Wednesday, February 26, 2020


One of the biggest challenges facing mankind today is our quest for renewable energy. Overhauling our entire power grid requires drastic changes in the way we produce, transport, use and store electricity.  we are beginning to hit a point of imbalance in the grid. Where places like California are wasting huge amounts of energy in the summer months, when solar is at its peak and not producing enough in winter. California is now installing vast battery storage facilities in locations to deal with this problem
Like Moss Landing to store extra for later use, but the amount of battery storage
These will be required when our renewal percentage increases.
State billions, if not billions. We can significantly reduce this dependence on batteries, if we can find a good stable energy source that does not harm our planet. Some people want to turn to nuclear power, but what if I told you that the solution could be directly under our feet. Imagine an ancient, hidden energy source within every square meter of our planet's surface. It is clean, flexible, virtually limitless, completely renewable, never closed and almost carbon free. Geothermal energy, energy produced by the Earth
As heat, that solution can occur.
Geothermal energy is produced from the underlying heat of the Earth. The center of the Earth (on screen: 6500 km deep) is as hot as the surface of the Sun (6000 ° C). Through convection, that heat heats the outer layers of the planet. But where does this summer come from? Most of it comes from gravitational forces when the planet formed 4 billion years ago, some of the heat produced by friction as dense elements make their way to the Earth's core. The second source of the Earth's internal heat is in the upper mantle and crust, where radioactive isotopes such as potassium-40 decay, create energy, and in turn, heat. If we can extract costs safely and use cost effectively then heat will solve our energy problems over the years.
This heat comes to the surface in some easily accessible locations. At temperatures of 700 ° C or more, the rocks partially melt, forming magmas, which are a variety of geothermal phenomena. If magma flows hot gases or water underground it can form hot springs and geysers, underseat hot vents, and natural steam vents. These features can provide water above 200 ° C, which is sufficient to drive a steam turbine. Such geothermal hot spots are found near the boundaries of tectonic plates, such as Iceland,
Like America's Yellowstone National Park, in volcanically active areas, such as Turkey, or in some places where the Earth's crust is thin. These places provide less hanging fruit.
Harvesting the Earth's heat for our energy needs. There is enough heat flowing every year on the surface of the planet to meet twice the total global energy consumption

[1]. And the geothermal reservoir is limitless: the heat within 10 km of the Earth's surface contains about 50,000 times more energy than all the fossil fuel resources around the world.

[2].
Yet geothermal energy makes up less than 1% of global installed power capacity.
It is also not a technology issue of the global potential for the use of geothermal energy.
Off-the-shelf technology, only 7% tapped

[3] So in the fight to change our global energy system, why didn't we take this energy source seriously?
Let's first look at our less hanging fruits, which are not being used to their full potential.
Naturally occurring hydrothermal reservoirs feature hot water that passes through layers of porous or broken rock near the surface. It is the easiest form of geothermal energy to be harvested, and can be tapped in many ways, which we have been doing for centuries.
Human societies have used geothermal energy of low temperatures (150 ° C) for millennia. The best-known examples may be the hot springs of Bath, England, founded by Roman engineers in 60 CE. Here, 1 million liters of water is heated to the city center every day at a temperature of about 45 degrees, recreational bathing and heating
Heating some buildings. This warm water replenishes itself as rain that falls into the nearby hills deep underground through the porous limestone where it heats and rises back to the surface.

[4]
But such convenient locations where there is the right combination of the water cycle, underground with porous rocks and a heat source close enough to the surface to heat it, are rare, and they are enough heat to drive a steam turbine And can provide water with pressure. Are even more rare. This particular source is not suitable, because 45 degrees is the lowest temperature we can employ. There are three basic types of geothermal energy generators. All three share the same basic idea. Take hot water or steam from a geothermal reservoir
And drive it through a steam turbine where


[5] But they are relatively common in geologically active regions such as Icelandic, Italy, Austria and the Pacific Ring of Fire, and geothermal energy is common in these places and is expected to increase by 2 in% over the next 4 years, southeast. The countries of Asia are expected to see the largest growth with countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.

