[HN Gopher] Largest Geothermal Development in America Taking Sha...
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Largest Geothermal Development in America Taking Shape in Utah
Author : geox
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-08-05 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mymodernmet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mymodernmet.com)
| prpl wrote:
| Ironic that fracking experience proved to be the technology
| enabler here.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Horizontal drilling predates the fracking boom. It's an
| adjacent technology. Your overall point stands, though.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A lot of geology is funded by petrochemicals and mining
| companies, since they invest top dollar into figuring out
| what's under us.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the
| professional organisation of geology professionals, is
| headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
|
| This is an outlier amongst US professional science
| associations:
|
| - Physics: APS, College Park, MD
|
| - Astronomy: AAS, Washington, DC
|
| - Chemistry: ACS, Washington, DC
|
| - Biology: ASBMB, Rockville, MD; ASCB, Bethesda, MD; ESA,
| Washington, DC; AIbS, Washington, DC.
|
| - Psychology: APA, Washington, DC
|
| - Sociology: ASA, Washington, DC.
|
| - Political Science: APSA, Washington, DC.
|
| - Economics: AEA, Nashville, TN.
|
| (That last ... surprised me.)
| jacobolus wrote:
| The members and officers of the AEA are geographically
| distributed at universities around the country, and their
| biannual conference moves around from city to city, but
| their Secretary-Treasurer is a professor at Vanderbilt
| (the previous Secretary-Treasurer was also a professor at
| Vanderbilt) and they have a permanent office in
| Nashville.
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| Genuinely curious here: who was doing horizontal drilling
| before fracking, and what were they doing with it?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Drilling through more conventional formations (oil or gas)
| that didn't need fracking. Particularly on formations with
| large, flat layers it could greatly reduce the number of
| wells needed, vs. vertical drilling. It's also very useful
| for offshore drilling.
|
| Measurement-while-drilling (where instruments in the drill
| string sense the surrounding formation, allowing it to
| follow ups and downs in the layers) is quite a technical
| accomplishment. Think about the problem of getting data
| back to the surface.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| It's called directional drilling [0] and is related to
| milkshakes [1]
|
| 0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directional_drilling
|
| 1 - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a5d9BrLN5K4&pp=ygUddGhlcm
| Ugd2l...
| julienchastang wrote:
| The word 'geothermal' is overloaded these days and can mean one
| of two things:
|
| 1. Extracting heat energy from magma within the earth via steam
| turbines. This is what is mentioned in the article.
|
| 2. Using the ground as a sort of infinite thermodynamic reservoir
| via a heat pump working as the same principle as a refrigerator.
| Retric wrote:
| There isn't such a clear line between those two as going
| slightly deeper for slightly warmer rock makes a big difference
| when you mostly want heat from that heat pump.
|
| ~1c per 40m may not sound like much, but it quickly adds up
| over 50 years.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There was a story in the NY Times six months ago about
| colleges in the US going with geothermal. Many are putting in
| shallow geothermal to be used with heat pumps (depth ~900
| feet), but Cornell has also been looking at true geothermal
| with an exploratory well to nearly 10,000 feet (bottom
| temperature was 82 C).
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/climate/geoexchange-
| clima... (may be paywalled)
| cwal37 wrote:
| This is more people just casually conflating two separate
| terms: geothermal and ground-source. Pretty frustrating since
| it is right there in the name of each, ground-source heat pumps
| are near-surface and basically leveraging the annual average
| air temperature while geothermal resources are leveraging
| higher temperatures much deeper in the earth.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| My dad had a "geothermal" heat pump installed back in the
| late 90s; that was the term that was commonly used at the
| time. The US Department of Energy uses that term even today:
| https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/geothermal-heat-pumps
|
| Not sure where you're hearing the term "ground-source heat
| pump" in common usage, but it certainly has not filtered out
| into common parlance.
| samatman wrote:
| It's also correct. They exploit heat (thermos) from the
| Earth (geos). A geothermal power plant and a geothermal
| heat pump differ in many particulars, but not in the
| meaning of the adjective they share in common.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Does this help?
|
| "The system comprises an injection and production well pair
| drilled within a high-temperature, hard-rock geothermal
| formation. According to Fervo, the lateral sections of the
| wells were drilled leveraging technology innovations from the
| unconventional oil and gas industry with a 9 7/8-inch hole
| size, completed with 7-inch casing, and extended about 3,250
| feet horizontally. They reach a maximum measured temperature of
| 376F (191C)."
|
| https://www.powermag.com/innovative-enhanced-geothermal-syst...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > The word 'geothermal' is overloaded these days and can mean
| one of two things:
|
| It's an umbrella term; it covers methods that leverage
| temperature differences between the ground and the air to
| exchange energy.
