If in doubt, use more lasers. This was fun, thanks to Carlos and the Quaise team! Use my link ground.news/DrBen to get 40% off the Vantage plan. Access local perspectives to better understand world politics and current events with Ground News.
Have you heard about rampian theory and rampian fracture? Lol anyway what a load of electric energy junk addiction mania, electricity is only needed for circuits if they are needed at all
Its a gear idea, this was researched in South Africa over 30 years ago, However we had very little use for it. Also underground water will draw off the heat, unless there is a stop/blocking method.
The delicious irony is that Quaise will be harvesting energy using technology meant for fusion well before the latter will come on-line, assuming it ever does. At that point, simple economics will render fusion (and especially fission) as bankrupt technology. Eventually, Quaise will then supersede the present alternative energy technologies, as well.
My napkin math on Quaise: 1MW output, assume beam has 50% efficiency and $0.10 per KWh which is $100 per MWh so around $200 per hour or $4800 per day in just the beams energy cost. If estimates are it takes 100 days to reach depth that's around half a million USD in beam costs to dig the well. Of course... nothing this technically challenging ever goes without a hitch. Looking at the macro investment numbers, assuming a very boring (pun intended) 10 year break even point a 300 MW power plant at 10 cents per KWh would generate 300MWh *1000 * $0.10 *24 * 365.25 * 10 = $2,629,800,000 or about $2.6 billion in revenue. Assuming the operation and maintenance costs are similar to a coal plant (both are steam) they run around $40/MWh so around $12,000 per hour or about $1.05 billion so the cost of the facility construction and sinking the well needs to be under $1.55 billion. The cost of the plant itself (again comparing it to coal) should be around $500 million leaving a budget of about $1 billion to sink the well. Considering an offshore oil well can run around $100 million to sink my napkin numbers for Quaise seem to check out... this is a much better idea than stuff floating around with big investment where the numbers don't make any sense. IF, and that's a very big if... Quaise gets the technology to the point where they can sink wells on existing coal plants and essentially reuse all that investment then Quaise would quickly become one of, if not THE most valuable corporations on the planet. Keep an eye out for that IPO.
The other key will be directional drilling. If they can drill a dozen holes in one area it would keep costs down. Alberta is currently in the process of setting up a government funded site to start testing new technologies for geothermal so I'd expect Quaise will end up drilling some holes here. Alberta has an advantage here over many areas since we have all the equipment and qualified drillers required to do work like this. We also have lots of data when it comes to what is under the ground as far as rock goes. They will be able to drill to a certain depth traditionally (which is much faster) and then at a certain point they can switch over to this type of system. That should in theory bring down the costs.
Your energy costs for a utility scale connection are off by a factor of at least three. In reality, these boreholes would be placed at existing power generation facilities anyway.
Please factor that these bores will be dropped within the existing power generating facilities, plus factor the surplus/scrap value of the displaced power generating equipment.
It is not even about IF this drilling technique will be able to do this but WHEN at least from my limited understanding of this subject. So far it seems not that far off and well withing our lifetimes. Electrification of basically everything would make a lot of sense this way but this also means that we need to do everything we can to protect the infrastructure. Recent solar flare could do in that kind of a world do a lot of damage. This technology can also make all countries completely energy independent. That sounds really sick.
Drilling down conventionally and then switching to the microwaves when you gain more with that process would be a better choice overall when the process is fully developed.
There was no mention of what would happen with the vapors as it travels back up the borehole and cools down on the way. I think they could easily clog up the hole or at least slow down the "drilling" considerably.
That was exactly my idea. They will need to come up with some solution (e.g. high pressure gas or something) to "push" the vapor up. Or the other way around - seal the hole and create a vacuum and suck it out - low air density will slow down the cooling process... But this will be really difficult over 10km of travel for the gas. Perhaps, if they manage to solidify it under control to small "chunks" and suck/flush them out... I don't know. I bet they already thought about the same thing though ;)
The plan is to ensure the cooling rockplasma is deposited on the borehole wall itself. This will glassify and seal the wall to ensure the super heated steam does not leak into the surrounding rock.
I love this. It brings back fond memories of Master of Orion tech tree. It is truly SciFi. For example: "Core Waste Dumps take man-made toxic and polluting agents and stash them deep within the planet. Since they’re so far below surface water supplies and often destroyed by the intense pressures and temperatures at the fringe of the molten core, this completely eliminates all Pollution on the planet."
Yes. This technology moves geothermal from being practical for 10%-40% of people, to 80%-95% of people, and ultimately lower cost per GWh once economies of scale are optimized. And we have workers who are expert in the drilling, from the fossil sector, with just a bit of retraining.
@@bartroberts1514 You think the robber barons will allow that? Don't delude yourself. They'll find ways to make it more expensive than fossil fuel power generation to keep their wallets fat.
@@Potent_Techmology You need to manage water table impacts, sure. But where in the world don't we need urgent water table management now anyway? Hydrology is advanced enough that we might be able to drill anywhere with such technology with net positive impact, while still so primitive that instead we endanger water to preserve fossil trade.
@@bartroberts1514 its not so much managing the impact on water tables as it's not viable to drill into water but ya, fresh underground water is also valuable to some degree it's not about "preserving fossil trade"
it may not be possible to do this everywhere, but the prospect of simply replacing the source of steam for a power station by tapping into geothermal heat near existing power stations sounds amazing. You can use all the infrastructure from steam powered turbines to the electricity network. and.. while drilling you can get the energy required from the power station itself.. what's not to love.
We should, as a species, have pause before we begin to mess with the systems of life itself. I don’t think I’m comfortable pulling energy from the system that keeps our core spinning and our magnetic field strong. Imagine cooling the core and slowing it down….forget the earthquakes that’ll happen as the mantle slows down because anything that survives will die from solar radiation as the magnetosphere fails.
@@LiberalVet He was talking about drawing off a fraction of a percent of the available geothermal energy over the course of two million years. A gradual breaking period of 2 MILLION years is about the smoothest and most gentle transition you could possibly imagine. So don't worry, there won't be any catastrophic super earth quakes caused by this...
I'm a Geologist with +20 years experience drilling oil and gas wells. As you stated we already can drill hydrothermal wells, butt in geographic locations identified with a high geothermal gradient 100 m/hr for conventional drilling is a gross exaggeration of drilling speeds at the depths you're aiming for. These speeds can be only achieved in upper softer sequences of shales and sands. I was on a well offshore Nile delta that was at the time of drilling the deepest vertical well in the Mediterranean and over 21,000ft. Problems we had on this well at depth was the temperature on the tools in hole kept frying the tools. You need special HP/HT tools as you need them to know a) where you are and b) what your drilling. Limits on my tools at the time was 350F/175 deg C. That is circulating temperature not static bottom hole temperature Then of course you need a fluid in the wellbore (which is your primary well control) with a specific gravity (mud weight) greater than the highest pore pressure of fluids in the wellbore. If not you will have what is call a blowout. So, this technology would have to work at high temps and IN a fluid without vapourising the fluid. Other thoughts are you need seal off sections drilled with steel casing with potentially different pore pressure regimes and having a uniform sized hole is beneficial in running the steel casing. Not sure how uniform a hole this technology would produce. Clearly this technology would be utilised in the base sections with conventional drilling in the upper sections.
Yah that is the plan. Drill conventionally to a certain depth before switching to this system. The other thing they will want is to be able to do directional drilling. If they can just move the drilling rig like 10-20 meters and then start drilling again they can bring down costs. That would also bring down the cost of infrastructure at the surface as well. You only build one power plant at the surface that is fed by like a dozen holes that are going in different directions.
You're 100% right, this technology is taking formation pressure (well control) and cuttings lifting into account not at all. I don't think they're talking about how they plan on holding back formation pressure at all. Vitreous layer that I can't verify the thickness of? I'll watch that particular wellsite from far away.
Mercury as drilling mud. All the weight you could want (your steel tools will float in it). Low viscosity. High thermal conductivity. Reasonably high boiling point. Of course, it might just end up killing everyone, too.