[6]
But we want to exploit geothermal energy outside these areas. We can not remove any power from it before the power loss due to resistance in the cables. The third type of generator provides the highest capacity for the expansion of geothermal energy because it can use minimum temperature sources. This system is called a binary cycle system. In a binary cycle power plant, hot water from a geothermal source passes through a heat exchanger where it exchanges heat with a closed boiling fluid with a low boiling point, such as a Pantene, at 36 degrees. Has a boiling point of The lower boiling point allows it to transition to the gas at a much lower temperature, allowing it to run the turbine at a lower temperature. This system has allowed countries like Germany

[[], Which lacks any shallow depth geothermal resources to develop their geothermal energy market in recent years with temperatures as low as 100 ° C. This figure is important, because the higher the temperature, the deeper we have to go.
Different regions have different geothermal gradients, which measure how quickly we raise the temperature. This map shows rough estimates of the geothermal gradient across America.

[8]
With the highest gradients found in Oregon and Idaho reaching 70 kilometers per kilometer. This is important, because using this heat in areas where it does not naturally surface in an accessible way, we need to drill down and thereafter we need to be more expensive. Typically we have only used geothermal resources where the natural permeability of the rock allows a convection heat cycle, but a new technique called Enhanced Geothermal System or EGS, opens the door to geothermal energy for more areas. Can.
This is how it works. The first step is to drill an injection well into the formation of hot rocks. Then the engineers injected fluid under pressure to create cracks or enlarge existing ones, this
Increases the area over which heat exchange with rocks can occur. To increase this area even more non-toxic and degradable material is pumped down to fill these cracks and allow new cracks to form to reduce pressure. Once we have opened a sufficient number of routes to fill the water we can drill additional holes that can act as an outlet for our hot water as we pump more underground.

[7] In 2006, an MIT report found that EGS can provide electricity at about 3.7 cents per kWh per hour of a coal-fired power plant. United States Government estimates

[10] That the new geothermal power plants could produce 40 gigawatts of electricity on US soil by 2050, mostly through the EGS system. Now I know what you are thinking, it sounds like a controversial practice, but it does not use toxic fracking fluid that can leak into our water cycle, it would have used water and some safe additives. Is, but it is not all plain sailing.

[1 1]
Creating this workway requires large amounts of fractures and cracks and can have some disastrous consequences.
In 2017, drilling at a proposed site for EGS in Pohang, South Korea

[12],

Have thought for
Has triggered a 5.4 magnitude earthquake in which 135 people have been injured. A previous incident occurred at an EGS plant in Basel, Switzerland in 2006, when drilling could have caused an intensity of 3.4, and damaged many buildings. Both projects were canceled as a result.
Red tape is a very large barrier to geothermal energy. In the United States, for example,
Drilling for oil requires less environmental paperwork and less approval than drilling of geological wells. The tax credit for wind and solar power projects is 30% while the tax credit for geothermal is only 10%.

[13]

On top of all this, drilling is very expensive and as we have seen there is no guarantee
Successful geothermal plant. You could spend months of your time digging a 2-kilometer hole in the ground and the productivity of the well could be greatly reduced to make the project worthwhile. This makes it difficult to prepare investors to place their money at stake. It simply makes more sense to invest in solar and wind. Despite the challenges, there is real hope for the expansion of geothermal energy. Industry
Recent improvements in drilling technology can form.

[14]

Engineers are developing new types of drills for geothermal wells, and improved techniques for cementing wells drilled in hot rocks. Earthquake risk is real, but engineers have protocols for monitoring with seismometers to ensure that seismic risk can be quickly assessed. In the case of a basal accident, the EGS facility was located on a seismic fault,
Due to the proximity of hot rocks to the surface. Once the tremors began, liquid injection was immediately stopped. So far, geothermal projects have not attracted strong political support in the West, but they have also not attracted major opposition, suggesting that easing the rules for technology may not be so challenging. As commercial interest in this clean energy source grows, political support for this should follow, especially if some smart politician realizes that it could be a rally call to get out of oil drilling technology to work .
Sometimes the struggle to change the global energy system for renewal can be out of reach and feel hopeless. But in terms of geothermal energy, there is an exciting source of electricity and heat that can power our future, and it is under our feet.






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