Don't miss out EcoFlow Black Friday Big Sales during 2024/11/12-2024/11/30 up to $3500 OFF, the Best Deals of the Year! At this exclusive link: bit.ly/3NYXRTH
One of Eavor's big challenges is that it is based in Alberta. Oil country Canada. Great for drilling knowledge unfortunately the provincial government is actively anti-renewable. They stopped all renewable projects in the province for 9 months to draw up new environmental policies ( something they have never done for oil & gas) causing billions of dollars of wind and solar projects to be permanently cancelled and then their policy declared renewable energy to be too environmentally damaging to be used on much the land, although none these limitations would apply to oil and gas drilling. Not a big surprise they went to Germany for a commercial project. I mean what use would excess heat from a geothermal project be in a province where winter temperatures go down to -50º c (-58ºf).
Oh dear I wasn't aware of that backstory to the move to Germany! I would have assumed that geothermal was a renewable tech that oil and gas fans could get behind! Certainly many of the startup founders in this space come from that background.
@@EngineeringwithRosie The greed of those involved in AI and crypto won't allow them to let off the gas. A bunch of the models and monetization strategies are hitting walls and CEOs like Altman are trying to convince people to give him several trillion dollars to build out compute. Look at Georgia in the US. The numbers are obscene! A bunch of producers are planning on TRIPLING their production and they can only do it with gas. It gets worse too. Look for a Washington Post article by Evan Halper.
I have an Ecoflow river2 ( much smaller) and used it during a storm power outage last week. It was handy to keep my phone charged to check on storm maintenance updates, and my computer running so I could keep working.
For context with the microwave drilling system, the deepest hole in the world, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, is only 12km, so the idea of drilling to 20km is kind of insane. Not to say it isn't possible, just that it's a bit crazy and we're going to learn so really crazy stuff it it actually happens.
I originally had a bit in the script about the Kola borehole! They started digging in the 1970s, which makes it so crazy they got so deep. And they did basically to see what happens when you dig a hole so deep. I took that section out though, because I wasn't entirely sure it is still the deepest (there are some oil and gas wells that may be deeper).
@@EngineeringwithRosieI googled "deepest man-made hole" & Kola came up in all results which surprised me, I thought the Russians had surpassed it a while ago with microwaves or lasers.
having dumped all our summer heat into the lake, our university is looking to pull winter heat from the rock... someday... now if they could only keep the thermostat in my office working...
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) works to reduce costs and risks associated with geothermal development by supporting innovative technologies. As you mention this technology has potential but plenty of challenges to be economic.
Thank you Rosie. This shows a lot more promise than SMR's in my opinion, with far less downside risk. The Eavor model in particular adds stability to enhance the cost effectiveness of solar and wind, which is already pretty substantial. Short term and seasonal variability being dealt with is huge.
I too is very excited by geothermal (no so much the fracking method though), it honestly seems like a no brainer, combining geothermal with wind and solar seems like a perfect match. How much money do we invest on this technology compare to other energy technology like solar, nuclear, fusion, etc ?
I don't see that much needs to be invested, all the research was done decades ago. Electricity was first commercially generated from geothermal in 1904 in Italy, the fracked wells in the video have been in use since the 1960s. The most recent development is the microwave drilling but even that is decades old. It's all stable, mature, established & well understood technology, it just needs someone to build more.
@@alanhat5252 Knowing that it works does not make it usable on it's own. It is easy to produce a prototype. Think of it like a car. It is easy to make a prototype car, but it is very hard to make a car that can be successfully sold on the free market. Knowing how a car works does not help you build the extremely complex factory that can build millions of cars. You have to invest in the factory, supply chains, marketing etc. Before you can sell the car to people that could chose between your car and all the other cars on the market. (the devil is in the details) If it was easier to drill a hole in the ground than burning coal, people would do that. But there have already been invested a lot into coal since 1904 making it cheap and easy thus we have to invest into geothermal befor it can compete. (or make a CO2 tax)
Constant output/ baseload is needed is increasing just for Internet and Data Centers. The growing consumption is getting sizable. Hope Eavor makes the progress they need.
