________________________________________________
Fusion tech finds geothermal energy application
Author : Lisdexamfeta
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-06-03 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| eluketronic wrote:
| This is pretty interesting but it seems like there's a massive
| component of this system that is yet to be proven viable--from
| the article: "Drilling a hole is challenging enough," says
| Tester. "But actually running the reservoir and getting the
| energy out of the ground safely may be something very, very far
| off in the future."
|
| Is there any existing +3km deep geothermal well energy system in
| use?
| dylan604 wrote:
| And what do you make the pipes out of that do not get destroyed
| from living at those depths?
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Steel
| Lisdexamfeta wrote:
| Utah FORGE is the deepest I'm aware of:
| https://utahforge.com/project-research. Well 58-32 goes to
| 2.2km. 78B-32 goes to 2.9km. 16B(78)-32 appears to break 3km.
|
| But FORGE is mostly based around research, from what I
| understand, rather than rolling out broad-based commercial
| geothermal.
| auspiv wrote:
| Fervo Energy is making great progress in this area. They've
| drilled a injector/producer pair, frac'd between them (exactly
| like oil/gas), and pump water at ~60 L/s. Whatever goes into
| the injector comes out the producer a few hours later much
| hotter. Their proof of concept produces 3 MW, and uses ~1MW to
| power the injection pumps. They are doing a full scale plant in
| Utah now, and expect ~8 MW net for each injector/producer pair.
|
| https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/5704/
|
| https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-breaks-ground-on-the-wo...
| jeffbee wrote:
| 3km would be far below average for new oil and gas wells in
| America. Climate change sucks but the technology for punching
| holes in the ground with extreme aspect ratios is really cool.
| A reason I am more interested in geothermal than nuclear for
| "base load" generation is because geothermal can reuse our
| existing drilling technology and workforce.
| audunw wrote:
| Yeah, and think about the amount of political support you
| could get for geothermal projects if workers from the oil and
| gas sector could see a clear and easy path to adapt their
| skills.
|
| Globally viable geothermal power generation would be an
| absolute game changer for fighting climate change. It doesn't
| have to be better than nuclear. If it's even close to being
| as good, the benefits of getting ex oil/gas people/companies
| on board would more than outweigh the difference. The growth
| rate could potentially hit levels that make a substantial
| impact on climate change within a decade of the initial ramp.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Geo would make a good transition project for the drilling
| side of the business.
|
| It's counter intuitive but if we did move that way we need
| a LOT more petro infrastructure going forward. And without
| irony it would be better for us.
|
| Capturing all the wasted natural gas (that gets flared off)
| as a reorient to maintain existing wells lowers carbon foot
| print and makes the use of gas less attractive due to cost.
|
| Petrochemical products aren't going away any time soon.
| Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things like
| lubricants. Having useful plastics (because there are tons
| of medical uses). And we're not getting rid of fertilizer
| (cause feeding 8 billion people is hard).
|
| There are reasons to keep the drilling side and the current
| matinence side around doing what they do today while
| lowering carbon foot print.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Petrochemical products aren't going away any time soon.
| Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things
| like lubricants.
|
| Synthetic lubricants (like Mobil-1) are a thing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Lots of options if someone is willing to pay 5x as much.
| Most options are better as well, but not 5x the price
| better.
| auspiv wrote:
| "Synthetic oil is a lubricant consisting of chemical
| compounds that are artificially modified or synthesised.
| Synthetic lubricants can be manufactured using chemically
| modified petroleum components rather than whole crude
| oil, but can also be synthesized from other raw
| materials. The base material, however, is still
| overwhelmingly crude oil that is distilled and then
| modified physically and chemically. The actual synthesis
| process and composition of additives is generally a
| commercial trade secret and will vary among producers."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_oil
| pfdietz wrote:
| Polyalphaolefins (PAOs), the most common synthetic oil,
| are produced from ethylene. In the US, this
| overwhelmingly means being produced from natural gas, as
| US fracked gas is rich in ethane, the feedstock for
| ethylene production.
|
| https://www.cpchem.com/what-we-
| do/solutions/polyalphaolefins...
