Futurology

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.

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 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 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 :)

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

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?

Why are we talking about wiping out nuclear when we should be talking about wiping out coal?

Good. Nuclear is massively expensive and generates so much waste that remains extremely toxic for 24,000 years.

How far did they have to dig and how much did it cost?