That's true and I expect there is a nice opportunity for partnerships there (I believe there are some already announced). But as I understand it, AI is only expected to account for about 4% of the total growth in electricity demand in coming years, so I don't think it will be enough to significantly smooth out demand curves.
I am excited about it in tropical regions in the world as they have tough seasonal issues for Wind and Solar. Indonesia most importantly but also other places in Eastern Africa (other than Keyna that was metioned) and central americia. Indonesia recently make some bold targets for renewable energy that some people believe must be a miss speak but it might well be possible.
I've seen some work in using alternative fluids for solar thermal instead of water to collect heat and separately some odder coolants. Most melt way above geothermal temperature, there are water-based with nano-particles (increases heat conductivity by a lot and heat capacity by a little), ionic liquid-based ones, perfluorocarbon or halogen-based ones (toxic for the environment so has to be closed system) and combos. These could potentially extract more heat faster than water, so may open possibilities. You might be able to get away with a smaller hole, which means more surface area (and faster heating) or slower pumping making it economical in more places. IDK
Geothermal has been in use since 1980-ish, the major problem has been the corrosive steam, where there is geothermal there is usually no cooling water.
With Plasma or mmWave drilling the rock is vaporized and the wall of the borehole is vitrified. The transfer fluid is a closed loop. The chemistry of the fluid does not change because of the barrier of the vitrified rock.
5 minutes googling produced - Larderello, Italy, 1904 seems to have been the first producing electricity. France went large-scale immediately after the 1975 Oil Crisis. The Geysers, California, 1950s & then expanding with EGS (fracking) in the 1960s & '70s. Plus Roman, Greek & Arabic thermal-only (particularly cooling) for millennia.
Quaise seems to mostly be a new drilling technology. Is there a reason it couldn't be used to do the boring for a closed loop system, reducing the cost of the latter? Seems that closed loops would also offer good storage potential. 🤔
Could geothermal be used both as electric production and central heating at the same time? I am thinking drill deep holes, have pipes with relatively high pressure, pump water through, get super heated steam, run it through a turbine that generates electricity. Then run the "cooled steam/hot water" through a heat exchanger, instead of a cooling tower. Then get hot 60 C hot water that can be used to heat homes. Maybe have a big insulated tank that can be used as a battery such that heat energy collected through the day can be used throughout the night. (assuming that peak heat consumption is doing the night, making it possible to use a smaller system than what is required at peak consumption)
@@alanhat5252 Can you give some hints for me to find that? Cause as far as I know there are only 3 geothermal plants in Denmark non of witch produce electricity, they only supplement central heating based on waste or wood chip incineration. (Thisted 1983, Amager 2005, 2013 Sønderborg) There have been given some permits (6 sense Sønderborg, as far as I can tell), but no plants have been build. (as far as i can tell) There is a 2020 report on competitiveness for geothermal in Denmark, but I think it concludes that geothermal is too expensive and recommends biomass boilers (I strongly disagree) and seawater heat pumps ( I assume powered by wind power). Honestly I don't even think they consider power production (it looks like the legislations says that heat and electricity has to be produced togetter, and that is holding back geothermal from being uses to generate heat only in Denmark 🤷♂) , I guess Denmark's plan is to produce power using Wind, solar and biomass incineration and relay on hydro power from Norway and Sveden for winter days without any wind. They also have connections to England, Germany and Holland, thus maybe they can buy wind power from England on some days where the wind i blowing in England but not in Denmark 🤷♂. I found the information on the danish energy agency's home page (Energistyrelsen, ens). They have a section on geothermal. I did not read alle the reports but I did not get the impression that geothermal had a bright future in Denmark. But I might have overlooked something.
Probably because gyrotron drilling is still experimental whereas Eavor is already building a commercial facility. I expect they don't want to wait and don't want to deal with the headache of adding an untested technology to the mix.
