Guest essay by Eric Worrall
For a long time Geothermal energy has been an expensive joke, even for people who claim solar and wind power is viable. History is littered with Geothermal projects which failed to live up to their early promise, such as the Tim Flannery inspired Cooper Basin project, which obliterated at least $90 million in government grant money before the project was abandoned.
But there are some hints that COP25 might include an attempt to breath new government money into this failed renewable energy technology.
From Chile, posted in April this year;
Chile and the role of Geothermal – preparing for the COP25 climate talks
Alexander Richter 30 Apr 2019
Diego Morata, Director of the Center of Excellence in Geothermal Energy of the Andes of Chile (CEGA), highlights the potential role of geothermal in the goal of cleaning the energy matrix of fossil fuels and the opportunity presented in the COP 25 climate talks to be hosted in Santiago de Chile, December 2-13, 2019.
In December 2019, Chile will be hosting the COP25 climate talks in Santiago. This provides a unique opportunity for the country and the geothermal sector to highlight the role it could play in the future energy mix of Chile.
Diego Morata, Director of the Center of Excellence in Geothermal Energy of the Andes of Chile, presents an interesting analysis about the role of geothermal in the goal of cleaning the energy matrix of fossil fuels Chile and the opportunity presented in the Convention United Nations Framework on Climate Change No. 25, which will be held in Santiago de Chile from December 2 to 13, 2019 (see the government communication in this link)
We share a copy of what was raised by Diego Morata in a column published in the newspaper El Mostrador, and was published by our sister publication, PiensaGeotermia.
“There is a big difference between stopping a change and curbing a disaster. The first can afford long solution times, the second requires decisive actions. During the last session of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP), the most powerful and mediatic statement warned us of the urgency: “You only talk about going ahead with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess , even when the only sensible thing they can do is put on the emergency brake “, the speech came from a teenage activist, the Swedish Greta Thumberg, and her photos and words are the memories that last the most today, not only because of the novelty of the interlocutor, but because their declarations shine an awkward truth: that the authorities still do not manage to take concrete agreements to reduce the increase of the temperature of the planet. What can Chile contribute to this scenario full of wilful declarations and little action now that we will host the next COP in December?
During the next COP 25 we will be the focus of global attention on climate change. What are we going to tell Greta? It is postulated that an increase of 2ºC in the temperature of the planet could bring serious consequences (irreversible?) For humanity. Climate change is a scientifically proven reality, the temperature of the Earth has been increasing progressively, and a large part of the scientific community accepts that we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological time where the effect of man in Earth’s climate These are the times in which Greta will grow up, who reminds us that “you say that you love your children, but they are robbing you of your future”.
Given this pessimistic scenario, Chile has good news to contribute. Our country has been recognized internationally as an example in the promotion and development of renewable energies, the development of solar energy positions it as the third national energy source. We must applaud this fact and continue on that path, deeper, deeper, underground. As well as the Sun, we are fortunate to have another inexhaustible renewable energy under our feet, geothermal energy, which would allow us to free our matrix of fossil fuels. We have already demonstrated as a country that geothermal electricity can be generated. ”
Source: statement sent via email by Diego Morata for publication via PiensaGeotermia – the Spanish language platform of ThinkGeoEnergy
http://www.thinkgeoenergy.com/chile-and-the-role-of-geothermal-preparing-for-the-cop25-climate-talks/
The allure of Geothermal energy is a promise of relief from the fatal intermittency which plagues wind and solar. All it would take is a magical breakthrough to make geothermal economically viable – and a claimed breakthrough has miraculously appeared, just in time for COP25.
Tech Breakthrough Could Spark A Geothermal Energy Boom
PUBLISHER Oilprice.com PUBLISHED NOV 20, 2019 8:39AM EST
Geothermal energy is often billed as one of “the cleanest energy sources” –and with good reason. It’s carbon-free, renewable, and efficient. Even those stoic anti-hyperbolists over at the United States Department of Energy sing its praises, saying, “this vital, clean energy resource supplies renewable power around the clock and emits little or no greenhouse gases — all while requiring a small environmental footprint to develop.”
While geothermal is one of the superheroes of clean energy production, however, it still has a lot of room for improvement. First and foremost, it needs to be massively scaled up in order to have any real environmental impact or significant market share compared to where it stands now, a speck in the giant shadow of fossil fuels. What’s more, there are significant barriers and high costs to the initial phases of exploration and infrastructure.