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Penzoil is at least upfront that they make their
| synthetics from natural gas.
|
| Mobile-1 is happy to tell you that they dont use natural
| gas.
|
| But that doesn't mean that they dont use hydrocarbons
| pumped from the ground to make it. Synthetic is just a
| marketing term: http://xtremerevolution.net/a-defining-
| moment-for-synthetics...
| bluGill wrote:
| > Unless we want to go back to hunting whales for things
| like lubricants. Having useful plastics
|
| We know how to make both from many other process. PLA
| plastic (commonly used for 3d printing) is commercially
| made from plant sources as well (I wasn't able to find a
| source for if it all is or just some). There are plant
| based oils that are biodegradable that you could put into
| any transmission today (meet OEM requirements) - they
| cost about 6x what regular oil costs though. If that
| isn't good enough the process to make synthetic oil just
| need carbon (ideally in the form of CO, but we could use
| CO2), water, and energy and from there we can engineer
| any hydrocarbon you want - again at much high cost.
|
| Pumping oil from the ground is cheap though, so it is
| hard to compete with something else. We know how to do it
| though. If you are a chemical engineer there is a lot of
| money in reducing costs (though I'm not making any claim
| this is possible, only if you can there is money)
| zer00eyz wrote:
| PLA does come from corn! And you're right that we do have
| plant based sources that are 6x the cost for a lot of
| things.
|
| We dump fertilizer made from petrochemical on the plants
| to grow them.
|
| And that's the rub. I have to wonder how much oil we use,
| to grow corn, to make ethanol, to save oil...
|
| EDIT: I Had to do the math I needed to know!
|
| 173.3 Bushels of corn per acre: https://www.nass.usda.gov
| /Statistics_by_State/Iowa/Publicati...
|
| 140 gallons of fossil fuel per acre of corn: https://www.
| nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Iowa/Publicati...
|
| A bushel of field corn can produce 2.77 gallons of
| ethanol:
|
| Assuming these numbers are right, it isnt so bad...
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Technology and workforce are not the limitation of nuclear.
| auspiv wrote:
| "The deepest man-made hole, which extends 12,262 meters below the
| surface of Siberia, took nearly 20 years to drill. As the shaft
| went deeper, progress declined to less than a meter per hour--a
| rate that finally decreased to zero as the work was abandoned in
| 1992. That attempt and similar projects have made it clear that
| conventional drills are no match for the high temperatures and
| pressures deep in the Earth's crust."
|
| This is true. Neither the article nor the CEO of the microwave
| drill company say why.
|
| At that depth, rock isn't a solid. It behaves plastically. The
| traditional tri-cone bit used could make progress, but it kind of
| just started "massaging" the rock. The bit (as all bits do) wore
| out. They pulled the drill string out of the hole to put a new
| bit on. The borehole would close back in during the multiple days
| it took to pull 40kft of drill string out, change the bit, and
| put it back in. Progress was not possible.
|
| Unless the microwave drill includes some enormous cooling system
| (that works 40kft down hole even when the drillstring is
| removed!), they will face the same issues.
|
| Also, separately, I saw pictures of the resulting lab-drilled
| hole on LinkedIn the other day. The hole shows a high rugosity
| (qualitative description of the roughness of a borehole wall).
| Similar photo here - https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-
| library/image-of-a-rock-surf.... That's a ugly hole, and would be
| very difficult to run casing into it.
|
| Further - traditional well drillers' #1 focus is controlling
| pressure downhole (typically done by varying the density of the
| drilling mud). If the pressure becomes too great, a blowout can
| happen, which is bad news for everyone involved (see the BP
| Deepwater Horizon incident). For geothermal wells, they
| presumably will try to avoid hydrocarbons. However, rock far
| above water boiling point can cause a BLEVE (boiling liquid
| expanding vapor explosion), which is also undesirable. Super
| curious to see how they intend to control bottomhole pressure
| with statements like this - "Instead of pumping fluid and turning
| a drill, we'll be burning and vaporizing rock and extracting gas,
| which is much easier to pump than mud."
