MIT Engineers Imagine Tapping Earth's Energy Will Solve Our Boundless Appetite For Power

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Like all Presidents since Nixon, Bush is long on the 'energy independence' talk but a midget when it comes to understanding what all this entails or means. One form of energy people wish to tap is power from geysers and hot springs. Misunderstanding the true nature of the earth's lithosphere, they imagine this power will be easy to tap. It, like all forms of power, must be handled with care.

&hearts As always, think tankers believe there is some easy solution to life's difficult problems and nothing illustrates this better than all the nostrums for dealing with the looming Hubbert Oil Peak:

The first geothermal study in 30 years reveals there is enough heat under Earth's crust to help supply America with up to 10 percent of its future electricity needs with minimal environmental impact, and probably at competitive prices.

The study was prepared by an 18-member panel led by MIT.

"Now that energy concerns have resurfaced, an opportunity exists for the U.S. to pursue the enhanced geothermal system option aggressively to meet long-term national needs," said panel head Jefferson Tester, a chemical engineer at MIT.

Men mining diamonds from the famous DeBeers Premier Diamond mines in South Africa must descend deep into the earth. As they worked their way down to 700 feet, the rise in temperature was quite noticeable. The recently enslaved African labor would have to strip down to near nakedness in order to sift through the pulverized rock. Up until deep mining set in earnest, people thought of the earth as been 'cool' despite the occasional hot spring or volcano. In the famous Jules Verne story, 'Journey to the Center of the Earth', for example, the temperature stays even throughout until they blow up a pile of rocks blocking their path and a volcanic eruption shoots them out of Mt. Stromboli in Italy.

Modern day explorers, sponsored by the National Geographic Society and others, have been waging an inner space race to see who can plumb the deepest depths of the earth. Recently, an expedition in a Mexican cave came to a similar end, so to speak, as the Verne story, stymied by a huge rockfall, they had to stop before reaching the very bottom of a very amazing cave which also has the world's largest crystals. This particular cave in Mexico's Sierra de Juárez region plunges down 2,000 meters (6,500 feet). The National Geographic explorers began to suffer from the increasing temperatures as they went deeper. This showed that even caves with no volcanic activity and with water and air running through them, if deep enough, heat up rapidly to intolerable levels. It is pretty amazing to see that the Germans who have been mining the mountains in Northern Europe since the end of the last Ice Age, are borrowing nearly as deep as the deepest natural caverns.

The British invention of the steam engine was strictly for pumping water out of deep mines. This gave birth to the Steam Age and trains. And solving the problems facing miners who go deep into the earth moves technology forwards. With the demand for coal rising across the world as oil becomes more expensive, coal mines are deeper than ever and are rapidly approaching the depth of the world's deepest caverns. COOLING HOT, DEEP GERMAN COAL MINES INSTALLED REFRIGERATION CAPACITY HAS BEEN TRIPLED IN PAST DECADE In West Germany, the average depth of coal mining is 900 m (3,000 ft) and the deepest faces are almost 1,400 m (4,600 ft) below surface. The virgin rock temperature at 1,500 m below surface is over 60 [degrees] C (which is a whopping 140 degrees F!), and locally, particularly around large tectonic faults, even higher temperatures are encountered.

Mining coal in the USA is still pretty much on the surface, relatively speaking. Even the shallower mines here are still hotter than the outside environment. Natural caves are not very warm, usually, due to air moving through them, cooling them off. Many of the open mines in America are mountains that are taken down rather than digging deep into the earth. Even great open pit mines like the ones I used to explore in Morenci or Sells, Arizona, were so open to the air, any heat would be dissipated. Even so, if one were to dig sideways and make a cave, it would probably prove to be warmer than the outside air in winter (but not summer, heh).

The article about the hyper-deep mines in Germany note that seams running close to tectonic faults are even hotter. It doesn't matter what kind of fault it is, the increase in temperature is still evident. This means that all fault lines are where the underlying magma rises between the cracks in the surface lithosphere. Just as there a tremendous heat from the sun which can be tapped, there is the same from the earth.

One thing I have noted all my life is how the desire for endless, cheap energy fuels attempts at exploiting whatever system we develop until they become hopelessly unstable or dangerous or even terminal to living things. This desire is destroying the only major source of geothermal electricity from the Geysers, California. The USA is the world's biggest user of geothermal power. The Icelanders use it raw to heat their homes and other purposes as well as for electricity. But by far, the most exploited dry steam thermal power is the Geysers in California.

From the earlier Xinhua story about the MIT geothermal study:

However, existing U.S. plants are concentrated mostly at isolated regions in the West. There, hot rocks are closer to the surface, requiring less drilling and thus lowering costs. Even then, drilling must reach depths of 5,000 feet or more in the West, and much deeper in the eastern United States.

The panel now estimates geothermal power could meet roughly 10 percent of U.S. electricity needs by 2050. Their new study also finds the environmental impacts of geothermal development are markedly lower than conventional fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.