@@theevermindthat'd work, is it transparent to microwaves? the weight may be an issue where it may actually fracture the formation by being too heavy as well.. always a balancing act with this stuff :(
@@theevermind as Tony Stark would say not a great plan. Apart from Mercury being incredibly poisonous, you can go too far the other way if your fluid is too heavy you fracture the formation and you lose all your fluid to the point of hydrostatic where it will come back the other way at you if you don’t have enough mercury to fill the hole you’ve got a mercury blowout.
I live in the Netherlands near The Hague. Not far from my home there’s a geothermal installation. It’s primarily to provide heat for greenhouses but it can generate enough warmth for a couple of neighbourhoods too. They had to drill two holes of ‘only’ 3 km to reach a reservoir of warm water. It’s not warm enough to generate electricity but more than warm enough to heat houses.
While it doesn't generate electricity, that heating has the run on effect of increasing electric grid capacity. If your heating is sorted out by geothermal you don't need to use electricity to warm houses. Also any gas that would be used for heating can go to electricity generation.
The microwave "Drill bit" may not wear down, but it will have the opposite problem, accretion of rock vapor into a thick layer on the waveguide. Indeed, the rock vapor is pretty much a not-so-tame lava flow and THAT engineering process will be a beast.
Indeed. The video points out how much hotter water needs to get to vaporize at those depths than at sea level, but then they overlook the fact that that same phenomenon will apply to vaporizing rock.
Virtually all physical processes short of fusion can be engineered with simple application of well understood principles of chemistry and materials science. Look up the guy who cracked the blue LED manufacturing process.
@@kccorliss3922 Presumably that gas wants to resolidify as soon as it finds the area of temperature that will allow it, but presumably the drilling tool will maintain the correct conditions directly around the business end to keep it from being fouled.
The news about Shenditake is wild. The project director says 5 months to hit 8k from the surface (so it's not like they took over an existing hole) and then 4 more months to hit 10k. So it is kind of crazy how quickly they can reach 8k, and then how much is slows at that point. There are a lot of 8k bores in the area, so maybe it is just that they had the tooling and experience to do it? Not sure, but it is a great achievement either way.
I worked in the oil field in the 80's and did have the honor of going a little over 32 thousand feet on one hole.. it took a little less than two years.. and during that time we probably spent two months fishing
@@100c0cit’s prices that holds it back. Reaching 10K is enough, it’s just typically not cheap or profitable enough. Where it’s easy and cheap, like Iceland, it’s all over the place.
I'm no geologist, but I always assumed with the kola and other previous bore holes, the drill team inserted reinforcing shells/tubes as the drill bits were swapped out to keep the hole from collapsing. Wouldn't the "glassified" walls left behind by the microwave laser eventually (if not immediately) shatter from the surrounding pressure and shifting/asymmetric forces?
Like ice, rock does move under high pressure. But I am not sure about the speed. I think eventually a 20cm will close through shifting rock, but if it would take 50 years for a hole to become unusable and needing to be renewed, that wouldn't really be an issue.
more importantly they need to remove the rock vapor before it cools. Also the specific heat of the rock vapor is going to cool all the of the hardware on it's way out. Depending on the conductivity of the material eventually the whole 'tube' is going to become an convection oven as they try to get the vaporized rock gas out fast enough not to cook the equipment, two as the plastic point of the rock they won't be able to extract the machine once it reaches that point AND the driving material will have to contend with lateral pressure from sticky plastic-like semi molten material. I am concerned that at that stage where the rock is more like a molten plastic that the gasses could cause massive gas bubbles and the subsequent cavitation could obliterate the equipment ending the whole process. Cavitation in water from what I recall is destructive, cavitation with a billion tons of material involved... this could be an literally GI JOE Cobra supervillain level earthquake machine.
@@IdgaradLyracant as a vapor hardens further up the shaft, they can retract the emitter and then change the wave length to widen the beam. They can then re-vaporise this new layer, taking it further up the shaft or extraction. It is also possible that the hardened vapor is quite brittle and that they could run a conventional drill bit extractor back down the shaft to collect it instead 🤔
12:00 This is fascinating. Like really change the world. They can use this ANYWHERE. Do it under a coal plant and it can keep running without needing to buy coal again. Use all of the existing power distribution lines of that plant. Clean unlimited energy. Wow.
This is not a done deal… there are still huge challenges. Vaporised rock might deposit in the inside of the tube, but also on the drilling equipment. I predict the big problem of choking at depth - high pressure venting to force out most of the vaporised rock seems like a possible solution. But relying on the vapour knowing where it’s supposed to land will not work. I’m not sure the $95m is enough to solve those challenges, but I really hope it is. If they can make this tech work it basically solves our energy needs forever.
@@incognitotorpedo42 Doesn't seem like they have considered one fundamental point.... you cannot drill a well without fluid in it - at or above the equivalent mudweight or hydrostatic pressure of the surrounding formatioI pressure. if you do,, you will collapse the wellbore, and if you penetrate anything penmeable, you will have a blowout. However, certain conditions require "underbalanced" drilling and requires additional surface gear but the fundamental points remains - it still has fluid in it which kinda make the op point moot. I don't think the average Joe understands the pressure at depth in drilling wells. Deepwater horizon is a great movie although not technically accurate.
It's one thing vaporizing holes in rock in an open environment in the lab, but once you get down a shaft in the Earth that vaporized rock will deposit higher up the borehole narrowing the borehole. Also you can get to a point where all the microwaves are doing is keeping the current cloud of rock vapour in a vaporized state. There has to be a way of removing the vaporized rock from the borehole order to avoid these situations.
Their plan is to force it out with high pressure argon. And yea I'm also definitely questioning whether or not this will scale. I'm very interested to see how their test sites fare. If those succeed then I'll get aboard the hype train.
One way might be to have the stone deposit itself onto a screw conveyor which takes the deposited powder up and out or more likely a vacuum to suck the gas and the powder up
Another application is access to ultra deep ore bodies to mine perhaps via a leaching-type method. All the ore bodies we can reach with current tech are gradually getting mined out, and the ones left are of decreasing quality. The ability to continue mine copper, lithium, rare earths, and phosphate at acceptable rates with current tech are likely to be bottlenecks for industry well before peak oil becomes a problem.
The supercritical H2) they propose to produce will dissolve almost everything, very quickly, including all normal alloys of steel and stainless steel. To resist those effects, so-called "high alloy" steel must be used to line the borehole, and that pipe is rather pricey, because it is 60% nickel. But they will not face that problem, because the microwaves they propose to use will not make it down the pipe! The pipe will clog up with condensed rock vapor, among several other issues.
Negligible. We are talking about all the heat produced by all the radioactive elements in the Earth's core. It is correct that the Earth's core would cool slightly faster than it naturally does. But this is a process that has been going on for billions of years and will continue for billions more. And compared to the amount of heat that naturally radiates from the surface into space, I think even tens of thousands of vent holes would not lead to an increase in heat radiation that would be detectable.
you slow the molten core rotation, shrink the magnetic field around the earth, and burn away the atmosphere, kill the vegetation, and evap the water into space. but dont worry, that is probably at least a couple of hundred years from now.
@@Yora21 offcourse we don't actually know the full ramifications of digging these wells either. Every time we find some amazing solution for our problems reallity comes back to bite us in the ass. dams ended up killing riverine ecosystems and displacing millions for instance.
It’s a very sensible question to ask, given the long history of “ideal solutions” that end up fucking us in the long run. In this case however, the heat release involved is close to nil compared to things like volcanoes, and there’s no carbon emissions involved so it isn’t going to have a cumulative environmental impact worth noting.
The problem I see with this method is extraction of the vaporized rock. The only direction the rock vapor can go is back up the multi kilometre borehole, cooling (via heat transfer with the borehole walls and the drill) as it goes. Once it cools enough it will become a liquid and start to drip back down the borehole and eventually solidify - back to relatively the same amount of rock. Heck, what's going to prevent the cooling rock vapor from freezing the drill / waveguide in place? In addition, what's to prevent the vaporized rock from escaping back up the drill / waveguide? There's also the matter of making the drill / waveguide out of a material which won't melt when exposed to 3000+C rock vapor.