| Terr_ wrote:
| > At that depth, rock isn't a solid. It behaves plastically.
|
| Sometimes this false-intuition comes out in sci-fi settings,
| when some terrible force scars a planet or moon with a big
| gash/puncture/fragmentation which appears semi-permanent,
| rather than being (relatively) quickly erased as the thing--a
| liquid on that scale--reflows back into a spheroid.
| audunw wrote:
| From what I understand the whole point of the solution is that
| you don't have to remove their equivalent of a drill string
| while drilling the whole. It can all be done in one continuous
| operation. That's why it's so much faster.
|
| I'm not sure they would need cooling down there? They're
| continuously blasting gas down inside the waveguide, and the
| gas can only escape on the outside around the waveguide.
|
| Maybe it'll be like blowing air down a straw into honey.
|
| I don't know the temperature of the gas they're pumping down,
| but maybe it's colder than the rock at deeper depths which will
| help keep the rock around the waveguide cool expect for at the
| tip where the rock is being blasted.
|
| Do they need a casing? I seem to remember reading somewhere
| that the process of blasting the rock will harden the walls of
| the hole. Though I'm curious how that would work at extreme
| depths.
| greenthrow wrote:
| In the article they state the idea is the beam source would
| stay on the surface.
| gridspy wrote:
| Fascinating! What would you consider the water source for a
| BLEVE? There is no drilling liquid, so are you concerned about
| drilling near a water source and the well becomes suddenly
| contaminated with water, then steam?
| krunck wrote:
| If this microwave drill is vaporizing rock, how do they keep the
| vapor from re-condensing on the drill, wave guide, and shaft
| walls and eventually closing up the spaces between them causing
| things to get stuck?>
| Terr_ wrote:
| Did some (metaphorical) digging, and it _sounds_ like they
| expect most of the rock to condense as small particles inside a
| purge-gas, before it has a chance to adhere somewhere else.
|
| I imagine walls are an easier problem--just advance fast-enough
| compared to the deposition rate, and the thickening is
| controlled. Not sure about gradual buildup on the wave-guide,
| but some periodic cleaning mechanism (further back, away from
| rock-condensation) might be possible.
|
| ____________
|
| > Even though the rocks are being vaporized, it does not mean
| that there is no material to be taken care of. "The gas will
| quickly recondense back to a very fine ash, which will then be
| taken up to surface by a purge gas. In our case, we will use
| nitrogen", Matt [Houde] explains.
|
| https://geoexpro.com/an-order-of-magnitude-more-energy-for-d...
|
| > MIT's Paul Woskov, whose research is the bedrock of Quaise's
| approach, spent a decade proving out the physics involved. The
| system will use a beam of millimeter-wave energy--an
| electromagnetic frequency in the territory of microwaves--
| generated by a gyrotron on the surface. The microwave beam
| shoots down the drill hole alongside a gas--nitrogen, air, or
| argon--and evaporates layers of rock deep in the Earth. Then
| the gas binds and carries the vaporized rock back up to the
| surface like a plume of volcanic ash.
|
| https://singularityhub.com/2022/02/14/startup-aims-to-drill-...
