(Via CleanTechnica)
First Magma-Enhanced Geothermal System In The World Developed In Iceland (via Clean Technica)
The first “magma-enhanced” geothermal system in the world — the IDDP-1 well at Krafla — has proven to be a great success, based on the first scientific reports on the project, which are now starting to be released. The well, which penetrated…
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Magma underlies the crust everywhere. Does anyone know where to find studies that assess the potential for this source of energy, problems with its development, and how much of the world’s energy needs it could realistically replace?
I think it isn’t under everywhere -or even under most where. And usually it is in the form of partial melts. Of course drilling gets almost exponentially more expensive as you go deeper, so only the first few kilometers of the crust are practical.
Hey, with temperatures that hot, maybe they could pump all their sewage down into the magma where it can be vaporized and recycled as steam… (OK, I’m partially kidding, but they could probably do it with sea water…)
When we humans start with the geo-engineering on a big or interesting scale, shouldn’t there be a presumption that we need to be dang sure that what our profit-driven, consumptive oligarchs who would drive such practices get behind will not, like, really screw up the planet we have to live on even worse? Fracking and geothermal at the present scale already produce earthquakes that produce damage to the “built environment” where humans live, and increased methane release. Consumptive geologists and engineers with grant and other money and naming rights in mind, and fearless discounting of caveats and externalities, may want the rest of us to believe that “Earth” is one relatively static monad that can be bled of energy and minerals and petroleum and the beasts of the forest and fish in the sea without significant consequence. And what could possibly go wrong with drilling a hole through the Earth’s crust into all that profitable magma, and then injecting stuff down the hole? Great for the Calvinist capitalist mentality, obviously wrong “on the ground,” for those who have to live with the consequences that our lords and masters mostly escape…