Many commenters asked about the vaporized rock condensing before exiting a long borehole. This seems to me to be a very good question. However, I am certain that I recently read about innovative small subsurface tunneling machines that utilize a similar ("laser-like") radiant heating or gas or plasma-based cutting processes in place of rotary cutting blades. I recall they tunneled rather slowly but continuously and, I think, sealed the tunnel wall as they progressed. An alternative method for underground pipes and conduits.
Interesting tech. Wonder what there plans for the following is 1. Vapor capture (prevention of harmful vapor escape) 2. Prediction of material, you realy dont want to energize combustable material and the deeper we go the harder it is to detect. Also in the long run we are creating cooling spots as we siphon the thermal energy. This will change the currents of magma layereffect8ng volcanic and possibly techtonic activity.... Well looks like i know what im doing tthis weekend
Attenuation in a copper waveguide is, at absolute best, 0.1 dB/m. So by the time the hole is 1 km deep, the 1 MW in the surface will be only 10 kW at depth. 1 dB/m is more realistic at mm wavelengths, making the drilling power 1 kW. That's for a solid metal waveguide. I think this stands no chance.
The microwave generator could be put at the drill head supplied with a high voltage DC source which will have significantly less loss. The trick is miniaturizing the generator to fit in the borehole.
Lowest loss reported for Circular TE01 guide is reported as 1.25 db/KM by S.E.Miller bell systems journal 33:1209-1265 Nov. 1954 But this was C band not mm. Even so 12.5 dB of attenuation delivers only 6% of the incident topside power at max 10km depth, so your point is still valid, even with very opmistic assumptions. Hmmm. I wonder which will melt faster, the rock or the waveguide business end? Lol! What will be the mismatch reflection between several hundred ohm Z waveguide and plasma rock vapor? 5:1 vswr if they are lucky? Pipedream!!!
"for the next two million years, by which time fusion will be only five years away." YOU are my hero and you're not wrong! P.S. And we'll be getting closer to solid state batteries, too!
anybody else remember "fractured fairy tales " (rocky & bullwinkle) I think it should become the name of this genre of science news. they are presented as" too good to be true " claims that aren't developed or proven, yet are coming soon to a reality near you.
I heard about this company and this aproach some years ago. I am realy glad to hear they are making progress and that field testing will come soon. I was afraid something happened and they didn't manage to get funding but this is great news!
Ya this is pretty exciting technology...the beauty of it is, is that they can use the thousands of existing former coal (and other) power plants that were shut down...so the infrastructure to get them producing power already exists. All they gotta do is dig a bunch of holes and the rest is a piece of cake...such an awesome idea. I'm still a fan of fusion energy, even if it's 5 yrs away....because I want them to put them in starships for exploring space.
They built a geothermal energy plant near where I lived in the 80's when I was a kid. The place is volcanically active and has several hot springs. It was an environmental disaster due to all the crap that came up with the water.
I’d love to visit this location. I have so many ideas on how to improve this situation. I love being a reverse engineer, entrepreneur handyman and a project like this is right up my alley ❤❤❤
I really like this idea, I designed a drill bit that was lot's of drill bits so that when blunt would expose a new drill bit but once you get to hot areas even a 100 meter drill bit's would only last a week or two. The smooth glass wall it leaves would also be great.
Yeah, harvesting the heat from the molten core that generates the magnetic field that protects our atmosphere from solar winds sounds like a great idea.
core is rather deeper (and a few thousand degrees hotter) Rock is a _very_ good insulator and one of the most pernicious problems with virtually all existing Geothermal sites is that the extractable heat drops off faster than it can be replenished from below. The collectable area at the bottom needs to be LARGE in order to collect sustainable heat The other problem at 10km is that the rocks start becoming plastic, so your hole may not be stable
This seems alot more complicated than just investing in ways to keep backup drillbits down near the drilling head and to send down replacements. Origami plus laproscopic (sp?) surgery is evidence of feasibility.
Another application for this would be in digging tunnels, where the ability to extract the vaporized rock could be more readily facilitated. In fact, if they can reduce the scale of this process, I could conceive it's efficacy in creating underground transportation tunnels, or even underground homes. They KEY problem I don't see resolve is how to extract the vaporized rock material to prevent it's re-deposition in undesired locations.
The way you explained the fusion technology's role in enhancing geothermal energy solutions is brilliant. It's exciting to see innovative approaches to sustainable energy being explored and explained so thoroughly.
I have been advocating this for so many years! I read up on it, and it is quite expensive (because in places, the heat is well down). BUT...compared to renewables (for which read 'unreliables') and nuclear, it isn't expensive at all! And although wind turbines use truly massive amounts of concrete and steel, and solar panels use toxic chemicals, deep geothermal uses water!
It's not the temperature of the rock that matters it's the heat flux which is the same at every depth (within the drivable layers of the Earth). Drilling deeper gives access to hotter rocks, but if the heat is extracted at a rate which exceeds the upward heat flux, every project is just a one-shot heat extraction for a few years until the rocks cool. Unfortunately the upward heat flux is small in most places. In the UK the average is 0.038 W/m^2 and globally its less than 0.1 W/m^2 almost every where. One-shot cooling of deep rocks may be worth doing, but there will be likely geological consequences of the stresses built up as a blob of deep rock is cooled, and contracts. There are smart techniques for extracting heat from rocks in a genuinely sustainable manner but they involve lateral drilling rather deep drilling. Best wishes Michael
If we suddenly converted the entire world's power usage to boreholes in the earth's crust. And given that the current year over year increase in power draw remains constant, how much energy would we extract from the earth's core in this time? What impact would that have?
0.1 percent in 2 million years of use. So basically nothing. The Earth's core is constantly heated by radioactive decay. We're kinda sitting on top of a giant fission reactor.
I think the heating of the earth is powered largely by radioactive decay, so I don't think it will be a major limitation. It will be similar to tidal energy gradually reducing the speed of the rotation of the planet. The sun getting hotter and engulfing the inner solar system in a couple billion years may be a more pressing issue.
I was always fascinated by geothermal energy. We're basically (and literary) sitting on vast amounts of power. Another source of free energy might be the sky. If you electrically connect the earth to a height of, say, 10km - you get a lot of energy - as the earth's atmosphere works like a giant generator. All you have to do is tap into it.
I had filed preliminary patents on this in 2011. I have a whole bunch of tech from my 2004 startup Nisvara , I can optically transmit the heat to the surface.
Thank you for the video Dr. I strongly hope that my country (Italy) which has a great geothermal potential and a desperate need for energy will use such technology.
It's all about baseload power. Geothermal is used in southern Utah in the US to balance out Solar and Wind in the same area. Dixie power delivers most of it's power from this method on the cheap.
the way the problem is described is that it's the changing of the drill bits that takes majority of the time and that's because you can't send a drill bit down when one is coming up that's the problem of having only a one-way lane. if that's the case all you need is to be drilling two holes together. the bits of both exit from only one and enter from the other. this way by the time the bits wear out there's already 2 more bits waiting in one of the holes. is it really this simple..?
Apologies in advance for the potentially stupid questions: 1) drilling holes and over using heat from the earth core shouldn't speed up its cooling down? 2) if 1 is true. What the potential effect of cooling it down. I've seen way to many disaster movies that my head is absolutely full of BS. But I'm concerned about the magnetosphere and continental drift related effects. 3) Where is all the vaporized rock going? I bet that is not healthy to breath or release into the atmosphere. Thanks in advanced to those more versed than me and again I apologize in advance for the potentially stupid questions.