Is Rosie aware of global warming gas emissions from Geothermal? In NZ at least. 6-700g CO2e / kwh. Less than fossils. But added up over time = greater emissions than coal or gas, since we use coal very little but geothermal at 20%
One problem that I am having with geothermal is that we are extracting heat from the planets reserves and eventually dump it into the atmosphere after going through a turbine. Will this contribute to global warming?
No, it's safe. The nuclear reaction at the planet's core is producing huge amounts of energy which is being dumped, geothermal is just altering the route a miniscule amount of it is taking to escape.
I do wonder why flexibility is important for geothermal. The reason flexibility is useful is because right now wind and solar have the lowest marginal cost of energy (additional cost for each additional kWh), so you don't want to spend expensive fuel when you could be using wind and solar instead, and then you have to quickly bring your other power sources online when the wind and solar aren't there. Grid-scale batteries make economic sense for basically the same reason, the cost of storing a kWh is less than the marginal cost of producing it by burning gas in a peaker plant. Geothermal, like wind and solar, has a near-zero marginal cost of energy, so turning off the geothermal when you have lots of wind and solar doesn't actually improve your marginal cost of energy,. Wind and solar are always going to be easier to start and stop than steam, so if the steam is just as "practically free" as the wind and solar, why not just turn off the wind and solar? I think nuclear is kind of similar to geothermal in this respect since the fuel cost is such a tiny part of the overall operating cost.
It isn't simply "turning off" the geothermal when you don't want to use it. That can be done with traditional geothermal (or it can be used to charge a battery). What Eavor and Fervo are able to do is to actually store energy underground. When they "turn off" fluid is staying longer underground and getting hotter, and pressure is building up. Then when it's turned back on, you can get more than the "baseline" power out of it for a while. It is not 100% efficient (you won't get as much energy as if you ran at constant output 24/7) but it does improve the economics of the project significantly.
@@EngineeringwithRosie that is interesting and makes more sense if they're actually managing to shift some of the generation. I had assumed that the water was in the reservoir long enough to get most of the way to the rock temperature already and couldn't get much hotter. I assume the mechanism is that there's enough heat flux to vaporize a certain mass of water per second, and because the steam is well above the boiling point of water at normal operating pressure, you have some room to add more water and increase the pressure in the reservoir until it's saturated, and then you can use the extra steam for peak capacity later. And I assume you need closed-loop or fracking geothermal so the steam doesn't have an escape path as the pressure builds.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 The key physics concept is that with increased pressure steam (or water) can store more energy by getting hotter. Remember that on everest water boils a 70 C, vs 100 C at sea level air pressure, that's 30 C less energy you can store in the same volume of water. So as long as the underground pressure can increase more heat can be absorbed. And later more energy extracted. With the traditional porous rock, the pressure just dissipates, the maximum pressure is limited and thus no ability to increase water pressure and temperature over the normal operating conditions.
Nope, not the way, still too expensive. The day geothermal will go mainstream, like solar today, is that the robots will dig it automatically without any human intervention. But for such robotics to be available we need AI, but AI is not ready. For AI to be ready we need cheaper chips, not going to be soon as right now the law of Moore has flipped: the cost of chip design doubles every 18 months. Conclusion: stop investing into geothermal, invest in AI instead, a robotic "mouse" could dig 5 km down the Earth while you are watching TV.
Don't miss out EcoFlow Black Friday Big Sales during 2024/11/12-2024/11/30 up to $3500
OFF, the Best Deals of the Year! At this exclusive link: bit.ly/3NYXRTH
neat !! 👍👍📓📓📚📚🌄🌄❤🩹❤🩹
One of Eavor's big challenges is that it is based in Alberta. Oil country Canada. Great for drilling knowledge unfortunately the provincial government is actively anti-renewable. They stopped all renewable projects in the province for 9 months to draw up new environmental policies ( something they have never done for oil & gas) causing billions of dollars of wind and solar projects to be permanently cancelled and then their policy declared renewable energy to be too environmentally damaging to be used on much the land, although none these limitations would apply to oil and gas drilling. Not a big surprise they went to Germany for a commercial project. I mean what use would excess heat from a geothermal project be in a province where winter temperatures go down to -50º c (-58ºf).
