THE PROMISING FUTURE OF GEOTHERMAL ENERGY

Earlier this month I posted on THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS FRACTURING.  Some of my articles draw a lot of attention, and this is one of them that did.  Last week I noticed that Rinaldo Brutoco of the World Business Academy wrote on A Reason for Hope:  On Conscience and Integrity.  To quote his first paragraph:

In the political swamp that has ensnared our democratic republic a glimmer of something we haven’t seen for almost six years is on the horizon: the emergence of a fissure in the Republican party, which has lately been in the grips of Mr. Trump’s remarkably single-handed control as it morphed into the Cult of Trump. Finally, over 160 present and former leaders of the Republican party have said “Enough!” 

Brutoco never went into detail on who the 160 were.  However, more and more Republicans are shifting away from Donald Trump.

Today is Wednesday, and I usually focus on a scientific/technological topic.  I was one of the reservoir engineers for the Hawaii Geothermal Project.  Almost half a century ago we began to investigate if geothermal energy had any potential for Hawaii.  We drilled down 1.2 miles in Puna and struck the hottest well in the world at 676 F.  Today, one of the Italian wells holds this record.  We built a 3MW power plant, which operated at 95% availability from 1981-1989, supplying electricity to the Big Island of Hawaii for a couple thousand households, with the waste effluent used as input to develop new industries at Noi'i O Puna.

I subsequently submitted a proposal to tap the lava lake of Kilauea Iki, which erupted in 1959 and sent out fountains exceeding 1000 feet, to produce a different kind of geothermal energy.  I was not successful, but have closely followed the efforts of Jeffrey Tester at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who is now at Cornell.  

What about drilling down three miles almost anywhere to access the heat of the Earth?  He says: It's not a question of whether it's there--it is and it's significant.  It's a question of getting it out of the ground economically.

Of course, this future technology brings some risk.  Quoting further:

In the U.S., Tester envisions a gradual switch to district heating by first transforming military bases, hospitals, schools, universities, and state and federal government complexes with public and private funding. One potential problem, though rare, is that deep drilling and fracking are known to induce seismicity and cause earthquakes. The famous example is an enhanced geothermal system drilled in Pohang, South Korea in 2017. Injecting fluid at high pressure to fracture the hot geology to release heat caused a 5.4-magnitude earthquake — the strongest in the area’s recent history — that injured 135 people and caused nearly $300 million in damage. “There certainly is seismicity with anything you do underground,” said Tester. “Controlling that and monitoring that is usually what is done in any subsurface injection. I don’t see it as the biggest challenge facing geothermal… The biggest challenge is productivity. Insuring that these connected systems between injection wells and production wells produce enough fluid to justify the economic investment to drill to that sort of depth.”

About conventional geothermal power, here are the top 16 countries producing and using it.

	Geothermal electricity production, 2010		Geothermal direct use, 2009
	GWh/year		GWh/year
United States	16,603	China	20,932
Philippines	10,311	United States	15,710
Indonesia	9,600	Sweden	12,585
Mexico	7,047	Turkey	10,247
Italy	5,520	Japan	7,139
Iceland	4,597	Norway	7,001
Japan	3,064	France	3,592
Kenya	1,430	Germany	3,546
El Salvador	1,422	Netherlands	2,972
Costa Rica	1,131	Italy	2,762
Turkey	490	Hungary	2,713
Papua New Guinea	450	New Zealand	2,654
Russia	441	Canada	2,465
Nicaragua	310	Finland	2,325
Guatemala	289	Switzerland	2,143

Sources: Data on electricity from Bertani (2010) and on direct use from Lund et al. (2010).
Notes: GWh/year = gigawatt hours per year.

Few even recognize that the U.S. has long been the largest producer of geothermal power, now at 3700 MW, supplying a million homes with electricity.  One huge advantage of geo-power is that it is baseload.  The sun comes and goes, and so does our winds.  Tester (left) believes that geo-methods could increase our lead production by a factor of 26 by 2020.  Plus, there is the matter of geothermal heat pumps for warming.  The Biden administration has committed $150 million to the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) project in Utah.

Here is a graph showing the highest percentage share of geothermal energy for electricity in these countries:

I might add that 99% of Iceland's electricity is produced from renewable sources, 30% of which is geothermal.   Another interesting story is that President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador has linked geothermal electricity in his quest to mine crypto-currency.  How?  Read this.

So how promising is geothermal energy?  First, remember that it is baseload, unlike solar and wind energies, which come and go depending on time of day and weather.  A 2019 U.S. Department of Energy report indicates that the current production can be increased 26-fold by 2050 to provide 8.5% of the U.S. electricity, plus direct heat for other applications.

Returning to the situation in Hawaii, the Puna eruption nearly decimated the geopower plant there, but luckily, much of the surface equipment was untouched.  Today we are producing 38 MW, with a probable reserves on the Big Island and Maui around 1000 MW.  Geothermal energy is very competitive with other sources, and in some analyses was equal or lower than natural gas electricity production, and also below wind farms.  A levelized cost of 6 cents/kWh is about average.

Considering the rest of the world, being really ambitious, geothermal energy can provide enough energy for humanity for a long time to come.   Consider this:

• 
  The molten core of our planet 4000 miles deep is as hot as the surface of the sun at 10,800 F.
• Thus above subtitle:  the Sun benBth Our Feet.
• Better yet, the heat is continuously replenished by the decay of naturally occurring radioactive elements at a flow rate of roughly 30 terawatts, almost double all human energy consumption.
• This process will continue for a few billion more years.

• 
  The ARPA-E AltaRock Energy estimates that just 0.1% of this heat could supply all of humanity's needs for 2 million years.
• All that is necessary is to tap this resource located a few miles from the surface.  Here is the U.S. potential 6 miles down:

•  The cost of Super Hot geothermal energy could well be cheaper than wind energy, fossil fuels or nuclear power:

• 
  Of course, getting down to 6 mile depths will be very challenging and there is uncertainty about the economics.  But it was only in 1954 that Bell Labs demonstrated the first practical silicon solar cell.  It took us almost 70 years to get us to where rooftops now provide "cheap" electricity.  Nothing wrong with speculating about the future of hot-dry rock geoenergy.

-