My Cousin is working as an Undergrad in (Might sound strange as I guess it's a new field of research) "Geospatial UAP Studies". And he states they have instruments they use that track high flow routes of these UAP from the Ocean (water). He said his professor thinks if, hypothetically these UAP are deep in the Ocean or inside the Mantel they would most likely use Geothermal Energy to operate a small civilization (These are theories, but the UAP observations are actually real) I'm paraphrasing, as I never knew this was a thing. Never thought UFO were being taken seriously in Academia.
Excellent, very exciting: so they want to do a Godzilla! Been waiting to tap this energy since the '70s when our fab physics teacher introduced the idea to us.
This application on a micro scale for third world needs for freshwater is a game changer this would allow for crops where the water tables are considerably deeper and reduce world starvation Factor by an orders of magnitude
Just Have A Think had a video on a company from Canada. They have a proof of concept already built using drilling and fracking techniques. These can be drilled anywhere and last decades before heat is exhausted.
This technology once fully developed might be rather handy to use in space mining as well. After all supplying energy to an autonomous mining system in space is much less of a logistical challenge than providing spare parts for high-maintenance components 🤔
Kim- "Captain, they need to drill the deep hole" , Janeway - "Tuvok, stand by the phasers full power", Tuvok - "Captain, I must remind you that Fusion is coming in 5 years", Janeway - "There's coffee in that earth core"
One interesting thing is that the average power is limited by the rate of heat diffusion to your borehole. At which pointv they look like hydroelectricity, with a total amount of energy you can take out per year, but it doesn't matter when you take the heat out. it may make sense to use them as peaker plants to fill in the gaps of wind and solar
Petrovoltaics & Piezoelectric Effect are what Thomas Townsend Brown studied while building his ionocraft disc drones. Crazy how that's bleeding edge tech 80yrs later.
Some important questions that need to be asked and answered. 1. Should we tap into this energy source? Just because we may be able to do something, doesn't mean we should. 2. What are the potential negative ramifications of extracting and utilizing geothermal energy from the Earth's core? 3. Would potentially harmful gasses and/or other agents be released into our atmosphere? 4. Could doing this potentially physically/structurally and/or chemically destabilize the Earth's core?
Instead of heat, if you could significantly cool the rock locally the thermal stress maybe enough to break the rock in a tensile direction, which is a lot easier than compression. Just need to move the heat around, not bring more with you, although that is terribly difficult over a very short time scale.
Question: why do we need to drill so deep? Why not drill less and use a combined-cycle plant on the surface? That way, you can generate electricity with lower temperatures.
IT all sounds good on the surface. Issue is we're already having issues in parts of the world where we suck out too much water from underground causing lots of issues. If they modified this approach to only suck out heat and not heat and water then we'd have us a solid winner if they could pull it off.
Laymen here. "By which time fusion energy will be five years away". As a laymen of this type of science. Why would we, even if they are very small in diameter, create so many holes in the direction of earths core? Couldn't we just focus on areas with stable volcanoes? Though that energy wouldn't be available everywhere.
Talk about warming the atmosphere. If there’s no way to condense it back down, cool or utilize the water then are you not pumping an immense amount of heat into the atmosphere? Are the oceans not rising? What is the effect of pumping even more water into the atmosphere?
They seem to gloss over the glaring issue of rock vapor removal. If it's expected to naturally waft upward out of the bore hole, they are likely going to be disappointed by the higher parts of the bore hole acting as a heat sink to cool and solidify the rock. Or, it will end up in a liquid form while trying to pump it out. So then maybe they keep it heated...sounds like an incredible amount of additional energy. So then they'll probably just have to occasionally stop to clear out solidified rock. Maybe that's easier than pulling up and changing drill bits, idk. The other major question I have is--what is the form of the wave guide? Perhaps this would be a good first application of a plasma filament wave guide.
I figured out how to use much lower temperature and therefore able to tap geothermal without going anywhere near so deep. In fact, it can draw power from temperatures so low that it wouldn’t even boil water.
This could have applications in Mars colonization where wind isn't available and Solar is much reduced. Mars also has a hot interior, the biggest issue would be water use.
seems like the big 'issue' to deal with will be the re-deposition of the rock material onto the walls of the over-head borehole and laser guide. Interested in how they mitigate this issue without massive shut down times, re-boring the holes, etc.
I've been on the edge of my seat for this technology. I understand that we need the multiple solutions aproach, but i can't shake the idea that this is a silver bullet aproach to clean energy, and every nation worldwide should be financing this as much as they do with fusion. Honestly this seems even more feasible and realistic. I'm waiting patiently for 2 half 2024 to see news on their progress!
I'm sceptical of the approaches involving fracking on economic grounds. Too many things that can go wrong or lose efficiency prematurely. If you have a cheap way to drill, it means the risk of holes failing is spread
If in doubt, use more lasers. This was fun, thanks to Carlos and the Quaise team!
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Have you heard about rampian theory and rampian fracture? Lol anyway what a load of electric energy junk addiction mania, electricity is only needed for circuits if they are needed at all
Thats the movie, "crack in the world "
This won't work. The hole will fill with high pressure vaporized rock and it will eat itself wider instead of deeper. You'll see.
@@autohypnotic6750 no you'll see. we dont need to drill down to the magma, only to the area thats hot. DUH!
Its a gear idea, this was researched in South Africa over 30 years ago, However we had very little use for it. Also underground water will draw off the heat, unless there is a stop/blocking method.
"By which time fusion power will be 5 years away."😂
I heard AI will be ready in a few years! 😉
I was eating pizza and spit it half way across the room 😂
@@harriehausenman8623 havent you seen the new ChatGPT update?
The delicious irony is that Quaise will be harvesting energy using technology meant for fusion well before the latter will come on-line, assuming it ever does. At that point, simple economics will render fusion (and especially fission) as bankrupt technology. Eventually, Quaise will then supersede the present alternative energy technologies, as well.
@@DaveDave-e4t The irony 😆
My napkin math on Quaise: 1MW output, assume beam has 50% efficiency and $0.10 per KWh which is $100 per MWh so around $200 per hour or $4800 per day in just the beams energy cost. If estimates are it takes 100 days to reach depth that's around half a million USD in beam costs to dig the well. Of course... nothing this technically challenging ever goes without a hitch.
Looking at the macro investment numbers, assuming a very boring (pun intended) 10 year break even point a 300 MW power plant at 10 cents per KWh would generate 300MWh *1000 * $0.10 *24 * 365.25 * 10 = $2,629,800,000 or about $2.6 billion in revenue. Assuming the operation and maintenance costs are similar to a coal plant (both are steam) they run around $40/MWh so around $12,000 per hour or about $1.05 billion so the cost of the facility construction and sinking the well needs to be under $1.55 billion. The cost of the plant itself (again comparing it to coal) should be around $500 million leaving a budget of about $1 billion to sink the well. Considering an offshore oil well can run around $100 million to sink my napkin numbers for Quaise seem to check out... this is a much better idea than stuff floating around with big investment where the numbers don't make any sense.
IF, and that's a very big if... Quaise gets the technology to the point where they can sink wells on existing coal plants and essentially reuse all that investment then Quaise would quickly become one of, if not THE most valuable corporations on the planet. Keep an eye out for that IPO.
The other key will be directional drilling. If they can drill a dozen holes in one area it would keep costs down. Alberta is currently in the process of setting up a government funded site to start testing new technologies for geothermal so I'd expect Quaise will end up drilling some holes here. Alberta has an advantage here over many areas since we have all the equipment and qualified drillers required to do work like this. We also have lots of data when it comes to what is under the ground as far as rock goes. They will be able to drill to a certain depth traditionally (which is much faster) and then at a certain point they can switch over to this type of system. That should in theory bring down the costs.
Offshore drilling rig rates are ~$500k to ~$1M per day. A single tool rental on that rig can easily be more than the beam energy.
Your energy costs for a utility scale connection are off by a factor of at least three. In reality, these boreholes would be placed at existing power generation facilities anyway.
Please factor that these bores will be dropped within the existing power generating facilities, plus factor the surplus/scrap value of the displaced power generating equipment.