Oh dear I wasn't aware of that backstory to the move to Germany! I would have assumed that geothermal was a renewable tech that oil and gas fans could get behind! Certainly many of the startup founders in this space come from that background.
Canadian fan appreciates that Eavor was featured. Dito on the Drill comment.
Google and Berkshire Hathaway are partnered with Fervo. You don't get much deeper pockets than those 2 companies.
I'm saving this bit of info for an upcoming video on how we're going to power AI. Thanks for the comment!
@@EngineeringwithRosie The greed of those involved in AI and crypto won't allow them to let off the gas. A bunch of the models and monetization strategies are hitting walls and CEOs like Altman are trying to convince people to give him several trillion dollars to build out compute. Look at Georgia in the US. The numbers are obscene! A bunch of producers are planning on TRIPLING their production and they can only do it with gas. It gets worse too.
Look for a Washington Post article by Evan Halper.
I have an Ecoflow river2 ( much smaller) and used it during a storm power outage last week. It was handy to keep my phone charged to check on storm maintenance updates, and my computer running so I could keep working.
You are on the right track! Keep going!
Good news. I look forward to the further progress of this technology.
For context with the microwave drilling system, the deepest hole in the world, the Kola Superdeep Borehole, is only 12km, so the idea of drilling to 20km is kind of insane. Not to say it isn't possible, just that it's a bit crazy and we're going to learn so really crazy stuff it it actually happens.
I originally had a bit in the script about the Kola borehole! They started digging in the 1970s, which makes it so crazy they got so deep. And they did basically to see what happens when you dig a hole so deep. I took that section out though, because I wasn't entirely sure it is still the deepest (there are some oil and gas wells that may be deeper).
The non-physical drill bit will make a huge difference.
And it is still the deepest
@@EngineeringwithRosieI googled "deepest man-made hole" & Kola came up in all results which surprised me, I thought the Russians had surpassed it a while ago with microwaves or lasers.
having dumped all our summer heat into the lake, our university is looking to pull winter heat from the rock... someday... now if they could only keep the thermostat in my office working...
Excellent video
As you point out, EGS will have difficulty competing with wind/solar in most markets. But it has a lot of potential for places like Alaska.
Thanks Rosie. Great video. EGS is the future.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) works to reduce costs and risks associated with geothermal development by supporting innovative technologies. As you mention this technology has potential but plenty of challenges to be economic.
Thank you Rosie. This shows a lot more promise than SMR's in my opinion, with far less downside risk. The Eavor model in particular adds stability to enhance the cost effectiveness of solar and wind, which is already pretty substantial. Short term and seasonal variability being dealt with is huge.
Nice cameo from the kid
He loves "helping". I'm counting down the days until he can help me out with camera work 😂
In select locations, it works great for space heat and water heating.
I too is very excited by geothermal (no so much the fracking method though), it honestly seems like a no brainer, combining geothermal with wind and solar seems like a perfect match.
How much money do we invest on this technology compare to other energy technology like solar, nuclear, fusion, etc ?
I don't see that much needs to be invested, all the research was done decades ago. Electricity was first commercially generated from geothermal in 1904 in Italy, the fracked wells in the video have been in use since the 1960s. The most recent development is the microwave drilling but even that is decades old. It's all stable, mature, established & well understood technology, it just needs someone to build more.
@@alanhat5252 Knowing that it works does not make it usable on it's own. It is easy to produce a prototype. Think of it like a car. It is easy to make a prototype car, but it is very hard to make a car that can be successfully sold on the free market. Knowing how a car works does not help you build the extremely complex factory that can build millions of cars. You have to invest in the factory, supply chains, marketing etc. Before you can sell the car to people that could chose between your car and all the other cars on the market. (the devil is in the details)
If it was easier to drill a hole in the ground than burning coal, people would do that. But there have already been invested a lot into coal since 1904 making it cheap and easy thus we have to invest into geothermal befor it can compete. (or make a CO2 tax)
Constant output/ baseload is needed is increasing just for Internet and Data Centers. The growing consumption is getting sizable.
