Drilling surprise opens door to volcano-powered electricity (opens in new tab)

I seem to be one of the few persons commenting so far who actually lives in the region and regularly reads local reporting on issues in North Dakota (a state neighboring my state). Western North Dakota, where the Bakken Shale oil boom is occurring, is very sparsely populated and historically had minimal infrastructure. It takes TIME to build pipelines to move the natural gas brought up by oil drilling operations to natural gas customers. Pipeline proposals are currently in regulatory review. There isn't even pipeline infrastructure in place yet for all of the petroleum production in North Dakota--much of the oil produced there is brought to broader markets in tanker trucks, and the truck traffic volumes are putting a lot of stress on highway roadbeds until the highways can be upgraded. Right now there is a boom economy in western North Dakota, with extremely high wages, low unemployment, a shortage of single women,

http://www.twincities.com/national/ci_22382285/north-dakota-...

and established businesses in the region importing workers from as far away as Illinois just to keep up normal operations as workers quit to join oil field crews. There hasn't been time to build infrastructure yet to move away the natural gas to markets that will pay for the gas--especially because the price of natural gas all over the United States has crashed because of the huge increase in production in the last few years. But given time, yes, there will be infrastructure in place to transport Bakken Shale gas to other markets, and I'm sure that we here in Minnesota will be as glad to have North Dakotan natural gas to supplement our nuclear-powered energy grid as we already are to have North Dakotan petroleum brought in by truck. Once more pipelines are built, the entire United States energy economy will become more flexible.

Still to be figured out is the economics of converting natural gas deliquefaction terminals (those cost BILLIONS of dollars and years to build or convert) along the Gulf Coast into liquefaction terminals, so that the United States can get into the business of exporting liquified natural gas. It could happen. North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula used to flare off all of their natural gas incidentally brought up during petroleum production--there was no local market for it. It took a long time to develop natural gas liquefaction; now there is international trade in natural gas that was undreamed of when I was growing up.

The challenge with natural gas is capture and transport.

Gas is, well, a gas. It doesn't stay put, and it takes considerable infrastructure to convert it to a more manageable form (compressed or liquified). Both of which are states it doesn't particularly seem inclined to remain in.

There've been enough issues transporting oil from new drilling zones. Transporting gas (by truck, rail, or pipeline) is even more complex.

That's among the reasons oil (and coal) are so useful as fuels sources: they're very convenient. Oil most especially, though even coal can be moved in pipelines (as slurry).

Mind: for both environmental (AGW) and resource limitations (peak oil/gas) reasons we'll have to shift off of them. But the practicality of both coal and oil means that that transition will carry with it immense costs.

I was intending to show you how New Zealand was shutting down its geothermal programmes, however I think I was wrong and it looks like it's growing. An interesting PDF (but 24mb!) http://www.geothermalnewzealand.com/NZTE_Geothermal_Booklet_... And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_New_Zealand

Most of Iceland's power comes from hydro, not geothermal.

There is, however, access in a number of regions where geothermal can be quite useful.

Iceland doesn't have a large population (332,000), but it's relatively close to Europe (or at least Ireland), and there have been proposals to link it via undersea transmission cables to the European grid.

Other significant resources exist around much of the Pacific Rim, including in Hawaii (limited population and a long way from nowhere), Japan (high population and critical energy resource ocnstraints), the Philippines, New Zealand, and the Pacific coast of the US. One of the largest present geothermal installations is The Geysers in California, with just under 1 GW of installed capacity. The largest geothermal resource within the US would be the Yellowstone supercaldera, and though this is presently protected from development, it represents a vast energy potential, as much as 20% of present US electric generating potential under some estimates. The National Park Status means that research is highly limited, so take with a very strong dose of salt.

Other significant resources exist in Kenya (another rift zone, as is New Zealand). Given Africa's status as a developing region, this is potentially hugely useful.

Geothermal has been significantly developed in many of these areas. I did some digging and apparently the Philippines has developed as much as 50% of its potential, where it provides 16% of the nation's electricity needs. Japan and the US have also done considerable development, as, of course, has Iceland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power_in_the_Philip...

Geothermal offers a number of very useful characteristics in a renewable / sustainable energy mix, including:

⚫ Base-load potential. Geothermal runs 24/7, is dispatchable (that is, you can throttle it up or down), and balances the nondispatchable nature of wind and solar energy.

⚫ Proven. Geothermal has been in active commercial production for decades. This is proven technology.

