[Deep geothermal technology can harness the heat stored beneath
the Earth’s crust to make abundant zero emissions energy. ]
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DEEP GEOTHERMAL — ONE RENEWABLE ENERGY SOURCE TO RULE THEM ALL?  
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Steve Hanley
November 14, 2022
CleanTechnica
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_ Deep geothermal technology can harness the heat stored beneath the
Earth’s crust to make abundant zero emissions energy. _

, image: MIT

 

Imagine, if you will, a decommissioned coal generating station sitting
cold and dark. It has a direct connection to the grid, but no
electrons flow because burning coal destroys the environment. But
wait! What if, by some alchemy, some magic, a supply of superheated
steam that is the correct temperature and pressure to make those old
turbines spin again were available? And what if that steam was heated
without any carbon emissions at all by the Earth’s own geothermal
energy
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miles below the surface?

Science fiction? Not according to Paul Woskov, a research engineer at
MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. For the past 14 years, he
has been experimenting with a device known as a gyrotron in his
research into fusion power. Woskov’s ideas have been adopted by a
new MIT spinoff known as Quaise Energy [[link removed]].

CEO Carlos Araque tells _Bloomberg_, a gyrotron is “a big cousin of
the microwave in your kitchen.” It operates using different
frequencies than a microwave and is 1,000 times more powerful, but
“It’s a fairly mature technology. We just use it for this
purpose,” Araque says. What does it do? Well, I am not a physicist
nor have I ever played one on TV. But the short answer is, it blasts a
hole thorough just about any material you can think of, including the
rock in the Earth’s crust that surrounds the mantle.

The crust is from 9 to 12 miles thick
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any conventional equipment can drill through. Below it is
the Earth’s mantle
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which varies from 1000º C to 3700º C. Blast a passageway to the
mantle, shoot some water down the hole and bazanga! Instant, high
pressure steam from a virtually inexhaustible source that could power
all of humanity’s energy needs for millions of years. Are you
excited yet?

 Deep Geothermal Is Closer Than You Think

This new technology isn’t here yet, but it’s not as far away as
you might think. “This will happen quickly once we solve the
immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having
it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” Woskov says
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go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially
available.”

“You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered
right now — granted, these beam sources have never been used 24/7,
but they are engineered to be operational for long time periods. In
five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve
these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.

“[Gyrotrons] haven’t been well publicized in the general science
community, but those of us in fusion research understood they were
very powerful beam sources — like lasers, but in a different
frequency range. I thought, why not direct these high power beams,
instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the
hole?”

[geothermal]
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Image courtesy of Quaise Energy

Quaise has received a grant from the Department of Energy
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scale up Woskov’s experiments using a larger gyrotron. With the
larger machine, the team hopes to vaporize a hole 10 times the depth
of Woskov’s lab experiments by the end of this year. After that, the
team will vaporize a hole 10 times the depth of the previous one —
what co-founder Matt Houde calls a 100-to-1 hole.

“That’s something [the DOE] is particularly interested in, because
they want to address the challenges posed by material removal over
those greater lengths — in other words, can we show we’re fully
flushing out the rock vapors?” Houde explains. “We believe the
100-to-1 test also gives us the confidence to go out and mobilize a
prototype gyrotron drilling rig in the field for the first field
demonstrations.”

Tests on the 100-to-1 hole are expected to be completed sometime next
year. Quaise is also hoping to begin vaporizing rock in field tests
late next year. The short timeline reflects the progress Woskov has
already made in his lab.

Although more engineering research is needed, the team expects to be
able to drill and operate these geothermal wells safely. “We
believe, because of Paul’s work at MIT over the past decade, that
most if not all of the core physics questions have been answered and
addressed,” Houde says. “It’s really engineering challenges we
have to answer, which doesn’t mean they’re easy to solve, but
we’re not working against the laws of physics, to which there is no
answer. It’s more a matter of overcoming some of the more technical
and cost considerations to making this work at a large scale.”

The company plans to begin harvesting energy from pilot geothermal
wells that reach rock temperatures at up to 500 C by 2026. From there,
the team hopes to begin re-purposing coal and natural gas generating
plants using its system. “We believe, if we can drill down to 20
kilometers, we can access these super-hot temperatures in greater than
90 percent of locations across the globe,” Houde says.

Rather than getting deep in the weeds of carbon capture, imagine
powering those existing facilities with steam generated without carbon
emissions at all. Will there be emissions associated with the process?
Of course, but they will be minuscule compared to generating
electricity the conventional way.

The Devil In The Details

Quaise’s work with the DOE is addressing what it sees as the biggest
remaining questions about drilling holes of unprecedented depth and
pressure, such as material removal and determining the best casing to
keep the hole stable and open. For the latter problem of well
stability, Houde believes additional computer modeling is needed and
expects to complete that modeling by the end of 2024.

By drilling the holes at existing power plants, Quaise will be able to
move faster than if it had to get permits to build new plants and
transmission lines. And by making their millimeter-wave drilling
equipment compatible with the existing global fleet of drilling rigs,
it will also allow the company to tap into the oil and gas
industry’s global workforce.

“At these high temperatures [we’re accessing], we’re producing
steam very close to, if not exceeding, the temperature that today’s
coal and gas fired power plants operate at,” Houde says. “So, we
can go to existing power plants and say, ‘We can replace 95 to 100
percent of your coal use by developing a geothermal field and
producing steam from the Earth, at the same temperature you’re
burning coal to run your turbine, directly replacing carbon
emissions.’”

Transforming the world’s energy systems in such a short period of
time is something the Araque and Houde see as critical to avoiding the
most catastrophic global warming scenarios. “There have been
tremendous gains in renewables over the last decade, but the big
picture today is we’re not going nearly fast enough to hit the
milestones we need for limiting the worst impacts of climate
change,” Houde says. “[Deep geothermal] is a power resource that
can scale anywhere and has the ability to tap into a large workforce
in the energy industry to readily repackage their skills for a totally
carbon free energy source.”

The Takeaway

“Geothermal has the power density and scalability of fossil fuels,
allowing us to put clean energy on the grid very quickly,” according
to Quaise Energy, which calls the deep geothermal technology, “A
truly equitable clean energy source, abundantly available near every
population and industrial center on the planet.”

Best of all, the skills developed over the past century by the oil and
gas industry are readily transferable to deep geothermal with a ready
made, well trained workforce available immediately. From drilling rigs
to power plants, fossil fuel infrastructure dominates the world today.
It can all be readily repurposed to rapidly advance a geothermal world
of clean energy.

Deep geothermal does not require any fuels and does not produce any
waste. It’s truly renewable, abundant, and equitable for all, even
in the most challenging energy environments. It uses less than 1% of
the land and materials of other renewables, making it the only option
for a sustainable clean energy transition.

Does this sound exciting? It should. Say goodbye to electricity from
burning fossil fuels, wild fluctuations in energy prices,
questionable carbon capture
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and the need for highly experimental geoengineering
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For years, people have been saying we would find a way to “science
our way” out of the carbon emissions dilemma. Maybe, with the help
of Paul Woskov and Quaise Energy, we just have.

_Steve Hanley writes about the interface between technology and
sustainability from his home in Florida or anywhere else The Force may
lead him. 3000 years ago, Socrates said, "The secret to change is to
focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the
new." Perhaps it's time we heed his advice._

_Hat Tip to Dan Allard._

* geothermal
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