I can't help but read "aggressive mining disguised as geothermal tech".
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
44 points (97.8% liked)
Technology
68305 readers
4374 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Fine, I'll take my attention elsewhere if you insist...
Weird, I read fine with Ublock+Firefox
TL;DR:
Geothermal energy is currently only feasible in very few places where heat comes close to the surface. We are limited by how far we can dig.
The article doesn't really go into detail on why that is, but basically it's due to pressure and heat, drill bits last less time the deeper we go, eventually there's just way too much pressure. It effectively becomes impossible to dig past a certain point due to the cost and materials science of drill bits.
But lasers don't have this problem, enabling us to dig much much deeper, potentially making geothermal practical in many more locations.
geothermal
renewable
WTF are they smoking?
I guess it’s not technically renewable but the reservoir of geothermal energy is so vast it’s hard to see how it could be used up and it has minimal environmental impacts.
Don't current geothermal techniques trigger small earthquakes in the midwest and Ohio Valley?
It is possible depending on the technology used. I personally don’t think the earthquake issue is as big of a deal as people think it is. We’re talking quakes so small you don’t even feel them.
I don’t know if this would compound and lead to larger ones if there were more facilities. If so it could be a bigger concern.
To be fair, I don't even consider solar and wind power to be renewable. But then again I'm the sort of weirdo that considers things on astronomical timescales.
Renewable doesn't exist on astronomical time scales, so you're just being an ass.
"Renewable" is just a word they came up with to keep us from doing something about the fact that the sun will grow into a red giant with a diameter larger than Earth's orbit.
So an Astronomical Ass then, noted.
(...) This study challenges the belief that the brittle-ductile transition (BDT) marks a cutoff for fluid circulation in the crust, demonstrating that permeability can develop in deforming semi-ductile rocks.
white paper in Nature
Permeability partitioning through the brittle-to-ductile transition and its implications for supercritical geothermal reservoirs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52092-0