⚫ Relatively low local impacts. Plant footprints are small and local environmental disturbance fairly limited. Water needs and the possibility of locally-induced earthquakes (most minor) are possible concerns.

But it is still limited to specific locations for high yields. And if you're drawing sufficient amounts of thermal energy from even high-yield caldera, it can take a considerable period of time (decades) for a geothermal zone to recover. This is particularly a concern with "EGS" (enhanced geothermal systems) in which boreholes are drilled into otherwise only marginal zones. Often a single borehole's useful life is limited to a decade or two.

Stars are fusion plants.

Sufficiently large planets are dual gravitational + fission plants. There's pretty good reason to believe there may be active natural sustained chain reaction fission reactors within the Earth's inner mantel / outer core (for reasons the geologists / geophysicists are better able to explain, apparently not in the core itself). There's also considerable latent heat from formation -- even after 4.5 billion years (rock is a good insulator).

But not all planets have molten interiors (Mars doesn't). And many aren't particularly accessible: Venus has that little atmosphere problem, Mercury's a tad toasty, and gas giants don't give your legs a leg to stand on. Plus gravity.

Visions of spacefaring humans are, I suspect, mostly strongly fantastical:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth...

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/

Outer space clouds and/or nebulas would have extremely low density I think. Imagine the vastness of sail collectors (or similar) needed to yield significant amounts!

I see what you are saying, if you can't find it, why do we care?

Two reasons, as the article states, it has been found, twice in fact. Once in Hawaii and now in Iceland. The Icelandic team is drilling another hole near the existing hole to investigate further. Maybe the same can be done in Hawaii.

The other reason we care is that perhaps technology doesn't exist yet to easily find these near surface reservoirs, but maybe it will in the future. If they determine this hole can be utilized, it will drive research into finding these reservoirs.

I think that there is probably some catch up that surveying needs to do to make this more practical, but it's probably more an effect of not having wanted to find magma before. A quick Google search turns up the following page about remote sensing for volcanic activity.

http://www.geo.cornell.edu/eas/PeoplePlaces/Faculty/matt/vol...

If there's money in finding magma, research will follow. 36 - 50 MW of non-carbon energy is good news. Geothermal is already competitive with coal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#U...) and with recent improvements in drilling technology, magma is within reach. The borehole mentioned above had a depth of 2,100 m. Deepwater Horizon drilled to more than 10,000 m (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon).

Not going to say its easy. But you can pretty accurately map magma under the surface using seismology. I believe it requires an earthquake and having the correct equipment in place, so its far from ideal. But it does work well.

> It sounds like they didn't intend to drill into magma

Correct.

> intentionally find magma near the surface to exploit in this manner?

They're not at the exploiting point yet.

You're correct. Here's what they said:

> IGA reports in 2010 that 10,715 MW is on line generating 67,246 GWh.

http://www.geo-energy.org/pdf/reports/GEA_International_Mark... page 4, 2nd paragraph of the section "Overview/Results"

Why?

Then one day someone leaves a sock on the ground starting a series of events that ends with everyone in Iceland being either dead or insane.

The short answer is, we don't know. The longer answer involves a lot of evidence that we can't hurt it that much. But then again, in the 1900's farmers were forced by law to dump their waste ag chemicals into the Atlantic ocean, so wait 100 years and we'll see.

More importantly are the subtle differences to ground water temperature when wells are drilled close together in densely populated areas. This is a bit off-topic for the OP, but I went to an alt-energy talk where someone was all jazzed about geo-thermal. I asked if anyone's done any research about what the cold water pumped into the well does to the water table, or whether you could trigger fungal blooms underground and render otherwise potable water undrinkable. They, as you can guess, didn't have an answer.

Alt-energy is all exciting and holds such potential until you realize that bituminous coal was once the miracle solution to having everyone burn wood.

Only so long as the neutrinos don't mutate.

Just so long as they steer cleer of the hollow adamantite veins, we ought to be fine.

It's good that it wasn't a balrog.

I just submitted a question on "running out" of renewable energy that included this scenario, so fingers crossed!

I do wonder to what extent we can mitigate potential future volcanic activity by preemptively pulling energy out of hot spots like this.

The odds are low, but a supervolcanic detonation in Yellowstone would be one of the most serious threats to the United States (or even the planet), so if we can mitigate it slightly while actually profiting from the process that seems worth pursuing.