Hope Eavor makes the progress they need.
That's true and I expect there is a nice opportunity for partnerships there (I believe there are some already announced). But as I understand it, AI is only expected to account for about 4% of the total growth in electricity demand in coming years, so I don't think it will be enough to significantly smooth out demand curves.
I am excited about it in tropical regions in the world as they have tough seasonal issues for Wind and Solar. Indonesia most importantly but also other places in Eastern Africa (other than Keyna that was metioned) and central americia. Indonesia recently make some bold targets for renewable energy that some people believe must be a miss speak but it might well be possible.
I've seen some work in using alternative fluids for solar thermal instead of water to collect heat and separately some odder coolants. Most melt way above geothermal temperature, there are water-based with nano-particles (increases heat conductivity by a lot and heat capacity by a little), ionic liquid-based ones, perfluorocarbon or halogen-based ones (toxic for the environment so has to be closed system) and combos. These could potentially extract more heat faster than water, so may open possibilities. You might be able to get away with a smaller hole, which means more surface area (and faster heating) or slower pumping making it economical in more places. IDK
I also do not think this would revolutionize it all at once or anything, but may make it slightly better and add up with other changes
Geothermal has been in use since 1980-ish, the major problem has been the corrosive steam, where there is geothermal there is usually no cooling water.
With Plasma or mmWave drilling the rock is vaporized and the wall of the borehole is vitrified. The transfer fluid is a closed loop. The chemistry of the fluid does not change because of the barrier of the vitrified rock.
5 minutes googling produced -
Larderello, Italy, 1904 seems to have been the first producing electricity.
France went large-scale immediately after the 1975 Oil Crisis.
The Geysers, California, 1950s & then expanding with EGS (fracking) in the 1960s & '70s.
Plus Roman, Greek & Arabic thermal-only (particularly cooling) for millennia.
Thanks Rosie
Quaise seems to mostly be a new drilling technology. Is there a reason it couldn't be used to do the boring for a closed loop system, reducing the cost of the latter? Seems that closed loops would also offer good storage potential. 🤔
Could geothermal be used both as electric production and central heating at the same time?
I am thinking drill deep holes, have pipes with relatively high pressure, pump water through, get super heated steam, run it through a turbine that generates electricity. Then run the "cooled steam/hot water" through a heat exchanger, instead of a cooling tower. Then get hot 60 C hot water that can be used to heat homes. Maybe have a big insulated tank that can be used as a battery such that heat energy collected through the day can be used throughout the night. (assuming that peak heat consumption is doing the night, making it possible to use a smaller system than what is required at peak consumption)
they've recently completed exactly that in Denmark
@@alanhat5252 Can you give some hints for me to find that?
Cause as far as I know there are only 3 geothermal plants in Denmark non of witch produce electricity, they only supplement central heating based on waste or wood chip incineration. (Thisted 1983, Amager 2005, 2013 Sønderborg)
There have been given some permits (6 sense Sønderborg, as far as I can tell), but no plants have been build. (as far as i can tell)
There is a 2020 report on competitiveness for geothermal in Denmark, but I think it concludes that geothermal is too expensive and recommends biomass boilers (I strongly disagree) and seawater heat pumps ( I assume powered by wind power).
Honestly I don't even think they consider power production (it looks like the legislations says that heat and electricity has to be produced togetter, and that is holding back geothermal from being uses to generate heat only in Denmark 🤷♂) , I guess Denmark's plan is to produce power using Wind, solar and biomass incineration and relay on hydro power from Norway and Sveden for winter days without any wind. They also have connections to England, Germany and Holland, thus maybe they can buy wind power from England on some days where the wind i blowing in England but not in Denmark 🤷♂.