It is not even about IF this drilling technique will be able to do this but WHEN at least from my limited understanding of this subject. So far it seems not that far off and well withing our lifetimes. Electrification of basically everything would make a lot of sense this way but this also means that we need to do everything we can to protect the infrastructure. Recent solar flare could do in that kind of a world do a lot of damage. This technology can also make all countries completely energy independent. That sounds really sick.
Drilling down conventionally and then switching to the microwaves when you gain more with that process would be a better choice overall when the process is fully developed.
Congratulations, that's exactly their strategy!
Good suggestion, as the comments above says, this is their plan, that clip in the interview ended up on the cutting room floor
I think comments like this should studied. Unsolicited advice on something they just heard about.
To a point because this drill makes its own pipe by melting the walls
Or start with a decommissioned pre-drilled oil well.
2 million years, at which time fusion will only be 5 years away,,,,,, now that was a good one liner.
...just before HS2 is completed.
Your impatience exhausts me. Please give them space.
I am determined to see fusion work and be supplying electricity to the grid
If it means I have to live to 125, so be it.
I'd invest in it if I had the money.
This is stupid oil is a biotic, this is your future learn to love it.... THREADS
There was no mention of what would happen with the vapors as it travels back up the borehole and cools down on the way.
I think they could easily clog up the hole or at least slow down the "drilling" considerably.
That was exactly my idea. They will need to come up with some solution (e.g. high pressure gas or something) to "push" the vapor up. Or the other way around - seal the hole and create a vacuum and suck it out - low air density will slow down the cooling process...
But this will be really difficult over 10km of travel for the gas.
Perhaps, if they manage to solidify it under control to small "chunks" and suck/flush them out... I don't know. I bet they already thought about the same thing though ;)
Also there're some radioactive gasses down there. Need to be careful
@@rklauco Yes, best chance is condensing it into droplets and then removing it by conventional means
The plan is to ensure the cooling rockplasma is deposited on the borehole wall itself. This will glassify and seal the wall to ensure the super heated steam does not leak into the surrounding rock.
My thoughts, too
I love this. It brings back fond memories of Master of Orion tech tree. It is truly SciFi.
For example:
"Core Waste Dumps take man-made toxic and polluting agents and stash them deep within the planet. Since they’re so far below surface water supplies and often destroyed by the intense pressures and temperatures at the fringe of the molten core, this completely eliminates all Pollution on the planet."
Geothermal energy actually sounds like it can be big, excited to see news about it
Yes. This technology moves geothermal from being practical for 10%-40% of people, to 80%-95% of people, and ultimately lower cost per GWh once economies of scale are optimized.
And we have workers who are expert in the drilling, from the fossil sector, with just a bit of retraining.
@@bartroberts1514 You think the robber barons will allow that? Don't delude yourself.
They'll find ways to make it more expensive than fossil fuel power generation to keep their wallets fat.
@@bartroberts1514 not quite on your % because you need to avoid water tables when tapping for geothermal but ya, giant leap for mankind
@@Potent_Techmology You need to manage water table impacts, sure.
But where in the world don't we need urgent water table management now anyway?
Hydrology is advanced enough that we might be able to drill anywhere with such technology with net positive impact, while still so primitive that instead we endanger water to preserve fossil trade.
@@bartroberts1514 its not so much managing the impact on water tables as it's not viable to drill into water but ya, fresh underground water is also valuable to some degree
it's not about "preserving fossil trade"
it may not be possible to do this everywhere, but the prospect of simply replacing the source of steam for a power station by tapping into geothermal heat near existing power stations sounds amazing. You can use all the infrastructure from steam powered turbines to the electricity network. and.. while drilling you can get the energy required from the power station itself.. what's not to love.
We should, as a species, have pause before we begin to mess with the systems of life itself. I don’t think I’m comfortable pulling energy from the system that keeps our core spinning and our magnetic field strong. Imagine cooling the core and slowing it down….forget the earthquakes that’ll happen as the mantle slows down because anything that survives will die from solar radiation as the magnetosphere fails.
@@LiberalVet He was talking about drawing off a fraction of a percent of the available geothermal energy over the course of two million years.
A gradual breaking period of 2 MILLION years is about the smoothest and most gentle transition you could possibly imagine. So don't worry, there won't be any catastrophic super earth quakes caused by this...
Not to mention the risk of awakening Cthulhu.
Or a Balrog!
@@johntaylor8072 The Dwarves delved too greedily and too deep...
Please don't put the kibosh on it already guys, let them have some fun for a bit
And we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
The Deep Ones' ire was great when Nikola Tesla did not dig them out as their Plan had prophesied.
I'm a Geologist with +20 years experience drilling oil and gas wells.
As you stated we already can drill hydrothermal wells, butt in geographic locations identified with a high geothermal gradient
100 m/hr for conventional drilling is a gross exaggeration of drilling speeds at the depths you're aiming for. These speeds can be only achieved in upper softer sequences of shales and sands.
I was on a well offshore Nile delta that was at the time of drilling the deepest vertical well in the Mediterranean and over 21,000ft. Problems we had on this well at depth was the temperature on the tools in hole kept frying the tools. You need special HP/HT tools as you need them to know a) where you are and b) what your drilling.
Limits on my tools at the time was 350F/175 deg C. That is circulating temperature not static bottom hole temperature
Then of course you need a fluid in the wellbore (which is your primary well control) with a specific gravity (mud weight) greater than the highest pore pressure of fluids in the wellbore. If not you will have what is call a blowout.
So, this technology would have to work at high temps and IN a fluid without vapourising the fluid.
Other thoughts are you need seal off sections drilled with steel casing with potentially different pore pressure regimes and having a uniform sized hole is beneficial in running the steel casing. Not sure how uniform a hole this technology would produce.
Clearly this technology would be utilised in the base sections with conventional drilling in the upper sections.
Yah that is the plan. Drill conventionally to a certain depth before switching to this system. The other thing they will want is to be able to do directional drilling. If they can just move the drilling rig like 10-20 meters and then start drilling again they can bring down costs. That would also bring down the cost of infrastructure at the surface as well. You only build one power plant at the surface that is fed by like a dozen holes that are going in different directions.
You're 100% right, this technology is taking formation pressure (well control) and cuttings lifting into account not at all. I don't think they're talking about how they plan on holding back formation pressure at all. Vitreous layer that I can't verify the thickness of? I'll watch that particular wellsite from far away.
Mercury as drilling mud. All the weight you could want (your steel tools will float in it). Low viscosity. High thermal conductivity. Reasonably high boiling point.
Of course, it might just end up killing everyone, too.
@@theevermindthat'd work, is it transparent to microwaves? the weight may be an issue where it may actually fracture the formation by being too heavy as well.. always a balancing act with this stuff :(
@@theevermind as Tony Stark would say not a great plan.
Apart from Mercury being incredibly poisonous, you can go too far the other way if your fluid is too heavy you fracture the formation and you lose all your fluid to the point of hydrostatic where it will come back the other way at you if you don’t have enough mercury to fill the hole you’ve got a mercury blowout.
I live in the Netherlands near The Hague. Not far from my home there’s a geothermal installation. It’s primarily to provide heat for greenhouses but it can generate enough warmth for a couple of neighbourhoods too.
They had to drill two holes of ‘only’ 3 km to reach a reservoir of warm water. It’s not warm enough to generate electricity but more than warm enough to heat houses.
While it doesn't generate electricity, that heating has the run on effect of increasing electric grid capacity. If your heating is sorted out by geothermal you don't need to use electricity to warm houses. Also any gas that would be used for heating can go to electricity generation.
@@azzanine1710 Good point. Tx!
The microwave "Drill bit" may not wear down, but it will have the opposite problem, accretion of rock vapor into a thick layer on the waveguide. Indeed, the rock vapor is pretty much a not-so-tame lava flow and THAT engineering process will be a beast.
Indeed. The video points out how much hotter water needs to get to vaporize at those depths than at sea level, but then they overlook the fact that that same phenomenon will apply to vaporizing rock.