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| Likely condenses into dust in midair and gets blown out.
| api wrote:
| I've thought for quite some time that deep well geothermal could
| be a sleeping giant in energy.
|
| The Earth itself is a giant fission reactor and molten metal
| thermal battery, but for some reason nobody thinks about it.
|
| This would be far easier than fusion or even next generation full
| cycle fission but it's barely funded.
| kaliszad wrote:
| There are so many energy projects that need probably orders of
| magnitude less investment than even the geothermal You propose,
| e.g. like the sodium fuel cell I have been writing about from
| time to time.
|
| For instance sodium can be used in its metal form directly to
| produce electricity in a fuel cell e.g. as described in
| US3730776A (https://patents.google.com/patent/US3730776A/en).
| The fuel cell does not require any special materials, however
| it still is a challenge to construct from the engineering point
| of view. Also, the proposed design can be greatly improved with
| additional knowledge about the reactions occurring. The
| resulting sodium hydroxide solution can be recycled using the
| well known Castner process, the "waste" hydrogen resulting from
| both reactions can be used as fuel or for other industrial
| processes.
|
| Btw. the energy density of sodium metal is 3694 Wh/kg and 3555
| Wh/litre - so an order of magnitude more than a typical Li-Ion
| battery. Also, the advantage of decoupling capacity from power
| is dramatic. Of course, you can also split the process of
| storing and releasing of energy which can be an advantage. Last
| but not least, sodium in its metal form is not hard to store or
| to transport. At ~100degC it becomes liquid and therefore even
| easier to transfer using regular steel pipes.
| api wrote:
| I think you meant more investment but yes.
|
| That sodium battery sounds great for grid scale storage and
| maybe aviation. The major problem with lithium there is
| weight per kWh. Wouldn't use it in anything consumer because
| liquid sodium loves to party.
| sfink wrote:
| Dumb question: is there any use for this for horizontal drilling?
| I'm imagining scaling up the size of the drill head to the size
| of a car-carrying bore hole, vaporizing the rock (or whatever
| gets in your way) and using some of it to recondense into tunnel
| liner, and blowing out the rest of the ash either back out the
| whole tunnel or via vertical(ish) vent tubes drilled periodically
| from the tunnel roof up.
|
| Though maybe the tunnel liner part is too much of a stretch. It
| sounds like the vaporized rock wants to turn to ash. I don't know
| if there's a way of concentrating the once-solid parts and
| keeping it hot enough while routing it to the tunnel wall. It
| just seems like a cool set of problems to solve, resulting in a
| self-contained (minus the energy source) burrowing drill that can
| create arbitrarily long stone tunnels underneath (non-volcanic)
| land.
|
| DIY lava tubes!
| dylan604 wrote:
| The oil&gas industry makes heavy use of horizontal drilling
| already. Say you own land with a nice pocket of $$$ buried
| beneath, but you refuse them to put a well on your property.
| That's when they turn to horizontal drilling.
|
| Infamously stated as "if you have a milkshake and I have a
| milkshake, but I have a straw that reaches your milkshake, then
| I have all the milkshake".
| bluGill wrote:
| Modern laws are generally onto this, and if caught (a big if)
| bad things happen. This is also why oil and gas companies buy
| mineral rights anywhere they might be interested in - it lets
| them take your oil without worrying about it.
|
| Of course not everyone lives where law is caught up to this,
| but it is a big deal and so most places where it matters the
| courts know what is up.
| njarboe wrote:
| More like if they buy your mineral rights they now own your
| oil and have the right to extract it.
| hinkley wrote:
| But it does allow you to consolidate the equipment and
| access roads on a large piece of land because you could,
| for instance, run a road across the narrow dimension of the
| property and run the wells horizontally along the wider
| dimension.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I originally started to include about mineral rights, but
| took it out. If you own the mineral rights and this happens
| to you, then yes it becomes a case of stealing/theft
| (whichever is more accurate in legalese). If you don't own
| the rights and the rights owner allows for that $$$ to be
| extracted, horizontal drilling is exactly how they'll get
| to it.
|
| Yes, the quote chosen did lead the meaning to stealing as
| that's how it was used in the movie. I have just always
| liked that quote. It didn't occur to me until your post how
| it changes the intent of the entire comment.
| GordonS wrote:
| They can drill horizontally subsea too!
| carabiner wrote:
| I think OP was asking whether this specific technology could
| be used for horizontal drilling.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| I don't think TBMs (tunnel boring machines) have the same
| problems as mechanical deep-well drills. For instance, you can
| replace worn components of a TBM without extracting the entire
| mechanism from 100s of meters of earth. Whereas vaporizing a
| 10-meter wide tunnel would require an insane amount of energy.