|
| In FL, 64deg aquifer water is used for cooling structures over
| 15k2ft. I worked on control systems for those.
| phaedryx wrote:
| Does anyone know exactly where this is supposed to be? I'm from
| "southwest Utah" so I'm curious.
| phaedryx wrote:
| Found an answer to my question: Milford, UT
|
| https://kslnewsradio.com/2113554/largest-geothermal-energy-d...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I was curious where this could work in the USA and here is a map.
|
| https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/maps/geo...
| briffle wrote:
| My old University has been powered by Geothermal for 11 years
| now, and they produce quite a bit more than they need, so they
| sell excess to the hospital next door.
|
| There are other geothermal wells on campus (not as deep or hot)
| just for hot water, that are used to flow in pipes directly
| under large staircases (campus is built on a hill) and
| sidewalks to keep them clear in winter, and are also used with
| large heat pumps to heat and cool all buildings on campus.
| Those have been used since the 60's..
|
| Warning, PDF's
|
| https://chptap.ornl.gov/profile/174/OIT_ORC-Project_Profile....
|
| https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/895238
| hcfman wrote:
| Is this so that it can power the Utah datacenter from the NSA ?
| Wasn't that meant to be in Utah ?
| yinser wrote:
| That's been built and operating for a while off the regular old
| grid. The customer for this power seems to be California for
| residential power.
| jandrese wrote:
| Especially since this is a PPA, so it's basically a
| crowdfunded power plant. People will buy shares in each well
| to get it constructed and use the energy produced to offset
| their power bill.
|
| Usually you see these with solar projects, but I don't see
| any reason a geo plant can't operate on the same principle.
| v8xi wrote:
| I think of geothermal the same way I think of tidal power -
| seemingly renewable but not really. Harnessing tides dampens the
| lunar oscillations surprisingly fast (as discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283).
|
| With geothermal, yes there is a huge reservoir of potential
| energy but speeding up the extraction of this energy is
| absolutely a terrible idea long term. I'm not gonna rant here,
| but look at what happened to Mars (only slightly smaller than
| earth) when the core cooled and the dynamo shut down.
| foota wrote:
| It's sustainable in the short term (for a very long definitoon
| of short term) though, which is what really matters wrt
| migrating off of fossil fuels. We could pull many times
| humanity's energy consumption from the earth for a century and
| it would still be a drop in the bucket.
|
| Now, some of these hot spots might not be renewable (in the
| sense that we drain too much ehat from them and they don't have
| sufficient heat flux to sustain as much extraction as might
| seem), but I don't think there's any risk of cooling the core.
|
| See e.g., https://www.wired.com/story/how-long-will-earths-
| geothermal-...
| spacemark wrote:
| Yeah the scale of thermal energy contained in the earth makes
| this fear (prematurely cooling the earth) irrelevant. The
| entire global consumption of energy is less than 2% of
| earth's thermal heat flow from the core.
| itishappy wrote:
| We're at about 40%. Current energy use is 20 TW per year,
| and the heat capacity of the earth is about 50 TW.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Terawatt
| spacemark wrote:
| Whoops, thanks for the correction. I was looking at end-
| user electricity consumption so it didn't include all the
| losses involved.
|
| That's staggering at first glance. So much energy!
|
| But then, I wonder how much it would really matter if we
| were harvesting that energy to move objects around on
| earth and turn on LEDs vs letting it dissipate into
| space. So I'm still skeptical of the concern.
| allemagne wrote:
| If this is something we actually need to be worried about, why
| not rant here? I think most people are pretty far from
| convinced that literally cooling off the earth through
| geothermal is a possibility we need to be taking seriously.
| yinser wrote:
| First comment on the linked article mentions an assumed
| exponential increase in consumption so the whole thing is moot.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Drilling 125 wells for 400MW of power seems like a pretty poor
| return. Although it's hard to tell as the article doesn't go into
| much detail around the depth of those wells.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Unless the price of energy goes up globally because of
| political/commercial instability created by climate change ?
|
| If we knew something that had all the perks of oil and none of
| the disadvantages, we would be all hooked on it. All clean
| energy are trade-off's compared to oil.
|
| Solar ? Short lifespan, land occupation, requires mining, the
| sun does not always shine, not much energy so you need a lot
| Wind ? Lifespan, much skill to build and to maintain, the wind
| does not always blow, not much energy so you need a lot Nuclear
| ? Big upfront cost, need skilled workforce to build and
| maintain Geothermal ? Big cost for not so much energy ?
|
| All of those need a good grid too
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > All of those need a good grid too
|
| So does oil.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Lots of oil rigs work off-grid, and refineries have
| historically also operated off grid, though nowadays they
| buy or sell electricity as needed, depending on load and
| price.