Virtually all physical processes short of fusion can be engineered with simple application of well understood principles of chemistry and materials science. Look up the guy who cracked the blue LED manufacturing process.
@@yosemiteanemone4714 no it wont,there will be no rock above it to pressurize it
They turn rock into gas, not dust.
@@kccorliss3922 Presumably that gas wants to resolidify as soon as it finds the area of temperature that will allow it, but presumably the drilling tool will maintain the correct conditions directly around the business end to keep it from being fouled.
This is the best description of Quaise's process that I've ever heard. Thanks Dr. Ben!
Yea cheers doka ya brill.
Everybody's gangsta until they awake a Balrog.
Or Cthulhu
We’re digging too deep and too greedily
FUUUUUUSSSIIOOONN SHHAAALLLL NOT PAAAAAASSSSSSSSS!!! 🧙🏼♂️🫵💥
I always were wondering why didnt we use geothermal energy more. Now I understand better. Thanks for the explanation.
It no longer takes 24 years to drill so far. Shenditake 1 broke 10,000 meters in 279 days.
The news about Shenditake is wild. The project director says 5 months to hit 8k from the surface (so it's not like they took over an existing hole) and then 4 more months to hit 10k. So it is kind of crazy how quickly they can reach 8k, and then how much is slows at that point. There are a lot of 8k bores in the area, so maybe it is just that they had the tooling and experience to do it? Not sure, but it is a great achievement either way.
Why don't they use that for geothermal? Is 10K not enough? 🤔
I worked in the oil field in the 80's and did have the honor of going a little over 32 thousand feet on one hole.. it took a little less than two years.. and during that time we probably spent two months fishing
We needed this in this video.
@@100c0cit’s prices that holds it back. Reaching 10K is enough, it’s just typically not cheap or profitable enough.
Where it’s easy and cheap, like Iceland, it’s all over the place.
I'm no geologist, but I always assumed with the kola and other previous bore holes, the drill team inserted reinforcing shells/tubes as the drill bits were swapped out to keep the hole from collapsing. Wouldn't the "glassified" walls left behind by the microwave laser eventually (if not immediately) shatter from the surrounding pressure and shifting/asymmetric forces?
Like ice, rock does move under high pressure. But I am not sure about the speed.
I think eventually a 20cm will close through shifting rock, but if it would take 50 years for a hole to become unusable and needing to be renewed, that wouldn't really be an issue.
No, you are no geologist.😂
I've been saying this for years. Geothermal energy is the future.
They should tackle it like it's the Manhattan project.
I saw this years ago. Glad they managed to develop it further
Were you on this world ?
@@hawkbartril3016 He from outer space
What happens to the rock vapor? Does it settle to take up less space than it started, or does it have to be vented out?
more importantly they need to remove the rock vapor before it cools. Also the specific heat of the rock vapor is going to cool all the of the hardware on it's way out. Depending on the conductivity of the material eventually the whole 'tube' is going to become an convection oven as they try to get the vaporized rock gas out fast enough not to cook the equipment, two as the plastic point of the rock they won't be able to extract the machine once it reaches that point AND the driving material will have to contend with lateral pressure from sticky plastic-like semi molten material. I am concerned that at that stage where the rock is more like a molten plastic that the gasses could cause massive gas bubbles and the subsequent cavitation could obliterate the equipment ending the whole process. Cavitation in water from what I recall is destructive, cavitation with a billion tons of material involved... this could be an literally GI JOE Cobra supervillain level earthquake machine.
*cook all the equipment
It goes into the atmosphere forming clouds until it starts raining rocks.
@@IdgaradLyracant as a vapor hardens further up the shaft, they can retract the emitter and then change the wave length to widen the beam.
They can then re-vaporise this new layer, taking it further up the shaft or extraction. It is also possible that the hardened vapor is quite brittle and that they could run a conventional drill bit extractor back down the shaft to collect it instead 🤔
My understanding is that it creates a vitreous casing for the bore hole. So you don't need to have metal pipe.
12:00 This is fascinating. Like really change the world. They can use this ANYWHERE. Do it under a coal plant and it can keep running without needing to buy coal again. Use all of the existing power distribution lines of that plant. Clean unlimited energy. Wow.
You seem much more passionate than the PhD holders I’ve met in the past. Kudos to keeping the love of science alive.
This is not a done deal… there are still huge challenges. Vaporised rock might deposit in the inside of the tube, but also on the drilling equipment. I predict the big problem of choking at depth - high pressure venting to force out most of the vaporised rock seems like a possible solution. But relying on the vapour knowing where it’s supposed to land will not work.
I’m not sure the $95m is enough to solve those challenges, but I really hope it is. If they can make this tech work it basically solves our energy needs forever.
I'm pretty sure they've thought of this.
@@incognitotorpedo42 I’m pretty sure too but the problem is a hard one to sort and limited funds might make a solution difficult to realise.
@@incognitotorpedo42 Doesn't seem like they have considered one fundamental point.... you cannot drill a well without fluid in it - at or above the equivalent mudweight or hydrostatic pressure of the surrounding formatioI pressure. if you do,, you will collapse the wellbore, and if you penetrate anything penmeable, you will have a blowout.
However, certain conditions require "underbalanced" drilling and requires additional surface gear but the fundamental points remains - it still has fluid in it which kinda make the op point moot.
I don't think the average Joe understands the pressure at depth in drilling wells. Deepwater horizon is a great movie although not technically accurate.
It's one thing vaporizing holes in rock in an open environment in the lab, but once you get down a shaft in the Earth that vaporized rock will deposit higher up the borehole narrowing the borehole. Also you can get to a point where all the microwaves are doing is keeping the current cloud of rock vapour in a vaporized state. There has to be a way of removing the vaporized rock from the borehole order to avoid these situations.
Their plan is to force it out with high pressure argon. And yea I'm also definitely questioning whether or not this will scale. I'm very interested to see how their test sites fare. If those succeed then I'll get aboard the hype train.
@@jonathanschmidt7325 Makes sense. Argon is abundant, heavy, and a noble gas.
@@jonathanschmidt7325 thanks for the feedback. It will be interesting to see them blow out condensed rock vapour from a 20 mile deep hole
One way might be to have the stone deposit itself onto a screw conveyor which takes the deposited powder up and out or more likely a vacuum to suck the gas and the powder up
Another application is access to ultra deep ore bodies to mine perhaps via a leaching-type method. All the ore bodies we can reach with current tech are gradually getting mined out, and the ones left are of decreasing quality. The ability to continue mine copper, lithium, rare earths, and phosphate at acceptable rates with current tech are likely to be bottlenecks for industry well before peak oil becomes a problem.
The supercritical H2) they propose to produce will dissolve almost everything, very quickly, including all normal alloys of steel and stainless steel. To resist those effects, so-called "high alloy" steel must be used to line the borehole, and that pipe is rather pricey, because it is 60% nickel.
But they will not face that problem, because the microwaves they propose to use will not make it down the pipe! The pipe will clog up with condensed rock vapor, among several other issues.
Is it unlimited energy though? If you open heat sinks to the surface what are the ramifications?
Negligible.
We are talking about all the heat produced by all the radioactive elements in the Earth's core.
It is correct that the Earth's core would cool slightly faster than it naturally does. But this is a process that has been going on for billions of years and will continue for billions more. And compared to the amount of heat that naturally radiates from the surface into space, I think even tens of thousands of vent holes would not lead to an increase in heat radiation that would be detectable.
you slow the molten core rotation, shrink the magnetic field around the earth, and burn away the atmosphere, kill the vegetation, and evap the water into space. but dont worry, that is probably at least a couple of hundred years from now.
@@Yora21 offcourse we don't actually know the full ramifications of digging these wells either.
Every time we find some amazing solution for our problems reallity comes back to bite us in the ass. dams ended up killing riverine ecosystems and displacing millions for instance.
