“This road is long, and much of the map remains blank. The biggest problem is drilling miles through hot rock, safely. If scientists can do that, however, next-generation geothermal power could supply clean energy for eons.”
Article is paywalled, but geothermal power solutions already exist. NZ gets 25% of its power from geothermal. Its not a science problem, its an engineering one, and mostly solved as well. And fortunately, the oil companies have all the expertise to do it.
SLB had acquired Celsius Energy, a company that deploy low depth geothermal solution. They are also partner with Genvia to developpe hydrogen. And have also plans for offshore wind turbines. Oil company all have plan to transition to new energy. Then know oil is not a long terme business. The problem is doing the transition while making money. If you dont make money, you die. And if you die, you cannot do transition. Unfortunately, oil still generate shitload of money…
I’d really like to see governments enact bans on drilling new oil wells. Then suddenly all the tooling for drilling wells is freed up for geothermal wells.
While oil drilling is profitable, there is always the risk that these new companies get bought out by oil companies and told to drill for oil instead.
It is a good sign that in some countries where leasing is still open, oil companies are buying a lot fewer permits
France has ban drilling new Wells on its territory. For now, despite oil lobbying, ban is still applied :) The problem with geothermy is more a social and legal problem. No one care about drilling in the middle of north sea. But geothermic should be drill close to population. And suddenly, everyone becomes afraid of earthquake, and you need dozens of authorizations.
France is also 80-90% nuclear from memory, so less demand for other renewables?
But valid point, its never that simple :(
More something like 50% nuclear, 40% renewable, but we also sell lot of nuclear electricity to Germany. Hydraulic is very well used. We have hydrolic power plant everywhere it’s possible. Not many people know this. “Hell ya, why don’t we build more hydrolic plant ?!” Well, because we already did 😅
The image is a test brick being spun around under the output of a MASER which is a type of directed energy weapo…tool. This is normally highly controlled to run tokamaks but they are trying to make it less expensive and adapt it to shot dirt and rocks to evaporate them and easily penetrate at 1meter per hour for around 100 days…~3km deep.
Didn’t see that in the article, sounds interesting … where can I read more?
You can check them out here in their websites: https://www.quaise.energy/
There’s a pictogram schematic of their maser system. The little tube part above the molten pit is called the waveguide. Waveguides allow the transport of energy from the source to elsewhere. The wavelength has to be tuned such that the receiving end…rock… Actually absorbs the power. Otherwise the amplifier would receive deflections and either overheat or blow up.