|
| What oil actually depends on is a transportation network,
| and aside from trains and pipelines, that's pretty flexible
| too.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Sorry, I should have worded my comment better.
|
| It was not to detract from the need for new and renewable
| sources of power, but rather surprise at how little power you
| get from each well, and the cost of drilling each of them.
| beembeem wrote:
| Hence the reason this hasn't taken off yet. Add in the
| geographical requirements of heat close enough to the
| surface and costs go up higher. Because it's baseload
| power, its ouput has higher value than intermittent sources
| per mwh produced.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| > Solar ? Short lifespan, land occupation, requires mining
|
| Almost everyone I know of who has had solar panels for a long
| time reports they last a lot longer than promised. And even
| if some part breaks, it can be replaced. You don't need to
| repeat the whole time and expense of acquiring the land,
| building the facility, grid interconnect and permitting. This
| means humanity gets a dividend in energy over the very long
| term, which balances favorably against the upfront cost.
|
| The issue of intermittency is more valid. It can be mitigated
| with battery storage, which has its own cost and downsides,
| but the chemistries are advancing rapidly, so I think the
| future is bright for energy abundance.
| jeffbee wrote:
| How many gas wells are punched for every gas turbine?
| Apparently there are about 500GW of natural gas power stations
| in America and 90000 producing gas wells, and 40% of that is
| for electric power, so 15MW per hole in the ground.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| That is an excellent comparison. And with the assumption that
| geothermal wells can last longer (the wells for my geothermal
| HVAC system were rated 50+ years, although I presume my wells
| and the types of wells needed for a 400MW plant are far
| different) then this is actually pretty decent.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Drilling 125 wells for 400MW of power seems like a pretty
| poor return.
|
| That's 400 MW of 24/7 baseload power. Forever, for free.
|
| The nuclear power lobby is scared shitless of geothermal
| generation becoming not just viable but proven, because "cheap
| baseload" is just about the one thing that NPPs are actually
| pretty damn good at.
| allemagne wrote:
| Hm... some articles are saying "largest new" and others just
| "largest". I don't think it's the largest but maybe it depends on
| what we mean by "geothermal development".
|
| The article quotes 400 MW and 125 wells, but according to a
| Wikipedia list [0] there are at least two geothermal complexes in
| the U.S. that produce more power than that and at least one that
| has over 350 wells [1] that appears to not only be the largest
| geothermal complex in the country, but in the whole world.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geothermal_power_stati...
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The editing on this piece is ... sloppy in the extreme:
|
| _In a victory for the development, one of the nation's largest
| utility companies, Southern California Edison, has agreed to
| purchase electricity from the development. The 15-year
| agreement will power the equivalent of 350,000 and begin when
| the development 's first part is operational in 2026._
|
| 350,000 _what_?
|
| (The answer is all but certainly "homes", which draw about 1.2
| kW each, which puts this plant at about 400 MW output ... as is
| noted three 'graphs further down the article. Compare against a
| typical large nuclear power plant at 1--2 GW output per
| reactor.)
|
| As you note there's also the Geysers plant in northern
| California (near Healdsburg) which has a nameplate capacity of
| ~1.6 GW, and a 53% capacity factor (that is, it's operational
| about half the time. Which would make the Met's article wrong
| on this point as well.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geysers>
| hnburnsy wrote:
| I think the article is mis-interpreting what is going on. Fervo
| announced the following...
|
| "World's largest geothermal PPAs highlight increasing utility
| demand for clean, reliable next-generation geothermal energy"
|
| PPAs are power purchase agreements
|
| https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-...
| dahfizz wrote:
| Genuine question: does "cooling" the center of the Earth via
| geothermal power plants have any sort of ramifications? If we
| converted to using 100% geothermal power, what kinds of effects
| would that have on the Earth's core?
| entangledqubit wrote:
| When I looked into this the numbers suggested that energy-wise
| we'd be extracting a drop in the bucket. There are concerns for
| local effects though (e.g. earthquakes).
| maxerickson wrote:
| The heat is already escaping at some rate, geothermal power
| accelerates it a bit.
|
| We drill a few thousand meters into the crust. There's several
| thousand kilometers of earth below that.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Geothermal _concentrates_ the thermal flux to the geothermal
| energy site.
|
| What happens in practice is that such sites end up being
| rate-limited by either the thermal flux of the surrounding
| rock, in the case of dry holes which are bored and take out
| heat directly, _or_ by depleting the groundwater and /or
| hydrothermal reservoir which feeds a "wet" geothermal project
| (as with California's Geysers).
|
| Dry holes end up having a limited effective life of a few
| decades, based on what I've seen, after which there's
| insufficient thermal energy to drive electrical generation
| (though it may be suitable for other lower-grade heating
| applications). Wet holes vary in response depending on how
| rapidly groundwater is replenished. I believe that the Geyers
| has dried up numerous wells. In places with ample water
| infiltration (e.g., near coastlines or in wet climates), I
| speculate that intrusion of fresh cold water might cool the
| geothermal reservoir somewhat.
|
| But the source heat, which is radiating from the Earth's core
| though the mantle and crust, has an effectively fixed flux.
| There's only so much heat radiating outwards, and a few
| localised pinpricks and steam generators won't effect that
| measurably. Volcanoes are far larger and similarly have
| little overall effect.