OMG, we could unleash a volcano that could destroy the dinosaurs. Get over yourselves
It’s a very sensible question to ask, given the long history of “ideal solutions” that end up fucking us in the long run. In this case however, the heat release involved is close to nil compared to things like volcanoes, and there’s no carbon emissions involved so it isn’t going to have a cumulative environmental impact worth noting.
The problem I see with this method is extraction of the vaporized rock. The only direction the rock vapor can go is back up the multi kilometre borehole, cooling (via heat transfer with the borehole walls and the drill) as it goes. Once it cools enough it will become a liquid and start to drip back down the borehole and eventually solidify - back to relatively the same amount of rock. Heck, what's going to prevent the cooling rock vapor from freezing the drill / waveguide in place?
In addition, what's to prevent the vaporized rock from escaping back up the drill / waveguide? There's also the matter of making the drill / waveguide out of a material which won't melt when exposed to 3000+C rock vapor.
The beam is also being gradually absorbed by the waveguide, as the beam progresses down the pipe.
Many commenters asked about the vaporized rock condensing before exiting a long borehole. This seems to me to be a very good question. However, I am certain that I recently read about innovative small subsurface tunneling machines that utilize a similar ("laser-like") radiant heating or gas or plasma-based cutting processes in place of rotary cutting blades. I recall they tunneled rather slowly but continuously and, I think, sealed the tunnel wall as they progressed. An alternative method for underground pipes and conduits.
I have always dreamed of this happening , geothermal is so perfect a solution if it can be mastered.
I love how the animators don't know which direction a drill bit is supposed to turn. 0:38
Interesting tech.
Wonder what there plans for the following is
1. Vapor capture (prevention of harmful vapor escape)
2. Prediction of material, you realy dont want to energize combustable material and the deeper we go the harder it is to detect.
Also in the long run we are creating cooling spots as we siphon the thermal energy. This will change the currents of magma layereffect8ng volcanic and possibly techtonic activity....
Well looks like i know what im doing tthis weekend
Attenuation in a copper waveguide is, at absolute best, 0.1 dB/m. So by the time the hole is 1 km deep, the 1 MW in the surface will be only 10 kW at depth. 1 dB/m is more realistic at mm wavelengths, making the drilling power 1 kW. That's for a solid metal waveguide. I think this stands no chance.
The microwave generator could be put at the drill head supplied with a high voltage DC source which will have significantly less loss. The trick is miniaturizing the generator to fit in the borehole.
Lowest loss reported for Circular TE01 guide is reported as 1.25 db/KM by S.E.Miller bell systems journal 33:1209-1265 Nov. 1954
But this was C band not mm.
Even so 12.5 dB of attenuation delivers only 6% of the incident topside power at max 10km depth, so your point is still valid, even with very opmistic assumptions. Hmmm. I wonder which will melt faster, the rock or the waveguide business end? Lol!
What will be the mismatch reflection between several hundred ohm Z waveguide and plasma rock vapor? 5:1 vswr if they are lucky?
Pipedream!!!
@@Proud2bmodesta small 1Mwt generator:)
@@davidpacholok8935 Thank you for the interesting reference.
"for the next two million years, by which time fusion will be only five years away." YOU are my hero and you're not wrong! P.S. And we'll be getting closer to solid state batteries, too!
anybody else remember "fractured fairy tales " (rocky & bullwinkle) I think it should become the name of this genre of science news. they are presented as" too good to be true " claims that aren't developed or proven, yet are coming soon to a reality near you.
I heard about this company and this aproach some years ago. I am realy glad to hear they are making progress and that field testing will come soon. I was afraid something happened and they didn't manage to get funding but this is great news!
Very promising 👍🏻
Ya this is pretty exciting technology...the beauty of it is, is that they can use the thousands of existing former coal (and other) power plants that were shut down...so the infrastructure to get them producing power already exists. All they gotta do is dig a bunch of holes and the rest is a piece of cake...such an awesome idea. I'm still a fan of fusion energy, even if it's 5 yrs away....because I want them to put them in starships for exploring space.
First energy inovation ive seen in a long while that sounds like it will actual work. ❤
Your drills in the simulations seem to be rotating in the wrong direction. Maybe correcting that would help! 😊
@@RobDucharme None! My convention relates only to hand drills!
No. If you drilling in both directions you would back off the drillpipe and the screw joints. + 20years drilling experience.
@@hankchinaski4075 directional?
This is a terrible idea. We should look at Krypton as an example.
They gonna drill up to 10km deep. The radius if the Earth is 6400 km.
I've been following Quaise for a few; great coverage!
They built a geothermal energy plant near where I lived in the 80's when I was a kid.
The place is volcanically active and has several hot springs.
It was an environmental disaster due to all the crap that came up with the water.
I’d love to visit this location. I have so many ideas on how to improve this situation. I love being a reverse engineer, entrepreneur handyman and a project like this is right up my alley ❤❤❤
Wait I've already seen this movie... "The Core" 2003
I really like this idea, I designed a drill bit that was lot's of drill bits so that when blunt would expose a new drill bit but once you get to hot areas even a 100 meter drill bit's would only last a week or two. The smooth glass wall it leaves would also be great.
Yeah, harvesting the heat from the molten core that generates the magnetic field that protects our atmosphere from solar winds sounds like a great idea.
core is rather deeper (and a few thousand degrees hotter)
Rock is a _very_ good insulator and one of the most pernicious problems with virtually all existing Geothermal sites is that the extractable heat drops off faster than it can be replenished from below. The collectable area at the bottom needs to be LARGE in order to collect sustainable heat
The other problem at 10km is that the rocks start becoming plastic, so your hole may not be stable
This seems alot more complicated than just investing in ways to keep backup drillbits down near the drilling head and to send down replacements. Origami plus laproscopic (sp?) surgery is evidence of feasibility.
Another application for this would be in digging tunnels, where the ability to extract the vaporized rock could be more readily facilitated. In fact, if they can reduce the scale of this process, I could conceive it's efficacy in creating underground transportation tunnels, or even underground homes. They KEY problem I don't see resolve is how to extract the vaporized rock material to prevent it's re-deposition in undesired locations.
The way you explained the fusion technology's role in enhancing geothermal energy solutions is brilliant. It's exciting to see innovative approaches to sustainable energy being explored and explained so thoroughly.
At the start of the video, i was thinking, "surely its not friggin lasers"
Half way through, "...its friggin lasers."
I have been advocating this for so many years! I read up on it, and it is quite expensive (because in places, the heat is well down). BUT...compared to renewables (for which read 'unreliables') and nuclear, it isn't expensive at all! And although wind turbines use truly massive amounts of concrete and steel, and solar panels use toxic chemicals, deep geothermal uses water!
Subscribed because you recommend ground news. This means you can actually reason. ;)
Thank you so much for the amazing information you provided Dr. Miles. Really nice stuff from Iceland. 💯💥
It's not the temperature of the rock that matters it's the heat flux which is the same at every depth (within the drivable layers of the Earth).
Drilling deeper gives access to hotter rocks, but if the heat is extracted at a rate which exceeds the upward heat flux, every project is just a one-shot heat extraction for a few years until the rocks cool.
Unfortunately the upward heat flux is small in most places. In the UK the average is 0.038 W/m^2 and globally its less than 0.1 W/m^2 almost every where.
One-shot cooling of deep rocks may be worth doing, but there will be likely geological consequences of the stresses built up as a blob of deep rock is cooled, and contracts.
There are smart techniques for extracting heat from rocks in a genuinely sustainable manner but they involve lateral drilling rather deep drilling.
Best wishes
Michael
This is very exciting indeed. I will be eagerly awaiting the results of Quaise' test rigs.
"...in Iceland , geothermal activity is 2km deep ,while in the rest of the world it is 10~ 20 km."
New Zealand: "Hold my kiwi..."
If we suddenly converted the entire world's power usage to boreholes in the earth's crust. And given that the current year over year increase in power draw remains constant, how much energy would we extract from the earth's core in this time? What impact would that have?
