Climate in the 21st Century

Fogdog said:

Please remember that I'm calling you out because you responded to a thread of mine that contained a practical solution that required A LOT of development but no invention required. I'm OK with your endless posts containing breathy reports about research projects as if they are "solutions" when in fact they are just research projects. Just saying, don't step on posts that actually contain solutions.

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Fervo Completes Geothermal Energy Testing - CleanTechnica

Enhanced geothermal technology makes it possible to tap heat reservoirs beneath the Earth's surface to generate zero emission electricity.

cleantechnica.com

Grandpapy said:

Dropping the core temp of the Earth, what could go wrong?

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Fogdog said:

Pardon me, I'm just not much into discussing the long term stuff. Too much of that is based on too little information. Thorium reactors, novel batteries, fusion reactors and so forth. I love me some research for many reasons but expecting that it comes to fruition before the planet reaches the tipping point to where Earth's climate changes past the tipping point that ends life as we know it on this planet is not one of them. Go ahead and continue to post breathy wet dream tech if you like. But you responded to my post so I'm kicking sand back at you.

No, I was not talking about Quaise Energy's gyrotron drilling. The state of the art of that tech looks like this;

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Gyrotron drilling tech is in the lab phase. If it were in the development phase, it would look like this:

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A drilling rig used by Fervo Energy outside Milford, Utah. The geothermal start-up aims to extract heat from underground granite to produce electricity.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

At the development stage, engineers, scientists and project managers are working out the bugs in order to discern risks and costs of this new application of developed tech. Something like this could be ten years away from deployment. Maybe less, depending on what they find out. Regardless, the economic hurdle to cross from this stage and into deployment is enormous and the cost might kill the project.

Lab phase projects are necessarily cheap because only one out of hundreds ever make it into the development phase. As I said, I love me some research. We need to fund more of it. From research goes new tech that makes lives better. More importantly, research projects are used to train the next generation of engineers and scientists. We need them as much or more than new tech. More funding for research please. But I do wish that people didn't take every damn press release about every damn research project as the next big thing. They rarely are.

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Grandpapy said:

Dropping the core temp of the Earth, what could go wrong?

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Grandpapy said:

Dropping the core temp of the Earth, what could go wrong?

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Would take a spell...

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DIY-HP-LED said:

Come on guys, the only post I made on fusion was about these guys out Foggy's way who had a do or die contract with Microsoft to produce power by 26. It was only because of that legal contract that I posted about fusion at all!

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cannabineer said:

How does that redeem all the wild-eyed reveries about deep geothermal, batteries made of maybium blueskide and perhapskite nonotech photovoltaics? hmmmmm?

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DIY-HP-LED said:

We are like the Ukrainians we have little choice but to fight since it is an existential problem and as it becomes more apparent, more will be done, including geoengineering as a last resort. Generally speaking, the planet will be fine, probably humans as a species too, but our natural world will take a beating and our global civilization might collapse. Even if we extincted everything except the cockroaches and rats, in about 10 million years the planet would be repopulated with their decedents mutated into new species. It's happened before, several times.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

I try to keep it real and close to the present, not next week or even next year, but within the decade, since I figure the coming decade will be the decade of radical change in energy technology. It has had its roots in the lab for the past 10 or 20 years in many cases and is ready to transition to the fab. IMO 2023 will be a turning point and initiatives already underway will get added support. The battery factories are going up now and they won't all producing the same traditional kinds of batteries. Even perovskite solar is looking promising in the near term with recent breakthroughs in longevity, efficiency and materials that we should see deployed in some form over the next decade. Meanwhile silicon solar prices continue to drop, and it is the cheapest form of power generation now.

We are in a Helluva jam and bitching about it won't solve it, neither will cynicism, technology and a will to employ it can help though. We cannot afford to think about, "tipping points" and giving up on an existential fight. When such events happen, there is not much we can do about methane releases from artic tundra or Greenland and antarctica melting unless we want to get into geo engineering. Personally, I'm not for fucking with the atmosphere, maybe a space borne solution that can be controlled and fine-tuned.

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cannabineer said:

I am not arguing against the existential fight. But I have little patience for frothy Popular Mechanics stuff that does not have established economics. Start with catalog numbers and proceed to warranty terms.

I get no thrill reading about Don Quixote entrepreneurs pitching the Bedrock Phaser that has not seen one minute of test, let alone a settled design.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

What can I say, they have serious investors and proper credentials with experimental results. I just posted an article that raised serious concerns about deep water fucking things up for quaise and gyrotrons. They have a company, nearly 40 engineers working and a timetable for a test well and pilot production facility in 2028, five years to prove the concept or otherwise.

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cannabineer said:

I did not know they had experimental results. Where are they drilling, and how deep have they gone?

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Microwave Drilling Sounds Like Science Fiction but So Does Drilling Down to the Hottest Rock

One of the problems with geothermal is that the rock that is hot enough to create the steam needed to run a power plant is also capable of destroying drilling hardware.

jpt.spe.org

cannabineer said:

I did not know they had experimental results. Where are they drilling, and how deep have they gone?

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DIY-HP-LED said:

There are several methods being commercialized for deep drilling and I figure the ability to go deep, is easier than fusion power and likely to arrive sooner. If the quaise proof of concept works out, it would be better than fusion power IMO and certainly worth a look see. I happen to like their idea, but I'm aware of some of the technical challenges. It looks like we will know in 5 years though, and if it works out as envisioned, then rapid deployment should follow.

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cannabineer said:

But but but

if they have experimental results, they’ve advanced or disproven concept. It’s what the term means.

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DIY-HP-LED said:

They sound confident to me have all the investors they need and appear to be a going concern with experimental results on the way. Millimeter waves have physical properties that are uniquely suited to this task and their theory and initial tests are both promising and sound. As I said, looks easier than fusion to me.

"Quaise’s goal is to drill the wells required to power a pilot power plant by 2026 and deliver a commercial system by 2028. For now, the 28-member engineering team, located near Houston, in Boston, and Cambridge, UK, is working on drilling longer holes in the lab and preparing for field testing in the next couple years.

This year, their goal is to drill a 100/1 hole—that is, a 100-in.-long, 1-in.-diameter hole, or ten times their previous best. At the same time, they are designing the more powerful, durable equipment needed to drill larger, longer holes in the field.

To do so they have ordered a 1-MWh gyrotron that will allow them to scale up on a site where the drilling rig that drilled the upper hole would handle the wave guide as the well went deeper.

“We are designing the rig to take all this equipment they have been using in fusion experiments and ruggedizing it and making it so it can be used with a typical land rig,” Bonebrake said".

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