This Fusion Tech is Solving the Geothermal Energy Problem
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ก.ค. 2024
- Can a fusion technology give us access to infinite geothermal energy?
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I had the opportunity to talk to Carlos Araque, CEO of Quaise Energy, a company aiming to take their breakthrough approach to reliably reach geothermal from any city in the world.
Find out more about Quaise here: www.quaise.energy/
#physics #science #geothermal #energycrisis
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Chapters:
00:00 The Challenges With Drilling For Geothermal energy
2:38 How Does Geothermal Energy Work?
5:19 Ad Read
6:27 Can A Fusion Technology Help Us Dig Deeper?
11:08 How Feasible Is Fusion Drilling?
13:07 What Are The Risks Of Drilling For Geothermal Energy?
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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.
@@user-tz3yx8dr1j The irony 😆
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.
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.
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
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
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"
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."
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.
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.
From my career experience (wellsite geologist) I can say that one of the most important concerns, while drilling a hole, is to (over)balance fluid pressures otherwise there's a high probability of pressure 'blow out' / explosion. The principle method is to use a sufficiently dense drilling/circulating fluid creating a fluid-column pressure sufficient to hold back formation fluid pressures
Do you foresee these fluids making the microwave drilling insurmountable?
As a geothermal Wellsite Geologist, with experience of all the challenges, I'm saying that you're very right. Other challenges include high permeability water filled fractures that swamp the beam with more fluid than it can handle/vaporize
The difference being that this geothermal well they will need to drill where there are NO oil or gasformations present. So at worst case you may get some water blowout. On the other hand, fluid or air has to be pumped down the hole to transport material to the surface. Maybe pump air at high pressure trough the waveguide (inner pipe), and fluid around the wave guide at lower pressure (between the inner and outer pipe). At the drill tip the air will blow the fluid away from the beam
@@esbrasill It’s obvious that a 2 stage program would work best. Use a normal drilling program with casing and cement to protect all the upper zones down to approximately 20,000 ft (6.1 kilometers) then switch to the microwave/laser process to finish the well. The blowout problem is a definite issue. I’d hate to be the guy working the floor when super heated steam comes screaming at my face. 😮
@@TraderDan58 100% agree, but once laser drilling is started you still need mud or some fluid to remove the vaporized rock (i assume this condenses as glass) and to cool the drill pipe. But on the other hand i suppose a clean waveguide is needed all the way up to the bottom of the hole. that's why i proposed the double walled drill pipe to transport air AND fluid to the bottom all at once, The mixture of air+fluid+dirt will the travel up around the outside of the drill pipe, inside the casings
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.
This is the best description of Quaise's process that I've ever heard. Thanks Dr. Ben!
Yea cheers doka ya brill.
One form of geothermal not mentioned is mine water geothermal. No need for fracking when you can use the extensive mined out areas already present. Its much shallower, much cooler, but obviously has huge volumes to work with. Its already in operation in England, with more sites being set up.
I also wonder if this kind of rock vaporising technology could be given a significant boost by starting in a deep mine, or could even be complimentary to mine water geothermal as a part of the cost cutting with existing infrastructure plans.
👍
Funny that, I was thinking exactly the same about mines in the UK.
It's low enthalpy energy and only really useful for space heating, but that's not to say it isn't still useful. If you've got a greenhouse, factory or office space that needs heating, it's worth having.
Mossop3135 are you saying that you can't use a turbine ? Because you can
@@hawkbartril3016 If you want to really get every last joule out of it you could use a stirling engine, but the fact of the matter is that low enthalpy heat isn't that great for generating electricity.
I saw this years ago. Glad they managed to develop it further
Were you on this world ?
@@hawkbartril3016 He from outer space
Awesome video! Very exited about this prospect
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.
Everybody's gangsta until they awake a Balrog.
Or Cthulhu
We’re digging too deep and too greedily
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
I've been following Quaise for a few; great coverage!
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.
Very promising 👍🏻
This is very exciting indeed. I will be eagerly awaiting the results of Quaise' test rigs.
You seem much more passionate than the PhD holders I’ve met in the past. Kudos to keeping the love of science alive.
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.😂
What happens during an earthquake? Isn’t that deep enough that the shifting layers would sheer and ruin the hole?
If you are on a subduction zone between 2 plates then maybe... But if you are in the middle of a plate like most of the world is, then this wouldn't be in the top 10 of potential issues.
Part of the idea behind this is the faster drill times and cheaper costs to allow you to drill a 2nd hole in a few months if a hole is ruined.
Also, once the hole is in use, it is going to be full of pipe and material, so it isn't like it is creating a void that will just collapse on itself without major issues or forces involved.
Great video, thanks.
This is fantastic, and I love it, and want to see lots of it all around the world.