| Plus you'd have to deal with the slag trying to flow back
| toward your equipment.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Inaccurate title. "Finds" implies it is being or has been used.
| More accurate would be "Fusion tech proposed to be used in
| geothermal energy drilling."
| gzu wrote:
| It's like if only we put more resources towards potential
| societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert
| random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable
| with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick
| return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...
| baq wrote:
| one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for
| electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in
| UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which
| ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.
| m463 wrote:
| and coal mining (kind of) saved the forests and and drilling
| for oil (kind of) saved the whales.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the
| other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs
| to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will?
| Jesus wept.
| tivert wrote:
| > what a sad statement on the human condition that all of
| the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the
| needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI
| will? Jesus wept.
|
| Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal
| slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity
| and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may
| never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with
| us poors again.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can
| afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the
| minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar
| Jar.
| zeristor wrote:
| Don't forget about heat death.
|
| More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere, it doesn't
| simply just disappear.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _More energy being used heats up the as atmosphere_
|
| We're nowhere close to this being a problem. (Our total
| energy production is dwarfed by the natural flux.)
| 0x0203 wrote:
| Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this,
| do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking
| in various places about what percentage of planetary
| warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption,
| vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but
| usually just get accused of being a climate change denier
| and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious
| about methodology, want to build a better mental model of
| how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen
| any discussions/papers talking about direct heating
| effects, so don't know where to start.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct
| heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas
| effects vs. natural causes_
|
| Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove
| solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth,
| 44,000 TW [2].
|
| So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth
| retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove
| solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of
| our entire civilisation. _That_ is why emissions are the
| problem. Not our direct heat production.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and
| _consum...
|
| [2] https://www.nasa.gov/wp-
| content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...
| pfdietz wrote:
| More significantly, indirect heating from increased
| greenhouse gases is about 400 TW.
| kolinko wrote:
| It's quite easy - we have numbers for humanity's
| electricity and heat production. We also know how much
| atmosphere and oceans weigh, which we can multiply by
| specific heat of air and water. From this you can
| calculate how much we've heaten up the atmosphere/oceans
| - even ignoring the loss of heat to space/ground our
| impact is neglible.
|
| Here is chatgpt doing the math - https://chatgpt.com/shar
| e/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d... - it's roughly
| correct.
| Beijinger wrote:
| Well, yes, kind of. But the Stefan-Boltzmann law has the
| temperature^4 means the earth should radiate it back into
| space. No?
| hollerith wrote:
| That is not what "heat death" means.
| alxmng wrote:
| You might enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's video exploring this
| "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in
| about 400 years":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
|
| It turns out we can probably solve this by building
| planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer
| atmosphere.
| kolinko wrote:
| All the energy we ever produced and are likely to produce
| in the forseeable future has neglible impact on the
| atmosphere's temperatures.
|
| (Unlike co2 ofc)
|
| Here is gpt doing estimates - the numbers are similar to
| the ones I calculated by hand some time ago: https://chatgp
| t.com/share/e/5d28257f-f51b-40e7-8742-75d75e2d...
| palata wrote:
| That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs
| more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion
| before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and
| climate) problem.
|
| Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen
| because uranium 235 is limited).
