Normally we SCOFF at high tech Capitalist Scams claiming to Save the Planet. This one looks FOR REAL and ready to go- but Big-Oil-Mafia may fight tooth and nail to stop it.
Feel the Heat: Paul Woskov of MIT holds water-cooling lines leading to a test chamber, and a sample of rock with a hole made by a beam from a gyrotron. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/MIT
In just 2 years the first Deep-Geo wells will be drilled. With new millimeter technology rocks can be vaporized in a self sealing borehole up to 20kms deep.
It’s not toxic, reaches only the hot rocks well before magma, and doesn’t fracture or poison ground water like fracking. And it uses already existing gyrotron technology developed in the USSR.
And you can do it almost anywhere..
That is- right next to redundant coal, oil and gas power stations, supplying the super heated steam to power their turbines, without oil, gas coal, nuclear, dangerous transport or Oil Wars…
Unlimited Electricity 100% both CO2 and methane free!
(unless we include CO2 released in the manufacture of the drilling equipment)
We live on a piece that fell off the sun. Just 20kms down the rocks are at 500 C. All we needed to do is drill down, pump in water and use superheated steam for free electricity lasting millions of years. But we didn’t know how to do it.
The promise:
If Deep-Geo goes viral worldwide it could really slow down and mitigate the Climate Catastrophe, tipping the oil and gas industry into a death spiral, with all its ramifications.
Problems:
- Deep-Geo won’t end Capitalist Ecocide that’s rapidly destroying our Biosphere.
- It is not fully demonstrated yet.
- It’s happening in the US where the oil/gas and military lobby will try to stop it.
The challenge for Activists against Climate Meltdown is to evaluate the reality of the Deep-Geo promise and, if it really works as promised, to support and demand it, while continuing to campaign against ongoing Capitalist ecocide.
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The Perfect Energy Source Is Already Here – Endless Geothermal Is Poised for Release From Deep in the Earth
By Andy Corbley at goodnewsnetwork Mar 15, 2022
The base of the new drilling method was discovered ‘accidentally’ by Paul Woskov and his team and developed for 10 years at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center before various companies began trials.
As physicists work in the nuclear fusion sector, they inadvertently invented a tool that could allow geothermal plants to deliver limitless clean energy by harnessing the power of the Earth.
That tool is a large millimeter-wave laser drill that will allow engineers to bore down more than 12.4 miles (20 km) into the Earth’s crust to harness the heat from the planet’s core.
This laser drilling technology is being pioneered by a spin-off company called Quaise from MIT .
The bottom line is that this idea is not science fiction, and Quaise has the money to put several full-scale demonstration machines into action by 2024, and hopes to have a 100- megawatt supercritical geothermal plant in operation by 2026.
At 12.4 miles into the Earth’s crust, temperatures soar to 500°C, a sector-redefining level compared to traditional drill bit borehole temperatures of around 200°C.
A Game-Changing Vision for Geothermal Energy
At this stage and depth, water under the ground becomes “supercritical,” a state of matter where it’s neither a gas nor a liquid.
“A power plant that uses supercritical water as the working fluid can extract up to 10 times more useful energy from each drop when compared to non-supercritical plants,” a spokesperson from Quaise told New Atlas. “Aiming for supercritical conditions is key to attaining power densities consistent with fossil fuels.”
A recycling masterclass
It’s perhaps ironic that humans would seek to harness the energy of the sun and stars in a nuclear fusion reactor when there is 20 billion times more heat under our feet than the entire world’s energy consumption.
Merely 0.03% of global energy is delivered from geothermal despite this richness.
A virtually limitless supply of energy exists in the form of this supercritical fluid snaking its way through the crust and mantle of the planet, and just 0.01% of it would provide far more wattage than the world uses.
In order to reach it though, we need better drilling technology, and Quaise is taking advantage of the work put into a 1970s piece of technology called a gyrotron.
When needing to heat water into a plasma scientists need to generate between 90-150 million degrees Celsius of heat. This has been done by both lasers and super magnets.
The gyrotron is one of those lasers, and it generates electromagnetic waves in the millimeter-wave spectrum, shorter than microwaves and longer than infrared or visible light.
Designed, invented, and tested in the USSR in the 1970’s, the device is excellent at rapidly heating up a plasma without substantial energy usage.
So, accessing already existing energy with already existing technology, Quaise has proved itself remarkably efficient. They’ve raised $63 million in funding and they’re looking to cut out fossil fuels in a real way before the end of the decade.
Their next planned step may be the greatest recycling trick in the industry.
As coal-fired power plants continue to be shuttered around the world, their giant, already established infrastructure for converting steam into electricity, large electricity distribution equipment, and talented workforce could simply be taken over by Quaise, who could merely replace the coal-fired components with those meant for harnessing supercritical water.
Pure futurism
“There are somewhere upwards of 8,500 coal-fired power plants around the world, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts of capacity, and they’ll all have to find something else to do by 2050,” writes Loz Blain at New Atlas.
Blain argues this is more revolutionary than nuclear fusion, and the beauty of the design, if it works, is that the technology originally made for fusion reactors could end up putting them out of a job.
At 12-15 miles below the Earth’s surface, it doesn’t matter where the drill or ex-coal plant is located, the heat will be pretty much the same.
In fact, the world would be set for a paradigm shift.
Since unlimited clean energy could be obtained within most nations, it would untether them from geo-political concerns about oil-rich countries like the US and their human rights abuses.
On land and sea, birds and wildlife would be untouched by any massive polluting oil spills that would become a thing of the past.
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The challenge for activists against Climate Meltdown is to evaluate the reality of the Deep-Geo promise and if it really works to support and demand it, while continuing to campaign against Capitalist ecocide.
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