…
Luckily, there has recently been an important breakthrough in the field of geothermal energy exploration and finding those geothermal hotspots (so to speak) thanks to a team of research scientists from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, based in Potsdam. The scientists’ findings, published this month in a Scientific Reports journal article titled “Geothermal sweetspots identified in a volcanic lake integrating bathymetry and fluid chemistry,” have solved the issue of finding underwater drilling sites by identifying a method that allows the mapping of submerged geological structures in order to determine inflow information essential for developing geothermal energy production.
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Read more: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/tech-breakthrough-could-spark-a-geothermal-energy-boom-2019-11-20
If entrepreneurs and their backers want to defy the odds, take risks, and reap rewards if their investments pay off, I don’t think any of us have a problem with that.
But if I am right, I have a funny feeling the COP25 organizers will be seeking lots of government support for their revolutionary idea. Green energy projects all seem to require large infusions of government money, not because they are economically unviable of course, but it is critically important to get things moving quickly because of the urgency of our global climate crisis.
And if some of the projects don’t work out, well who cares about money? The future of the world is in the balance!
I happen to travel to Iceland quite a bit and they make use of geothermal in a very sensible way that we could take advantage of here in California in certain areas. For example, heat and hot water are practically free in Iceland because everyone heats with steam from hydrothermal sources. Towns in California such as Bishop, Benton and Mammoth Lakes could probably get all the free heat they can use from available underground hot water. Some of the hot springs in those areas are hot enough to instantly kill anyone unlucky enough to fall into one. I don’t know what the energy consumption is for heating and hot water in Mammoth Lakes and Bishop but I am willing to bet it is a considerable amount.
For example, in Reykjavik there are great insulated pipelines that travel for miles to bring hot water in from the surrounding area into the city where it is distributed to homes. The raw water can go directly to radiators (just about every place I have seen in Iceland also has steam heated towel racks in the bathroom!) or can go to heat exchangers for hot water for domestic use (though some places use the raw water for bathing if one doesn’t mind a bit of a sulfur smell). One just needs to moderate the pH to prevent corrosion and such.
See:
https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/aearth.html
Tom Swift and His Atomic Blaster:
It’s a story from the early 1950’s that anticipates drilling down to basically a mantle
plume (before such things were known) using something similar to a modern
plasma drill.
In the 1950s/60’s the author(s) heavily relied on our ability to suspend our disbelief…
Much as today’s patent-applied-for grant chasers expect.
Wow. That web page looks like it was designed in the 50s/60s.
Or towns could install small modular reactors and have a steam utility to provide heat to all the homes in the community in addition to electricity.
This geothermal project is taking place almost in my backyard:
https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/news/calgary-company-testing-new-geothermal-technology-at-central-alberta-site/
Using abandoned oil wells and modern drilling techniques. Lots of private capital involved, and government funds as well.
There are two basic categories of geothermal: utility scale and home scale. I’m going to talk about home scale, because I investigated it when we had our house built two years ago. Conclusion first: If you have a body of water on your property and no regulatory issues, home-scale geothermal might be promising. Otherwise, watch out.
The typical small-scale geothermal setup involves digging a length of trench 5 or 6 feet deep; placing PVC pipe inside; replacing the soil; pumping antifreeze through the pipes to capture the heat in winter and the coolness in summer, using a heat exchanger. It’s an appealing idea, given that the soil temperature at 5 or 6 feet is typically somewhere around 55F/13C. You’d think it would be a snap to make the exchange, right? Think again.
The trenching and pipe placement is the easy part; in my research I uncovered no show-stoppers. The pumping uses electricity; the question is how much more heat you get by doing it this way relative to plain electric coils. There are some strange issues there, the strangest being that, as you withdraw heat from the soil in those trenches during the winter, you cool the soil. In fact, if you’re in a cold climate, it’s not uncommon to actually freeze the soil.
As the soil has less heat to give, the ratio of energy used to pump the anti-freeze to heat delivered to the structure becomes less and less favorable. The same thing happens in summer in reverse. In places with hot summers, the soil warms up. Another issue concerns the soil replaced around the pipes in the trench. It tends to settle, and to develop air pockets, reducing the efficiency of any heat transfer. Who knew? I didn’t.
You can also run a geothermal (a/k/a “ground source”) pump into a well. The problem there is the same pumping energy issue, plus the need to dig a second well to return the water to the aquifer. This is more daunting than you might think. Finally, residential ground-source heat pumps are about twice as expensive as conventional “air source” models, and wind up being considerably more finicky in operation, and harder to find people to fix them.
All in all, the capital cost to install a residential ground-source heat pump is at least double that of an air-source model, and probably more like triple. The coup de grace is that, in the past 20 or so years, conventional air-source heat pumps have become much better. They operate at roughly 2.5x the efficiency of bare electric coils, and can readily operate at temperatures down to 0F, at least if you get a big enough one. We opted for a hybrid that uses the heat pump down to somewhere between 15 and 20F, then going to propane below that.
