Well out of the blue

ENERGY
Fusion tech is set to unlock near-limitless ultra-deep geothermal energy

By Loz Blain
February 25, 2022

https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep ... ave-drill/

What on earth about this report is supposed to inspire me to invest (either emotionally or financially) in such an enterprise? What persuades me that this is pure hype are simple facts about the mechanics of rock materials.

It's surely not unlimited at least in theory and I am curious if anyone would know how to enumerate the limit? How much heat we can take before the core goes cold? Just to entertain the thought.

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edit: it blows my mind that we don't make investments into stuff like this a priority because, indeed, we will need a lot of clean energy in not so distant future.

Do you think the folks at MIT or Quaise really cares about your opinion Cito. Bit of hubris there.

In 2018, MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center spun out a business called Quaise, specifically focused on ultra-deep geothermal using hybrid systems that combine traditional rotary drilling with gyrotron-powered millimeter-wave technology, while pumping in argon as a purge gas to clean and cool the bore while firing rock particles back up to the surface and out of the way.

The company has raised some US$63 million to date, comprising $18 million in seed funding, $5 million in grants, and $40 million in a Series A financing round closed earlier this month.

Don't think you were invited. Sour milk dept over near the blue cheese.

••••

From a human scale of energy needs over time, unlimited if the boring technology works.

I think you made a typo there, its bore not boring :)

tuco wrote:It's surely not unlimited at least in theory and I am curious if anyone would know how to enumerate the limit? How much heat we can take before the core goes cold? Just to entertain the thought.

Just compute a total amount of heat from temperature and heat capacity variation and something about how heat flow depends on a temperature gradient.

I am curious what the actual number would be, say in gigawatts. That's how one gets investors interested .. it can produce as much electricity as xyz nuclear powerplants. 10^? really big right? :)

Cito di Pense wrote:What on earth about this report is supposed to inspire me to invest (either emotionally or financially) in such an enterprise? What persuades me that this is pure hype are simple facts about the mechanics of rock materials.

How many Theranos's will occur before we stop giving column inches to these cranks, let alone finance? This is somebody's pie-in-the-sky dream that's based on no science whatsoever. It's pure fantasy, and we're not even close to the technology to drill that deep yet. Not even in the ball park. Not even on the same continent as the ball park.

Honestly, this thread is in entirely the wrong sub-forum. Just because the energy is there doesn't make this any less pseudoscience. And that's speaking as somebody almost entirely ignorant of the mechanics of rock materials beyond a simple grasp of the variability of ductility at depth and pressure and a naïve view of temp increase with depth.

The whole bollocks about directed energy and lasers is the best bit of it all. This is Hyperloop level fantasy.

tuco wrote:I am curious what the actual number would be, say in gigawatts. That's how one gets investors interested .. it can produce as much electricity as xyz nuclear powerplants. 10^? really big right?

1.21, by my calculations, admittedly made in a science-fiction film, but that's more appropriate than calculations done in a lab in this case.

One gets investors interested by getting them to believe. Whether you can actually deliver is another matter (c.f.Elisabeth Holmes).

Macdoc wrote:
From a human scale of energy needs over time, unlimited if the boring technology works.

People developing drilling technology for ultradeep holes also need to know something about the mechanics of geomaterials at the relevant pressures and temperatures. Quaise seems focused on developing drilling technology and are hyping it with implications for geothermal development that have nothing to do with the challenges of ultra-hot geothermal recovery.

That article is a fluffy hype piece on a drilling technology startup with an unproven application and with only pilot funding. More blurb:

Matthew Houde, a co-founder and geologist, remains undaunted. He notes that for millennia the Earth has shown us that stable holes of incredible depth are possible. Volcanoes draw their power from far deeper.

https://www.engine.xyz/founders/quaise/

Houde is not talking about holes that have been drilled from the top down, but from the bottom up.

hackenslash wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:What on earth about this report is supposed to inspire me to invest (either emotionally or financially) in such an enterprise? What persuades me that this is pure hype are simple facts about the mechanics of rock materials.

How many Theranos's will occur before we stop giving column inches to these cranks, let alone finance? This is somebody's pie-in-the-sky dream that's based on no science whatsoever. It's pure fantasy, and we're not even close to the technology to drill that deep yet. Not even in the ball park. Not even on the same continent as the ball park.

Honestly, this thread is in entirely the wrong sub-forum. Just because the energy is there doesn't make this any less pseudoscience. And that's speaking as somebody almost entirely ignorant of the mechanics of rock materials beyond a simple grasp of the variability of ductility at depth and pressure and a naïve view of temp increase with depth.

The whole bollocks about directed energy and lasers is the best bit of it all. This is Hyperloop level fantasy.