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.
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
This was very compelling
Very interesting, I'll be keeping an eye on this technology.
I feel like the engineering challenges with this approach are less epic than space solar or nuclear fusion. We dig big holes all the time - I imagine setting up a tunnel boring machine on a steep incline and getting 8-9km down (over maybe 50km) without too much issue by having the MASER heads instead of diamond heads , and then setting up a series of galleries down deep with traditional drill and blast, then do the last few km of vertical wells to the geothermal reservoirs with the vertical drill techniques. We can borrow all the smart engineers who built the LHA infrastructure.
Something tells me that "traditional" is the last word that would apply when you are 10-20km below the surface.
Your proposed 50 km tunnel would be among the world's 30 longest tunnels, while also reaching depths well beyond what a TBM is normally designed for. As far as I know, there's no precedence of getting a person deeper than 4 km underground, yet you seem to propose crewed machines operating "8-9 km down". You think it is easy because you don't understand how difficult it is.
@@BlurbFish You're right, I don't fully understand how difficult it is. If you have some experience, what would be the challenges?
Given we've got a number of mines in the 3-4km deep range, my thoughts were that downwards and sideways bearing pressure at 4 km is going to be similar to that at 10km, and other challenges like logistics are already solved. Most deep holes are mines, and I was guessing that all of the engineering problems are already solved, but the reason we don't have deeper holes is there is currently no point in spending the money due to ore grades not being up to par.
@@mikelastname The problems with your proposal are the same as those described in this video, and then further amplified by factors inherent to your proposal. You want to drill at a slant instead of vertically downwards, which means overall more km worth of digging in the difficult depth. You need to have crew for the TBM (and the machinery you set up later for the many galleries) at a depth where the temperature is killing. The diameter of a TBM bore hole is enormous compared to that of a bore well, which means more material to remove and higher demands for structural support - the latter becomes more and more challenging to deal with as you go deeper.
Again, going deeper becomes more difficult the deeper you are. You propose to get people down to 8 km, even though 4 km has not been achieved.
@@BlurbFish Thanks, yeah, temperature sure sounds extreme at those depths. I get that widescale geothermal is a very difficult proposition, but putting my dumb ideas aside, for blue sky thinking, I feel like the _engineering_ challenges for this would be less than for say, nuclear fusion where after 50 years of effort, we are a lot further behind where we are with mining engineering.
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.
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 ❤❤❤
Brilliant recycling of old plants that's efficient. It seems like a vacuum would help on the top as a vaporized rock outlet. I'm not sure if the waves will scatter at as depth increases but if so, then a lining can be placed on the side of the walls (e.g. at a max average bore width). I see the cause for the tests and am excited to hear the results! Thank you for the informative video.
Wait I've already seen this movie... "The Core" 2003
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.
Subscribed because you recommend ground news. This means you can actually reason. ;)
Wery important news, thank you.
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?
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.
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.
Looks like a hella space weapon.
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.
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
Carlos is succinct and simple in his explanation-of geothermal. Obviously a great guy.
While we wait for space-based solar power, geothermal is basically the only viable alternative to nuclear as our major baseload power if we want to rid ourselves of carbon emissions. I know you think current nuclear is too expensive, but I think you've missed that much of the cost comes from disproportional safety demands compared to much more damaging power plants, and that nuclear provides services to the grid that supposedly cheap wind and solar can't do with current technology.
Hydro.
Pumped hydro or compressed air plus wind plus solar.
V2G plus a mixed renewable grid.
Much of the cost of nuclear comes from that it's just a bad business model, by comparison, except for medical isotopes, military use, and metrology applications.
@@bartroberts1514pumped hydro requires specific geology and requires flooding huge tracts of land
@@bartroberts1514 Costs don't exist in a vacuum. Circumstances including regulation, location, existing infrastructure, expertise and all kinds of things have a great influence.
Hydro has many advantages, including being more flexible than your standard nuclear power plant. On the other hand rivers are in limited supply, and hydro power plants tend to be tremendously more environmentally destructive than nuclear power plants. Depending on what value you put on nature, hydro may be a great option in some locations.
I'm sure pumped hydro can make sense on some locations where suitable facilities just need some addition for it to work, but on the scale that we need to increase our electricity production in the upcoming decades I have a hard time believing that it will make sense compared to nuclear in general, especially since nuclear already, even with all the penalizing rules, is competitive on a longer time scale. (See the Illinois EnergyProf channel for information about the economics of nuclear.)
If we can make this kind of geothermal work, it could potentially be a serious contender though. I assume even land usage could be similar to the small demands of nuclear.
@@descai10 Water management is made more and more necessary by shifting precipitation patterns resulting from climate change due to fossil emissions.