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
| mateus1 wrote:
| I mean, we'd probably be living like the Jetsons if the US
| routed 20% of the defense spend to STEM.
| okdood64 wrote:
| We'd probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East
| was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China
| Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to
| restore the Soviet Union.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| We'd probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a
| serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit
| offshoring to reduce inequality.
|
| (ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track
| - returns on capital)
| airstrike wrote:
| _> curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to
| reduce inequality._
|
| that assumes cooperation on a global scale between
| competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is
| infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Either the US or the EU could do it: which global company
| can afford to not do business in any of these economic
| blocks?
|
| But the way the EU handled the COVID vaccine procurement,
| I think we're still a long way.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Nevertheless, this was a good first step:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/03/global
| -mi...
|
| Maybe next time they actually make it work?
| dylan604 wrote:
| This premise means that the extra dollars would be spent in a
| way that would justify your comment. Schools in Texas,
| Florida, et al would probably just replace those liberal
| texts with much more censored versions. They'd probably find
| a way to build bigger football stadiums or those other
| sportsball programs. New uniforms and things too. Then it'd
| probably pay for perks for principles and sporting directors,
| but sadly, there wouldn't be enough to increase the base pay
| of actual teachers. I'm sure there's other ways to spend that
| money and not a bit of it improves our advance towards the
| Jetsons' world.
| bluGill wrote:
| A significant portion of the defense spend is STEM. It takes
| a lot of engineering to build a bomb. It takes a lot of math
| to create/break encryption....
| Retric wrote:
| That just makes things worse. Imagine if most people
| working on nuclear reactors in the navy instead spent the
| time building and maintaining civilian equipment. The kind
| of people designing and building the F-22 etc where capable
| of more long term useful activities etc.
|
| The US could be safe spending 1% of its GDP on defense and
| largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local
| manufacturing. There's clearly a lower limit, but half of
| current spending is perfectly reasonable starting point
| before decisions get tricky.
| kolinko wrote:
| Which foreign systems? If US would've withdrew from cold
| war, half of Europe would be learning cyrylic now, and
| there would be few countries to import tech from. Not to
| mention engineers from the eastern block working for the
| opposite side.
| kortex wrote:
| > largely importing foreign weapon system designs for
| local manufacturing.
|
| I'm pretty sure they legally can't "largely import
| foreign weapon designs". The Berry and Kissel amendments,
| not to mention ITAR and a few other regulations, put a
| strong incentive on in-sourcing when at all possible. The
| only exceptions are for things that are really hard to
| get domestically.
| Retric wrote:
| Laws are binding to most organizations, but the people
| setting budgets are the same people creating laws.
|
| So, it's not actually an issue.
| mateus1 wrote:
| That's precisely the point. We're using the science budget
| for bombs instead of helping people.
| kolinko wrote:
| Bombs help protect people from countries like Russia
| zeristor wrote:
| Probably not, this assumes that that 20% is efficiently
| spent.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| We spend about 3.5% of GDP on defense [1], and coincidentally
| about 3.5% on R&D [2]. People tend to wildly overestimate how
| large the modern US defense budget is. It's only around 13%
| of federal spending [3]!
|
| [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?lo
| cat... [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.G
| D.ZS?locat... [3] https://federalbudgetinpictures.com/where-
| does-all-the-money...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I live in penthouse in LA Abe shuttle to other rooftops, one
| glance down at the sidewalk level and it kind of feels like
| the jetsons
|
| at least the retcon sketches where they showed what the
| ground level was like
| m463 wrote:
| what if the amazing mathematicians / physicists / statisticians
| that are sucked into wall street worked on fusion...
| bluGill wrote:
| Is that like trying to make a baby in 9 months by using more
| women?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Sounds like a winning plan, except what are the extra women
| for?
| rqtwteye wrote:
| That's not an apt analogy. Right now we are trying to make
| a baby with less than one woman
| navane wrote:
| How about trying to deliver any baby, using more women, and
| you don't know which one are infertile
| fragmede wrote:
| Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women
| making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific
| project, and having the coordination between the
| individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger,
| like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to
| shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work
| can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead
| of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and
| advancement in the field, compared to not.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| 9 women can produces babies 9x faster than one woman can
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Maybe it is like trying to make _more_ babies using more
| women, which absolutely works.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS
| apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short
| time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over
| the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It
| is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B
| people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the
| same way.
| aredox wrote:
| Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of
| markets.
|
| If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would
| be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the
| tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his
| "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are
| here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put
| up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and
| whose future is not assured yet.
| Tagbert wrote:
| But they are capital intensive with long timelines and a
| high risk of failure. It's hard to get investment in
| projects like that.
| kolinko wrote:
| The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than
| with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue,
| because funds can exit before the startup's exit through
| secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok
| with long term investments.
|
| (src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder /
| seedfund 2 years ago.)