But there is an environmental impact. Barely aware of this, we pretend we can simply tap all resources and there is no blow-back if nothing happens the first 100 years. In Wales, mining operations piled up discarded rock in huge piles, year after year for 100 years. Then one shocking day, the piles destabilized and collapsed upon the nearby village and crushed many people including most of the children in school. I was a child when that happened and it made quite an impression on me. Another form of unanticipated mining accident that caused a huge environmental change is when some coal mines in Pennsylvania caught on fire. Everything above ground near the places where the toxic gases discharge is dying and a number of homes had to be abandoned.

One of the most spectacular destruction ever was the earthquake in China which swallowed an entire city because the coal mines underneath it collapsed. Estimates are, half a million people died. When authorities in California gave permission for deeper drilling and heavier exploitation of the geothermal springs, we warned them this might trigger unknowable geological reactions that could be very challenging.

&hearts Click here to see Napa Valley and the Geysers from a satellite.

&hearts This is from an article in 2001:

Geothermal plants in The Geysers area north of the Napa Valley have tapped steam fields to produce electricity since the 1960s. The 350-degree steam rushes more than 1,500 feet up from the earth, spinning turbines that create a constant flow of electricity.

But mismanagement of the steam fields beneath the hilly northwestern California region that straddles the Sonoma and Lake county lines has led to a large decline of pressure -- and a drop of more than 50 percent in the amount of power the plants produce.

The geothermal decline comes as California already faces short supplies of hydroelectricity from the drought-ridden Pacific Northwest and growing competition for megawatts from other power-starved states.

The Hubbert Oil Peak data applies to all energy systems. Once the ability to exploit a niche improves to the point that it exceeds renewal, it collapses rapidly after reaching peak efficiency. Getting people to understand the dire reality of the Hubbert Oil Peak which is so easy to grasp yet very hard to convince due to wishful thinking, it is doubly hard to explain this rule concerning 'renewable' resources.

Bush's push to turn aside growing food to using food to convert to gasoline so we can drive our big, useless vehicles, has many downsides that will become manifest as it is relentlessly pursued. The most obvious will be the starvation of billions of people. But the over-exploitation of land and the reckless farming this will introduce because they don't have to worry about poisons being eaten, the mono-culture destruction of the ecosystem accelerating madly, this could doom us just as bad as reckless pollution of the atmosphere.

In the case of dry geothermals, not only are we now forced to 'recharge' the wells just like we are seeing the pumping of sea water into oil wells in order to keep up the pressure as we pump the last oil out of the earth, in the case of geothermals, the water has to be 'fresh'. Because of global warming, droughts in the Northwest down to California means the hydropower from the great dams on geologically unsound rivers drops at the same time the availability of water for the Geysers drops, too.

But more troubling than all that is the nature of the Geysers: it is, I believe, a rift in the earth. Namely, a place where the earth is literally tearing apart. This is different from compression which in California is also at work. More than one direction of stress is at work in the Western USA. It is interesting to me and I fear, no accident that the sudden appearance of near continuous micro-to midlevel earthquakes are now shaking the Geysers like clockwork unlike when the facilities were first built. As we drilled deeper and used more energy and steam, the whole rift destabilized and is now troubled by something forcing its way upwards.

Here is a pair of drawings from the October, 1977 National Geographic Magazine showing what geologists back in 1977 thought was going on at the Geysers. I find it flawed. If one thinks the underlying materials is generalized hot material but not lava, is deluded. I suspect and geologists are beginning to understand, the Geysers is where a rift is forming like the one at Mammoth Lake or the ones that run all over the West where volcanic ridges grew into mountains like the Sawtooth Mountains in Texas. Namely, under the fault lines of the Geysers is a crack that runs all the way down to the earth's magma. This is why it is so hot. Water falls into the earth, such as we see in the great cave in Mexico, for thousands of feet.

The drilling at Geysers shows that the deeper we drill, the hotter the water. Indeed, it is steam even at the surface! To make 'dry steam' means very hot water. This means the crack, far from being like the lines in these drawings, are not closed but are open. Namely, it is more like the Lord of the Rings Crack of Doom rather than the earth being warm there and heating the water more indirectly.

The MIT article today excitedly tell us yet again, we can simply tap the latent energy in the earth with no worry. This childish belief springs ever eternal. Looking at these older diagrams of what the earth supposedly looks like underneath (we know astonishingly little!) one is struck by the thought that if we pump lots and lots of water into the earth, what might emerge would be a dragon.

Belching flames. And shaking everything. For the earth is an ecosystem. Alter any sector and all other sectors shift to deal with the incipent changes! And indeed, in this case, literally. In earlier articles, I pulled up papers and articles about how earthquakes in far Alaska can alter the geothermals of both Yellowstone as well as the Geysers in California! If distant but significant event can have such a huge effect, direct intervention will be even more dramatic.

