6mo ago

Houston-based startup Quaise Energy is testing technology that melts and even vaporizes rock to unlock "superhot" rock geothermal energy.

www.houstonchronicle.com

A Houston startup is thinking outside the box in bid to 'repower civilization'

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I can't help but read "aggressive mining disguised as geothermal tech".
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.
Lab data confirm potential of geothermal’s holy grail: superdeep, superhot rock as important renewable energy source
- 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.
(...) 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.
::: spoiler 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 :::

14 comments