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see
| as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years.
|
| It's _absolutely_ true that this stuff is capital
| intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get
| investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using
| showmanship and a series of successful (whether through
| genius or luck, it doesn 't matter!) risky bets to back
| it up. So I think it just really is the case that because
| of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get
| however much funding he wants in private or public
| markets to take a giant risky bet on something like
| geothermal energy.
|
| But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost
| himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Getting deep to hot rocks is important, but reducing the thermal
| resistance around the borehole is also important.
|
| Some schemes fracture the rock between two boreholes, but this
| requires fiddly positioning of the wells as well as the
| fractures. Another interesting approach is to increase the
| thermal conductivity of the rock around a single well. Much of
| the thermal resistance is in the rock close to the well (as can
| be seen by examining the relevant integral), so this doesn't have
| to affect too far out to have a significant effect.
|
| A company XGS Energy recently raised $20 M in series "A" funding
| for this. Their fluid (which is forced into fractures around the
| borehole) is proprietary, but is thought to contain graphite
| dust. Graphite can be three orders of magnitude more thermally
| conductive than rock, so incorporating it into even narrow
| fractures can have a major effect.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40434975
|
| https://jpt.spe.org/hot-rock-slurry-developer-of-emerging-ge...
|
| (the field tests mentioned there must have been successful, as
| they raised that $20 M subsequently.)
|
| Because this technology involves a single well that remains
| sealed from the surrounding formation, it could be used in
| existing played-out oil or gas wells, some of which go quite deep
| (although that's in basins with low geothermal gradients or else
| the fossil fuels would have been destroyed.)
| drtgh wrote:
| Has anyone calculated how much energy could be extracted before
| the cooling of the earth's crust, due such geothermal extraction,
| would turn irreversible the reservoir and unleash worse
| consequences than those "greenhouse gasses" mentioned?
|
| From how such progressive temperature change (extraction) would
| affect the dynamics of the Earth's core, among other things, to
| how it would affect such temperature to the nature chemical
| processes on the surface, how it would affect vegetal life
| (cultives), and so on.
|
| The planet is big, but we are talking about, lets say, a century
| of use or more. Has anyone calculated were would be the limit of
| holes (on geothermal a new hole each XX years due area cold down)
| before the "we never guessed that X could happen"?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Pretty sure the numbers are not comparable, not by many zeroes.
| Like, trillions of times more energy in the Earth's heat than
| humans could extract in a billion years.
|
| Add to that, Earth is heated by deep radioactive elements. A
| fission furnace. Not gonna burn out for a billion years, maybe
| not ever.
| lukan wrote:
| - new heat is generated constantly in the earth by radioactive
| decay
|
| - how much is debated, but this alone probably dwarfs humans
| energy needs (the core of the earth is really, really BIG)
|
| The real danger is in creating local earth quakes, because that
| already happened.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Actually, it's estimated radioactive decay in the Earth is
| about 20 TW, which is also about equal to the current global
| rate of primary energy consumption.
|
| Geothermal can be better described as heat mining than it
| would be exploiting a steady state heat flow.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| More than we could ever hope to extract at even heightened
| future consumption levels, which you could take to mean pretty
| much impossible, see a past comment of mine along these lines:
| [0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38850786
| justinpombrio wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_energy#Resources
| piva00 wrote:
| On the phone so won't try to even get to a ballpark but just
| thinking on the scale we are talking: a massive volume of a
| molten ball of rock with a thin crust I believe it'd take a
| fucking lot of energy to have any cooling. Even more where it'd
| be radiating out to space and "lost".
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-03 23:00 UTC)