Residential geothermal heating was one of several non-traditional HVAC approaches that I considered before we had the place built. I was open-minded all the way, but for various specific and practical reasons rejected solar panels, solar water heating, and a ground-source heat pump. I’ll leave the utility-scale discussion to others, but on the residential side, I regard ground-source heat pumps as an appealing idea that hasn’t worked out in practice.
As for a body of water, if you had a year-’round stream or a deep enough pond, maybe (a big maybe) a ground-source heat pump would work. But especially insofar as a stream is concerned, I could easily imagine the environmental weenies getting pretty hinky about the fish.
Two points about so-called geothermal heat pumps (as you mentioned, they are really thermal storage in soil and do not extract heat from deep underground or from hot springs).
One is the reliability concerns you mention. I went to an energy fair from the local power company where they distributed literature promoting this method of home heating, and a woman showed up who had complaints about such a system. She was a nurse in private practice making visits to serve medical needs of the home bound, she lived outside the city where she had enough land to install such a system, and her electric bills were sky high.
She and the power company representative had some back-and-forth about would could have gone wrong with her geothermal setup, but I got the impression that 1) the power company was only promoting this as green public relations, so their representative was going through the motions handing out the literature and 2) their representative was palpably uncomfortable dealing with an unsatisfied customer because that one of these systems could be done wrong was off-script. My takeaway from the session is that there is non-trivial risk installing such a system, having it either done wrong or go wrong and then having no recourse nor prospects for fixing it.
Two, installations of such systems have gotten very expensive. I am pulling numbers out of my head, but I installed a then high-efficiency A/C (13 SEER) and condensing gas furnace for about $4500 back in 1993. In that time framework, I has seen “numbers” for a ground-source heat pump installation in the $10,000 range. Much more recently, a friend was quoted $40,000 for such an installation for a smallish house. I am thinking that with all of the monetary stimulus supporting housing prices, the cost of anything associated with a house has greatly increase since the 2008 financial crisis. I am afraid to ask what replacing my 26 year old A/C and furnace would run, and I watch over the equipment carefully that I don’t have to incur such an expense.
I first encountered them as “geothermal heat pumps,” but I usually wind up calling them “ground source heat pumps.” And yes, they are very different from what the utilities do. It sounds like the woman you encountered had a system whose heat exchanger wasn’t working, probably for one of the reasons I mentioned in my first comment. Ground source heat pumps also have old coils that produce ridiculously expensive heat, and that’s probably what she was stuck with.
As I investigated the option 2+ years ago, I ran across some material that said a ground source system had to be 3-1/2 or 4 times as efficient as plain coils to justify the capital investment. I have to say that the freezing of ground around the trenched pipes, and the air gap issue, were big surprises to me. There’s nothing like facing the imminent drain on your personal funds to make you a whole lot more discerning than you might otherwise be.
Another one that I looked at was a home-scale wind turbine. I axed that idea for lack of established vendors, along with short warranties (3 years was typical of what I could find) and high-cost ongoing maintenance. From my perspective, the best “alternatives” for us have been on-demand propane-fueled hot water, that air-sourced heat pump, and a short range electric car that I bought at a deep discount strictly for curiosity’s sake. Everything else that I looked at was a non-starter.
Our new neighbors have built a house on the 20 acres next to us, and are relying on a larger-scale heat pump than ours, with no propane backup furnace. I have mixed feelings about that, because if a heat pump fails (they don’t have a generator yet, and we get two or three power failures a year here), it takes forever to get back to a warm house on account of heat pumps not streaming very hot air.
All of this is reminding me to do some more spade work with respect to the heat pump here vs. the propane backup. There’s a temperature breakeven point below which even a well-operating air-source pump becomes more expensive than propane, and now that the frigidity has arrived I need to find out what that temperature is.
Well, that sort of geothermal (basically a heat pump using ground temperature) is a little different than steam under pressure at a few hundred degrees.
By the way, China is installing a nuclear heating project in Haiyang (Shandong province).
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Chinese-nuclear-heating-project-starts-up
Like other “renewables” geothermal energy is a fine niche solution, its just doesnt scale well.
The ultimate renewable resource – government funding. With their green back(ing), there is no limit to what cN be promised.
Eartquakes are not the only thing that can go wrong
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/staufen-germany
Key here is not to have subsidies or government regulations. Let human ingenuity flourish. Do it with private money and keep sure that you have a business case.
Here one example of a suburb level geothermal: https://www.st1.eu/st1-to-launch-the-final-phase-of-drilling-the-worlds-deepest-geothermal-heat-wells-in-otaniemi.