0.1 percent in 2 million years of use. So basically nothing. The Earth's core is constantly heated by radioactive decay. We're kinda sitting on top of a giant fission reactor.
I think the heating of the earth is powered largely by radioactive decay, so I don't think it will be a major limitation. It will be similar to tidal energy gradually reducing the speed of the rotation of the planet. The sun getting hotter and engulfing the inner solar system in a couple billion years may be a more pressing issue.
What happens if you strike an oil reservoir with a microwave laser?
I was always fascinated by geothermal energy. We're basically (and literary) sitting on vast amounts of power.
Another source of free energy might be the sky. If you electrically connect the earth to a height of, say, 10km - you get a lot of energy - as the earth's atmosphere works like a giant generator.
All you have to do is tap into it.
I had filed preliminary patents on this in 2011. I have a whole bunch of tech from my 2004 startup Nisvara , I can optically transmit the heat to the surface.
Carlos is succinct and simple in his explanation-of geothermal. Obviously a great guy.
Thank you for the video Dr.
I strongly hope that my country (Italy) which has a great geothermal potential and a desperate need for energy will use such technology.
This is a real life version of that movie: The core (2003)
Some few years ago I wondered (not being an engineer) what would it take to "drill" by vaporizing rock. Nice to see that my wondering wasn't naive.
LOL. Actually LOL about "fusion will only be 5 years away". Good one!
It's all about baseload power. Geothermal is used in southern Utah in the US to balance out Solar and Wind in the same area. Dixie power delivers most of it's power from this method on the cheap.
the way the problem is described is that it's the changing of the drill bits that takes majority of the time and that's because you can't send a drill bit down when one is coming up
that's the problem of having only a one-way lane. if that's the case all you need is to be drilling two holes together. the bits of both exit from only one and enter from the other. this way by the time the bits wear out there's already 2 more bits waiting in one of the holes. is it really this simple..?
Apologies in advance for the potentially stupid questions:
1) drilling holes and over using heat from the earth core shouldn't speed up its cooling down?
2) if 1 is true. What the potential effect of cooling it down. I've seen way to many disaster movies that my head is absolutely full of BS. But I'm concerned about the magnetosphere and continental drift related effects.
3) Where is all the vaporized rock going? I bet that is not healthy to breath or release into the atmosphere.
Thanks in advanced to those more versed than me and again I apologize in advance for the potentially stupid questions.
My Cousin is working as an Undergrad in (Might sound strange as I guess it's a new field of research) "Geospatial UAP Studies". And he states they have instruments they use that track high flow routes of these UAP from the Ocean (water). He said his professor thinks if, hypothetically these UAP are deep in the Ocean or inside the Mantel they would most likely use Geothermal Energy to operate a small civilization (These are theories, but the UAP observations are actually real) I'm paraphrasing, as I never knew this was a thing. Never thought UFO were being taken seriously in Academia.
Two thoughts to consider: Would the Earth be leaking heat too fast for its own longevity, and could we risk a magma-hole event?
Excellent, very exciting: so they want to do a Godzilla! Been waiting to tap this energy since the '70s when our fab physics teacher introduced the idea to us.
Just a question. Won't the plasma condence higher up in the borewhole, totally clogging it. It's not magic. Where would the stone go?
This application on a micro scale for third world needs for freshwater is a game changer this would allow for crops where the water tables are considerably deeper and reduce world starvation Factor by an orders of magnitude
Just Have A Think had a video on a company from Canada. They have a proof of concept already built using drilling and fracking techniques. These can be drilled anywhere and last decades before heat is exhausted.
This technology once fully developed might be rather handy to use in space mining as well. After all supplying energy to an autonomous mining system in space is much less of a logistical challenge than providing spare parts for high-maintenance components 🤔
Reaserch that will come out of this, being able to drill that deep relatively easily, should be interesting as well.
I like the idea of fusion tech being put to actual use.
Kim- "Captain, they need to drill the deep hole" , Janeway - "Tuvok, stand by the phasers full power", Tuvok - "Captain, I must remind you that Fusion is coming in 5 years", Janeway - "There's coffee in that earth core"
One interesting thing is that the average power is limited by the rate of heat diffusion to your borehole. At which pointv they look like hydroelectricity, with a total amount of energy you can take out per year, but it doesn't matter when you take the heat out. it may make sense to use them as peaker plants to fill in the gaps of wind and solar
This is truly game changing. Being energy independent anywhere in the world would prevent energy conflict and exploitation globally.
Petrovoltaics & Piezoelectric Effect are what Thomas Townsend Brown studied while building his ionocraft disc drones. Crazy how that's bleeding edge tech 80yrs later.
Proof of work will push this technology forward for everyone
Some important questions that need to be asked and answered.
1. Should we tap into this energy source?
Just because we may be able to do something, doesn't mean we should.
2. What are the potential negative ramifications of extracting and utilizing geothermal energy from the Earth's core?
3. Would potentially harmful gasses and/or other agents be released into our atmosphere?
4. Could doing this potentially physically/structurally and/or chemically destabilize the Earth's core?
Instead of heat, if you could significantly cool the rock locally the thermal stress maybe enough to break the rock in a tensile direction, which is a lot easier than compression. Just need to move the heat around, not bring more with you, although that is terribly difficult over a very short time scale.
Question: why do we need to drill so deep? Why not drill less and use a combined-cycle plant on the surface? That way, you can generate electricity with lower temperatures.
IT all sounds good on the surface. Issue is we're already having issues in parts of the world where we suck out too much water from underground causing lots of issues. If they modified this approach to only suck out heat and not heat and water then we'd have us a solid winner if they could pull it off.
How about using acoustic cavitation? The "Star in a jar" technique to break the rock. Rocks have water inside them. No need to wait for fusion.
Laymen here. "By which time fusion energy will be five years away".
As a laymen of this type of science.
Why would we, even if they are very small in diameter, create so many holes in the direction of earths core?
Couldn't we just focus on areas with stable volcanoes? Though that energy wouldn't be available everywhere.
Talk about warming the atmosphere. If there’s no way to condense it back down, cool or utilize the water then are you not pumping an immense amount of heat into the atmosphere? Are the oceans not rising? What is the effect of pumping even more water into the atmosphere?
They seem to gloss over the glaring issue of rock vapor removal. If it's expected to naturally waft upward out of the bore hole, they are likely going to be disappointed by the higher parts of the bore hole acting as a heat sink to cool and solidify the rock.
Or, it will end up in a liquid form while trying to pump it out. So then maybe they keep it heated...sounds like an incredible amount of additional energy.
So then they'll probably just have to occasionally stop to clear out solidified rock. Maybe that's easier than pulling up and changing drill bits, idk.
The other major question I have is--what is the form of the wave guide? Perhaps this would be a good first application of a plasma filament wave guide.
I figured out how to use much lower temperature and therefore able to tap geothermal without going anywhere near so deep. In fact, it can draw power from temperatures so low that it wouldn’t even boil water.
This is absolutely fantastic.
This is just like the Krell energy production in Forbidden Planet! Fantastic!
This could have applications in Mars colonization where wind isn't available and Solar is much reduced. Mars also has a hot interior, the biggest issue would be water use.
Once upon a time a civilization pursued endless power.. history always repeats itself.
seems like the big 'issue' to deal with will be the re-deposition of the rock material onto the walls of the over-head borehole and laser guide. Interested in how they mitigate this issue without massive shut down times, re-boring the holes, etc.
I've been on the edge of my seat for this technology. I understand that we need the multiple solutions aproach, but i can't shake the idea that this is a silver bullet aproach to clean energy, and every nation worldwide should be financing this as much as they do with fusion. Honestly this seems even more feasible and realistic.
I'm waiting patiently for 2 half 2024 to see news on their progress!
I'm sceptical of the approaches involving fracking on economic grounds. Too many things that can go wrong or lose efficiency prematurely.
If you have a cheap way to drill, it means the risk of holes failing is spread
why not use traditional to start the hole while cost effective then switch.
Great question. That's their plan. 1-3km conventionally, then switching to microwaves