TL;DR:
Geothermal energy is currently only feasible in very few places where heat comes close to the surface. We are limited by how far we can dig.
The article doesn’t really go into detail on why that is, but basically it’s due to pressure and heat, drill bits last less time the deeper we go, eventually there’s just way too much pressure. It effectively becomes impossible to dig past a certain point due to the cost and materials science of drill bits.
But lasers don’t have this problem, enabling us to dig much much deeper, potentially making geothermal practical in many more locations.
I can’t help but read “aggressive mining disguised as geothermal tech”.
Fine, I’ll take my attention elsewhere if you insist…
Weird, I read fine with Ublock+Firefox
(…) This study challenges the belief that the brittle-ductile transition (BDT) marks a cutoff for fluid circulation in the crust, demonstrating that permeability can develop in deforming semi-ductile rocks.
white paper in Nature
Permeability partitioning through the brittle-to-ductile transition and its implications for supercritical geothermal reservoirs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52092-0geothermal
renewable
WTF are they smoking?
I guess it’s not technically renewable but the reservoir of geothermal energy is so vast it’s hard to see how it could be used up and it has minimal environmental impacts.
Don’t current geothermal techniques trigger small earthquakes in the midwest and Ohio Valley?
It is possible depending on the technology used. I personally don’t think the earthquake issue is as big of a deal as people think it is. We’re talking quakes so small you don’t even feel them.
I don’t know if this would compound and lead to larger ones if there were more facilities. If so it could be a bigger concern.
To be fair, I don’t even consider solar and wind power to be renewable. But then again I’m the sort of weirdo that considers things on astronomical timescales.
Renewable doesn’t exist on astronomical time scales, so you’re just being an ass.
“Renewable” is just a word they came up with to keep us from doing something about the fact that the sun will grow into a red giant with a diameter larger than Earth’s orbit.