Instead of drilling you can you can use a lake, a pond, a river or a sea as the heat reservoir. See Stockholm case https://www.gshp.org.uk/DeMontfort/LargeWaterSourceHeatPumpsSwedish.pdf
Start with small experiments, not with world government totalitarian rule.
Oh Um I am nearly 80 years old, And as a baby I can remember elictricery being produced from a vent nesa our hose in New Zealand (present geothermal electricity produced in NZ is 900mw ) about 17% of the supply ! Wind, Sun ? follow the money !!!!
“elictricery”
The who with the what?
Meanwhile back with unreliables the cracks are beginning to show-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-01/rise-of-rooftop-solar-power-jeopardising-wa-energy-grid/11731452
It’s what happens when you don’t have a level playing field with dumping squeezing out dispatchables.
I should add WA is an islanded power grid from the other States so without interconnectors it’s a microcosm of what will happen eventually to the eastern seaboard too. Just grappling with the unreliables growth problem sooner.
“attempt to
breathbreathe new government money”Fixed! 🙂
According to Al Gore it’s several million degrees at 2 kilometers or so down.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/16/gore-has-no-clue-a-few-million-degrees-here-and-there-and-pretty-soon-were-talking-about-real-temperature/
So, energy problem solved. Let’s go geothermal.
The man knows everything. He won a Nobel Prize, remember?
How dare you question his knowledge. He is a Climate Saint!
No talk of pollution? I was a medical consultant briefly for a mid sized conventional geothermal plant supplying Jakarta. Demonstration size. Worked fine. However. The main pollution risk was hydrogen sulphide. The risk was a dramatic increase in loss, killing the staff.
Naturally, the facility was built in an isolated area, a long way from any villages. To my knowledge, no further plants were built, the risks were too high.
“Given this pessimistic scenario, Chile has good news to contribute. Our country has been recognized internationally as an example in the promotion and development of renewable energies, the development of solar energy positions it as the third national energy source. We must applaud this fact and continue on that path, deeper, deeper, underground.”
Wait…
Isn’t Chile the place St Greta had to change her destination from because the People there were on the streets trying to stop the Govt from their rampant renewable campaigns that were making life unlivable?
ABC NEWS –
Geothermal power project closes in SA as technology deemed not financially viable
BY TOM FEDOROWYTSCH
TUE 30 AUG 2016, 4:45 PM AEST
A potential energy source in Australia is set to remain untapped, with a geothermal power project in the far north of South Australia now closed.
Energy company Geodynamics closed and remediated the sites of several test wells and generation plants in the Cooper Basin after deciding they were not financially viable.
Before the closure, the company had managed to extract super-heated water from five kilometres below the earth’s surface and use it to generate small amounts of electricity.
“The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create,” Geodynamics chief executive Chris Murray said.
Professor Martin Hand ran the South Australian Centre for Geothermal Energy Research at the University of Adelaide.
“I think it was talked up too much — it’s a very nice concept on the front page of a newspaper, looks very easy to do, and I think it was over-spruiked,” he said.
Professor Hand said large areas of the Earth’s crust across Australia were very hot and could be ideal for use as a non-conventional energy source.
“Rocks about five kilometres below the surface are at temperatures of around 240 to 250 degrees and, in principle, if water could be circulated through those rocks it could be returned to the surface to produce geothermal power in a power plant,” he said.
He pointed out Australian geothermal energy differed greatly from the energy created by abundant and accessible steam vents in countries such as New Zealand and Iceland.
“There are 46 countries around the world that generate significant geothermal energy, but all of those come from conventional systems — where you see the geysers and all the volcanic manifestation, where there is natural permeability in the ground,” Professor Hand said.
____________________________________
The difference is:
– Energy company Geodynamics [ ] had managed to extract super-heated water from five kilometres below the earth’s surface which stems from Earth’s MANTLE.
While
– “46 countries around the world that generate significant geothermal energy, but all of those come from conventional systems — where you see the geysers and all the volcanic manifestation, where there is natural permeability in the ground,”:
where the reaped heat stems from Earth’s red hot interior along the ring of fire – reliable and super-powered.
Careful what you touch, you shouldn’t take too much:
German Town devastated by thermal energy efforts:
https://www.google.com/search?q=German+Town+devasted+thermal+energy&oq=German+Town+devasted+thermal+energy+&aqs=chrome.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-huawei&sxsrf=ACYBGNSzDcDhRvP3O9yI8Ukl52hLecCTrg:1575521779574&q=German+Town+devastated+thermal+energy&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjkh4eA3J3mAhVMJlAKHWlgDIsQBSgAegQIDBAC&biw=360&bih=518&dpr=3