Pumped hydro as a hybrid use for such reservoirs, irrigation systems, erosion controls, flood prevention and the like is a good way to defray these costs incurred because fossil trade pushed climate disruption up smokestacks and through tailpipes to our detriment.
@@beardmonster8051 Rivers are in renewable supply, shifting and meandering over the decades. Precipitation pattern changes due fossil emissions-caused global warming require new hydrology management, and create new opportunity to tap hydro power at all scales.
Incidentally, the US Army Corps of Engineers estimated only 40% of America's water power to be tapped, as of the 1990's.
Meanwhile, over 80% of plausible nuclear reactor and storage sites are full, now. It's not easy to find tectonically stable (recall Fukushima), water-stable, geopolitically stable (Zaporizhzhia?), accessible place to plonk down a reactor. And those SMNR's? A nightmare more like the Soviet era RTG fiasco than their promoters admit.
I've seen the exuberant claims of Illinois Energy Prof, and countless others. I've also seen what they gloss over and ignore, and cannot reconcile their enthusiasm with prudence and good judgment from an OHS perspective. Those regulations aren't cavalier restrictions put in by red-tape loving naysayers; they're what keep us from repeating mistakes of the past, where people are fine after exposure, until their jaw falls off. (Actual, true event.)
Nuclear land demands aren't small. Solar can go on rooftops or as agrisolar in farm fields improving crop conditions. Wind shares land with cattle advantageously to both, and protects coastlines from erosion. Geothermal can fit in under former coal facilities.
Nuclear requires a large campus and an eternity of surveillance.
They drilled a couple 6-8 km holes in Finland near the capital and it turned out to be very difficult and the water didn't properly move between the boreholes. They were aiming for 40 MW of thermal power to get hot water for district heating but in the end they might have gotten a few megawatts out and decided it wasn't economically viable. At first they used pneumatic drilling but got stuck at ~4 km and then they switched to hydraulic drilling to get to the end. Very slow, very expensive and not reliable at all.
New tech uses plasma. It works even better with hotter rocks, so problems like you mentioned could be overcome.
I always were wondering why didnt we use geothermal energy more. Now I understand better. Thanks for the explanation.
First energy inovation ive seen in a long while that sounds like it will actual work. ❤
very cool, now to figure out all the ways this will end badly for us in the long run...
Yep, cheap energy? Energy companies will definitely find a way to make it expensive for consumers or never getting off the ground globally
energy companies being scum is i think a smaller worry . what about extracting heat more and more and slowly turn the magma cool slowly hardening the crust . this could damage the Plates movement . Hell this could weaken the magnetic field that protects us from cosmic radiation.
What else ? who knows but its certainly not a long term solution without damage
For *everything* in the universe, the question is not "Will it turn to dust?" But "How is it going to turn into dust?" 💀
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 is just like the Krell energy production in Forbidden Planet! Fantastic!
Very cool. This has pluses all over it. Would be a dream come true. It really is.
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.
Sounds great!
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.
This is so cool!!!
Hot would be better
yes, technically it would be global cooling...
I did some analysis of Ice Cube and some annular vertical two phase flow analysis. My gut feeling is that heat losses will consume the energy so the efficiency will be in the lower single digit or less.
Ice Cube similarly drilled about 80 holes with hot water 2 km into the South Pole ice cap to build a Neutron Telescope. A 10 cm stream of hot water was used to make about a 61 cm diameter hole. Once the hole was drilled they had about a day to install the a string of glass spheres about 46 cm diameter before the hole diameter reduced down from freezing water.
As seen the hole diameter is much bigger then the beam in the pictures shown for shallow holes, like Ice Cube. Just like the above stream of water, the rock vapor will turn to a liquid and then a solid slowly to make the glass like surface at a diameter bigger then the beam. And liquid or vapor rock entering the beam will be returned to vapor consuming energy, but maintaining a diameter bigger then the beam. The heat loss in the rubber hose of the hot water in the hose to the OD of the hose is the same effect.
I assume the beam is in resonance like a lazar else it is like a flash light that expands at a fixed angle, a cone, useless. And even a lazar has a very very shallow cone angle. This is where the mirror for that wave length comes in to play. Wave guide is metal for this wave length. Rock isn't metal so the property of the glassy rock will change with the rock and is an unknown. The vapor rock is the media in the beam itself, also an unknown spreading effect. And the heat loss conducting the heat from the ID of the hole into the infinite heat sink, an other unknow. I assume to get the present funding all of these losses and effect were modelled. The latter conduction loss has an exact solution, the assumption are the problem with this analysis. The testing goal is to put numbers on the assumptions.
So let us assume the hole is drilled. No mention of how water is sent down the hole and vapor comes out. I assume annular flow of which you can find dozens of analysis for vertical annular flow where the fluid is flowing opposite the vapor. Far fewer with heat transfer is occurring to create the vapor or condense the vapor. My guess in doing some of this analysis decades ago is that this doesn't work for such a long hole.