I found the information on the danish energy agency's home page (Energistyrelsen, ens). They have a section on geothermal. I did not read alle the reports but I did not get the impression that geothermal had a bright future in Denmark. But I might have overlooked something.
Why not associate closed loop with gyrotrons?
Probably because gyrotron drilling is still experimental whereas Eavor is already building a commercial facility. I expect they don't want to wait and don't want to deal with the headache of adding an untested technology to the mix.
Is Rosie aware of global warming gas emissions from Geothermal?
In NZ at least.
6-700g CO2e / kwh.
Less than fossils.
But added up over time = greater emissions than coal or gas, since we use coal very little but geothermal at 20%
One problem that I am having with geothermal is that we are extracting heat from the planets reserves and eventually dump it into the atmosphere after going through a turbine.
Will this contribute to global warming?
No, it's safe. The nuclear reaction at the planet's core is producing huge amounts of energy which is being dumped, geothermal is just altering the route a miniscule amount of it is taking to escape.
I do wonder why flexibility is important for geothermal.
The reason flexibility is useful is because right now wind and solar have the lowest marginal cost of energy (additional cost for each additional kWh), so you don't want to spend expensive fuel when you could be using wind and solar instead, and then you have to quickly bring your other power sources online when the wind and solar aren't there. Grid-scale batteries make economic sense for basically the same reason, the cost of storing a kWh is less than the marginal cost of producing it by burning gas in a peaker plant.
Geothermal, like wind and solar, has a near-zero marginal cost of energy, so turning off the geothermal when you have lots of wind and solar doesn't actually improve your marginal cost of energy,. Wind and solar are always going to be easier to start and stop than steam, so if the steam is just as "practically free" as the wind and solar, why not just turn off the wind and solar?
I think nuclear is kind of similar to geothermal in this respect since the fuel cost is such a tiny part of the overall operating cost.
It isn't simply "turning off" the geothermal when you don't want to use it. That can be done with traditional geothermal (or it can be used to charge a battery). What Eavor and Fervo are able to do is to actually store energy underground. When they "turn off" fluid is staying longer underground and getting hotter, and pressure is building up. Then when it's turned back on, you can get more than the "baseline" power out of it for a while. It is not 100% efficient (you won't get as much energy as if you ran at constant output 24/7) but it does improve the economics of the project significantly.
@@EngineeringwithRosie that is interesting and makes more sense if they're actually managing to shift some of the generation.
I had assumed that the water was in the reservoir long enough to get most of the way to the rock temperature already and couldn't get much hotter.
I assume the mechanism is that there's enough heat flux to vaporize a certain mass of water per second, and because the steam is well above the boiling point of water at normal operating pressure, you have some room to add more water and increase the pressure in the reservoir until it's saturated, and then you can use the extra steam for peak capacity later.
And I assume you need closed-loop or fracking geothermal so the steam doesn't have an escape path as the pressure builds.
@@thamiordragonheart8682 The key physics concept is that with increased pressure steam (or water) can store more energy by getting hotter. Remember that on everest water boils a 70 C, vs 100 C at sea level air pressure, that's 30 C less energy you can store in the same volume of water. So as long as the underground pressure can increase more heat can be absorbed. And later more energy extracted. With the traditional porous rock, the pressure just dissipates, the maximum pressure is limited and thus no ability to increase water pressure and temperature over the normal operating conditions.
Nope, not the way, still too expensive. The day geothermal will go mainstream, like solar today, is that the robots will dig it automatically without any human intervention. But for such robotics to be available we need AI, but AI is not ready. For AI to be ready we need cheaper chips, not going to be soon as right now the law of Moore has flipped: the cost of chip design doubles every 18 months. Conclusion: stop investing into geothermal, invest in AI instead, a robotic "mouse" could dig 5 km down the Earth while you are watching TV.
Depends where and what for.
A start up here was looking at being profitable with geothermal until they got messed up internally. The tech is fine.