When the Geysers electical generation plants simply tapped what was escaping from the ever-widening vent deep in the earth as the Californian coast glides in violent jerks to the northwest, there was little alteration in the balance of nature there.

But since then, energy demands which are, by our natures, infinite, have caused the exploiters of this force to abuse it and in order to increase the energy, we now meddle more and more with what is going on in the earth below. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has the Mines of Moria become a great danger to everyone above because the dwarves 'dug too deep' and released an energetic creature, the Balrog. As part of his subconscious allegory, not only did the deep mining release violent, burning energy, the Ring of Power was concealed there for a time, too.

It, being born of volcanic energy itself. The desire to tap volcanoes, the elemental force that has nearly wiped out living things repeatedly but also was the birthplace of life in the toxic oceans billions of years ago, the hot water vents created us but can also destroy us. This is why grappling with this energy has the same degree of downsides as nuclear power, the power created by massive forces within the stars themselves... and the darkest energy of all, the one that really is eternal and endless and truly powerful: black holes...is by far, the most dangerous and difficult to control or use.

In the 1970's, there was tremendous fear that we would lose the comforts of modern technology because we could not tap endless energy. For we live in an energy cocoon. Many schemes were thought of that could let us continue this way. Then we went back to exploiting the easy energy of fossil fuels.

We are now reaching a global crisis. Despite the dropping of oil prices which is all due to poltiics and not the Hubbert Oil Peak...yet...the truth is, we are preparing outselves to hyper-exploit all possible systems no matter what or how, we just need that energy. The fear is palpable. I was reading in the Washington Post all about Davos where the ruling elites go to hobnob and plot. No one bothers to demonstrate against these Marie Antoinettes anymore. We clearly see the raging wars in oil pumping lands has taken care of the elites. Relentlessly, the wars rage and unlike just ten years ago when leftists tried in vain to stop things, the new restless hordes are armed with religious fanaticism.

Evidently, the Davos party-going executives from America, less than 17% of them believe the climate is in crisis! And they also think the world will shoot forwards eternally, tapping more energy, more power, more money for themselves, more of everything, the horn of plenty will pour out its bounty for them and nothing has to change, we all just continue onwards.

This is why the entire speech by Bush was totally cynically fake: there is no crisis as far as these guys can see! They know the populace is frightened and so they want to calm us by pretending to be slightly interested in solving the looming crisis but this is a false front. They frankly don't give a hoot. Or worse, I suspect they have a solution and we are seeing it in Iraq: the masses without medicine, electical power, or sanitation, starving to death and killing each other while the rulers hang out in their 'Green Zone' thinking General X who is inside with them won't throw them over the walls and to the ravening masses.

But he will. This always happens. This is why smart despots keep their masses happy. Unhappy masses are dangerous.

I hope Americans don't accept the role of military oppressors of the earth working for these monsters. As billions starve to death and live lives of misery and enslavement, will we go around killing everyone who raises a hand against this regime? And do we really think we too won't sink lower and lower until we are barely distinguishable from those we oppress?

History is clear: this is our fate unless we make many changes today. And the main one is to live sensibly.

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Comments

[blues]

Well, the 'Geothermal Solution' would not be the worst solution. The problem is, we have scrupulously divorced ourselves from any solutions. Except, of course, EAT THE RICH.

[foo]

You might want to update your knowledge of deep mining, especially in South Africa. Diamond mines (and Premier in particular) are not particularly deep. It's the Gold mines that are extremely. Many mines are more than 2000m deep, and the deepest, South Deep, has a shaft 3000m deep (that would be 9900 feet). The average mining depth is ~2700m, and the virgin rock temp is 49C.

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Um, I was showing mines from 1900 and tying them in with the Jules Verne book.

Then I talked about the very deep coal mines in Germany because they were in the news. Of course, the gold mines are also extremely deep as you point out.

And all this is in the last 40 years. Super-deep mining is a recent development thanks to modern technology.

[JSmith]

"Namely, under the fault lines of the Geysers is a crack that runs all the way down to the earth's magma."

It's an old one.

Here's an article I'm sure you'll enjoy!

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=0006E0BF-BB43-146C-BB4383414B7F0000

[DaliWood]

If you haven't seen them yet, the Idaho National Lab has done some interesting graphics of temperatures at depth for the US at 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10 km. They're best viewed (unless you have an enormous monitor) by downloading to a graphics software or viewer.

http://geothermal.id.doe.gov/maps/index.shtml

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Thanks for all the links! How wonderful!

I troll the web looking for stuff, sometimes it is like pulling teeth. I have books, too, but they have to be transcribed so I prefer to find things online.

So when readers provide links, I am so grateful! Thank you all, again.

[JSmith]

Hey... any time, Elaine. Glad you read 'em!

[Elaine Meinel Supkis]

Seriously, the articles were very useful. I really do like getting new information. It is sometimes kind of obscure when one hunts online.