That leave the next approach of meeting two holes at the bottom and pumping under pressure liquid down and up with the vapor made in the plant directly or by a heat exchanger. The heat loss to the infinite rock around the is likely for this depth is going to absorb the heat slowly heating the rock nearer the surface of the hole with as diameter increases a lower temperature rise but more area. The conductivity of the rock has to be low enough to make losses low which means at the bottom the reverse is happening to heat the water. My guess is that a very deep large diameter mechanically drilled hole will be needed to provide the insulation to reduce losses for the hot water hole. And the diameter of the drill may also have to increase to increase the ratio of area to perimeter.
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.
Looks super good....................
great ideas
That fusion joke was great!!! I literally LOL!!!😅
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
I have always dreamed of this happening , geothermal is so perfect a solution if it can be mastered.
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.
Reaserch that will come out of this, being able to drill that deep relatively easily, should be interesting as well.
How about a follow up to this that expands on how the working fluid is shuttled around & used.
Last time Ive heard about this project about 2 years ago and I was wandering how are they doing. Because this is the ultimate infinite energy source that will change the world more than the AI.
I believe there was a technology developed in the early 1980's using electrically heated tungsten thermal drill bits to melt thru soil and rock, creating rock-glass borehole linings. Oddly the initial development was funded by the US Interior Parks Dept . The Parks Dept needed to place modern utility conduit runs thru foundation rock walls at old landmark Parks Dept buildings. Their project was successful serving that use case. Somebody realized along the way the same tungsten bore bit might be employed to drill efficiently thru hot rock which as this video points out is very difficult and expensive.
LOL. Actually LOL about "fusion will only be 5 years away". Good one!
I'm sure they still have many problems to solve, but this has some promise for supplying the kind of energy at levels we imagine a future world needs.
the short-wave laser for drilling was researched 3 years ago at MIT and they had a PoC
They had a person of color? Wow
The drilling method reminds me of the movie the core where they go to the center of the Earth to restart the rotation of the Earth
The base load aspect of this is the most compelling thing about geothermal...
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.
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!
This video shocked me because I heard about this laser drilling technology years ago and I thought it was already almost completed.
I actually worked in drilling, albeit it being for a short time. 100m a day is possible if it is the upper 1-2km of rock, and if it is sediment. then drilling speed significantly slow down, as the material gets harder.
but they always drill in some sort of sedimentary rock. not igneous rock.
igneous rock is much harder and more complicated to drill in.
but that plasma method is actually capable of drilling in that environment. that's basically the reason why the kola bore hole did take so long. it was so hot and it was hard rock, not some sediment.
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.
@DrBenMiles nice set of ideas and presentation. But remind me where the fusion is... As I understand it there are accelerated electrons making microwaves to heat rocks to a plasma.
What about bringing in more drill bits and finding a way to mechanically rotate/switch between them?
Before there were Lasers, there was the Maser - Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission.. It produced a collimated beam of microwaves. It sounds like the Gyrotron is similar, though not as collimated, but far more powerful. BTW, the magnetron in a regular microwave oven is simpler, uses a cold cathode, and is much less powerful.
This is genuinely interesting, and it really seems like a viable clean energy source if this technology is capable of taping into it, and most importantly, IF it doesn’t bring any dangerous and unforeseen consequences in it comercial use, which it very well could though, we don’t know what could happen if we start indiscriminately syphoning energy from the Earth, Energy that powers our very world and everything that makes it work. It’s crucial that they can definitively prove that this process will not cause any significant harm to the Earth, otherwise it is just as unviable as fossil fuel, just for different reasons. But being positive, this does have a lot of potential.
I hope we can advance our drilling technology so we can utilize geothermal energy. Greenland and Iceland utilize it and it's so helpful. It would be game changing.
Hope they will make it :)
Petrovoltaics & Piezoelectric Effect are what Thomas Townsend Brown studied while building his ionocraft disc drones. Crazy how that's bleeding edge tech 80yrs later.
Respect to roughnecks what’s really not talked about is how dangerous it would be and the chances of accidents happening if try to dig a whole that deep
Yay with this tech we might be able to drill deeper for oil and gas that was previously too expensive, possibly making oil and gas cheaper :):):) what a win-win!
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!
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
Why do the animated drill bits rotate in the wrong direction? Still great content regardless
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.
0:15 Great opening joke!!! LOL
Hi Ben, great video. Just a small note: at 10:20, could you quote the oil drill rate in m/h and the Lazor system in cm/s? It would be great if you kept the time units the same so they are easier to compare.
So here it's 100m/h vs 3.6 m/h, right?