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes, but minimal.
|
| The heat is coming out one way or another. It already traveled
| 6500 km to the surface unaided, we're just helping it up the
| last 1 km or so. Frankly, I'd be interested if the core would
| notice an effect from the removal of the Earth's crust in it's
| entirety. My money is on "no for any human-relavant-timescale."
|
| For reference, the interior of the Earth works out to about 50
| TW of heat. Today, humans consume about 20 TW. The Sun delivers
| 173000 TW.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_internal_heat_budget
| dahfizz wrote:
| Interesting, thanks! I did not know the eath's core is still
| generating heat.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Emitting heat technically. Imagine rocks warmed by a fire
| or those in a sauna, they cool off very, very slowly. At
| earths core is a giant chunk of super compressed and super
| heated lead. I don't recall if the core is the size of the
| moon, but you could imagine a solid ball of lead for your
| sauna that is the size of the moon and so hot it would melt
| if it were not under extreme pressure.
| codesnik wrote:
| Iron and nickel mostly, not lead, AFAIK
| mystified5016 wrote:
| There's a nearly-negligible amount of heat being created
| from simple radioactive decay, but essentially all of the
| heat is just leftover from the formation of the planet.
|
| Which is just nuts to think about. The core is _that_ hot
| and it has been for _billions_ of years. Incredible.
| dahfizz wrote:
| The linked wiki article says around 50% of geothermal
| heat is from radioactive decay
| GratiaTerra wrote:
| In part with heavy rains, Puna geothermal fracking on Hawaii
| Island appears likely to be responsible for 2018 eruption.
|
| So no, not 'minimal'.
| itishappy wrote:
| I had no idea about the Puna geothermal plant! I'll read up
| on it!
|
| My "minimal" remark was intended as a response to the
| question of our effect on the Earth's core; I should have
| made that more clear. I'm sure we'll uncover all manner of
| consequences to the upper crust.
|
| Having read into your comment a bit, the USGS doesn't agree
| with you. :(
|
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2020/1017/ofr20201017.pdf
|
| https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/14259/did-
| t...
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| It will cool it down. Do it for long enough and the core will
| solidify with all sorts of dreadful effects.
|
| But there is an awful lot of energy there so I don't think we
| need worry for a few million years.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Geothermal doesn't cool the center of the Earth; it cools the
| crust around the wells. The effect farther away is miniscule on
| any reasonable timescale. Think of it as mining crust heat.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Roughly equivalent to the rise in sea level because of
| displacement from offshore oil drilling platforms and wind
| turbines. Which is to say, immeasurable.
| jandrese wrote:
| We are operating on such a tiny sliver of the crust that
| worries about the core temperature are many orders of magnitude
| away from being a problem.
|
| However, there are some side effects. Iceland heavily invested
| in geothermal power plants and as a result their natural
| geysers are dying out. This is also why the US doesn't run
| geothermal power plants in the Yellowstone caldera, because the
| danger to the tourism industry outweighs the potential gains,
| at least for now.
| causal wrote:
| Great if renewable, but is there a hidden freshwater consumption
| cost here?
| snickerbockers wrote:
| If geothermal energy were to be utilized at every opportunity,
| could all the thermal energy being pumped out of the ground
| create a new kind of environmental crisis? Or is there so much
| energy down there that mankind as a whole would never be able to
| make a non-negligible change to the earth in that way?
| bdamm wrote:
| Similar to how if we came up with some clean fusion and then
| multiplied all our energy use 10, 1000, 10,000-fold, then at
| what point would we be actually heating up the atmosphere
| directly (instead of indirectly via green house gasses)? I'd
| like to see the math on this too.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Or if we create cryptocurrency and AI training centers that
| require huge amounts of energy...
| tialaramex wrote:
| No. It will be a slightly warm damp rock regardless of what we
| do, until in the distant future the nearby star either destroys
| it or goes out leaving it to gradually cool down.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Some better details from the source...
|
| https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-announces-320-mw-power-...
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| I was on my way to Hawaii on vacation and we flew directly over
| that. I wondered what the heck that was out there in the middle
| of nowhere but couldn't find anything online. And, now, here it
| is!
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