^ well, that would explain what blew my mind then.

hackenslash wrote:

tuco wrote:I am curious what the actual number would be, say in gigawatts. That's how one gets investors interested .. it can produce as much electricity as xyz nuclear powerplants. 10^? really big right?

1.21, by my calculations, admittedly made in a science-fiction film, but that's more appropriate than calculations done in a lab in this case.

One gets investors interested by getting them to believe. Whether you can actually deliver is another matter (c.f.Elisabeth Holmes).

Reminds me of some of the penny-stock crap I remember from the mid- and late-90's. These are MIT-trained engineers who are working on developing drilling technology. It doesn't matter what the technology is eventually used for, except that hyping it with talk about unlimited geothermal is, as you say, fairy-tale until a pilot plant for dry 500 °C geothermal holes is operating.

Macdoc wrote:

The company has raised some US$63 million to date, comprising $18 million in seed funding, $5 million in grants, and $40 million in a Series A financing round closed earlier this month.

What's this bit supposed to be telling us? Theranos raised $700 million for a complete fraud, and Elon Musk has done the same thing multiple times for his pet fantasies.

hackenslash wrote:

Macdoc wrote:

The company has raised some US$63 million to date, comprising $18 million in seed funding, $5 million in grants, and $40 million in a Series A financing round closed earlier this month.

What's this bit supposed to be telling us?

It's the kind of hype you hear from people pumping penny stocks, is what it is. New! Improved! Now with bigger financing!

Yeah, it's 'look, these people think it's good, and they have money, so they must know what they're on about'. It's a Clupidae of distinctly scarlet hue.

tuco wrote:I am curious what the actual number would be, say in gigawatts. That's how one gets investors interested .. it can produce as much electricity as xyz nuclear powerplants. 10^? really big right?

Lord Kelvin's 1862 musings on "The Secular Cooling of the Earth" give a starting point to which we must add radioactive decay and the modern science of materials to conclude that the Earth's internal heat source flows to the surface at a rate close to 50 Terawatts: wiki link.

Probably not the number you seek but it's a guide to further guesses...

newolder wrote:

tuco wrote:I am curious what the actual number would be, say in gigawatts. That's how one gets investors interested .. it can produce as much electricity as xyz nuclear powerplants. 10^? really big right?

Lord Kelvin's 1862 musings on "The Secular Cooling of the Earth" give a starting point to which we must add radioactive decay and the modern science of materials to conclude that the Earth's internal heat source flows to the surface at a rate close to 50 Terawatts: wiki link.

Probably not the number you seek but it's a guide to further guesses...

In fact, from that wiki article:

Despite its geological significance, Earth's interior heat contributes only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation.

I say we just paper over the surface with solar collectors and boil the biosphere a little more quickly than is otherwise expected, and then fix that problem with a nuclear winter.

The area of solar panels required to power Germany, the EU and the world is marked on a map of North Africa in a quora discussion (Cito's favourite source, I know) but I've seen similar plots elsewhere and there was at least 1 Ph.D. thesis in there somewheres...

As panel efficiencies increase, the area shrinks, of course.

I'm planning a new start-up to harvest solar energy before it ever reaches the surface by constructing an array of orbiting solar panels. There are some challenges in getting the energy down to the surface, and I estimate at least some significant dispersal, but it's fairly straightforward to use a laser as a carrier wave to transfer the energy down to collector stations on the surface for distribution. We'd also not have to build any new power stations, as existing stations could be repurposed for collection, and are already plugged into national grids.

This has the added advantage of presenting a controllable orbiting solar screen, which can attenuate the amount of insolation, thus mitigating climate change somewhat and giving us a larger window to bring the carbon budget under control.

I know, I know, the sceptics will already be banging on about how we construct it, but that's the clever bit. All we have to do is to build these nanobots that will harvest minerals from NEOs and will self-construct this solar array. Once operational, the nanobots will go dormant, only called upon to conduct repairs. Better still, all repairs can be conducted using the original materials, as the nanobots will simply deconstruct and reconstruct at an atomic level from the originally harvested minerals. I calculate we need to construct 100 of these nanobots, and they will take care of the rest.

Also, the global manufacturing industry will benefit massively from the development of this nanobot technology.

OK, there's my proposal. All I need now is somebody good at graphics to do some flashy png mock-ups and we xcan hit the Vegas trade shows and drum up some funding. Who's with me?

hackenslash wrote:
...
There are some challenges in getting the energy down to the surface, and I estimate at least some significant dispersal, but it's fairly straightforward to use a laser as a carrier wave to transfer the energy down to collector stations on the surface for distribution.
...

Jewish space lasers?