An idea for clean power

Geothermal is not new, we even have it in Australia, which is nowhere near the edge of a continental plate like Iceland. They find a hot spot and pour water into it till it runs out of energy, extracting what heat they can. When it cools down, that's it! All the [fresh drinking] water has to be trucked in too.
How about drilling a hole near the coast, say 10 kilometers deep. Insert a liner [the technology to make a fabric that can take the corrosive environment has just arrived, Graphene], pour in sea water, boil it and use the steam for turbines. The condensed, desalinated water can be used for agriculture. After a few cycles the liner can be removed and the minerals left behind could be processed. The energy removed is replenished by the tidal forces of the sun.
The Earth is a ball of molten rock and iron, we live on a thin crust like the skin on a coffee. Oil is so 20th century, much too useful to burn.

I have heard of several versions of geothermal heat extraction. In the ocean, a volcano, deep underground and so on. It often seems puzzling to me that we as a species don't utilize these ideas more thoroughly. Especially when it comes to temperature moderation concerning homes.

All of these ideas seem fine and they all have their own pros and cons. Personally, I think clean energy makes plenty of sense and I believe there is only one reason why it wasn't a complete reality 10-20 years ago+.

Corruption/profits.

Unti we see the price of gas reach $8 a gallon we as Americans will never push for these clean power sources. You drive down and street and you see people in jacked up trucks getting 6-10 MPG and as long they can afford to fill that 20 gallon tank for under 100 bucks its never going to change.

Now some may say that "I need that truck for work" I can accept that but why do you insist that you need that truck yet you have off-road wheels on it and you drive it from city to city every day? Why do you need 400HP supercharged v10 to commute to work?

We have this illusion that we are going to have cheap gas forever and as long as we continue to subsidize the oil and gas companies we are never going to break our dependance.

shn1k3rs said:

as we continue to subsidize the oil and gas companies we are never going to break our dependance.

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Bingo!

The WWW has given us a [virtually] free communication system. Geothermal power as I described, would give us all the free power we need. The recovered minerals would cover any costs. And they are going to have to make it free because in a very short time robots will be doing all the work, I mean everything!
At any point in time there are millions of people striving to improve the the world, 4d printers, thought control [search Muse], Algae farming [whole foods like Spirulina, bio fuel from sewage], new materials, nano tech, medical procedures, asteroid mining, electric bikes, the list goes on... There's plenty to keep us occupied when we're unemployed.
Who wants to be employed anyway, it's such a waste of human potential. I've employed plenty of people, some are hopeless, some are useless. That's not to say they are useless humans, they just haven't found their niche. The good ones are like robots in a way. You give them instructions and they carry them out without drama. Robots work all day though, not just 10 or 12 hours. But I digress...
The world has never been so good, I'm completely sure we're going to sort the minor details out, giving us more time to ride.
Here's another idea! Use fibers to raise water in tall buildings using capillary action. It could be done in stages, nature can only manage 350 feet or so [the height of the tallest trees]. do it on the sunny side and it could take the heat out of the building saving you on air con, heating too. Generate power with it on the way down, a separate system for the waste water could do the same thing, think regen.

I wonder how the fluids used in Geothermal compare to those used in Fracking. Both work much the same way, causing fissures in the ground to release the energy form. Both started out using water but started using science to come up with something more stable than nature. Fracking is basically using much the same thing as you find in the radiator of your car, it only makes sense that geothermal would use the same since it WORKS much the same as the radiator of your car. That and the gases emitted cancel out any notion of CLEAN energy, though there's still the chance to be cleanER. I ugess it's okay to replace the fluids with carbon dioxide, except if there's a leak;; Then there's the effect of the surface cooling, I guess you don't put a system in around fruit trees, etc.

But with the high start up cost, the unstable rollercoaster of the output, plus the fact it just doesn't work well everywhere, geothermal doesn't look like a major player in energy production. I wonder if the single home system would work well in southern California.

The system I propose contains the fluids, only steam is released. Graphene insulates it. Enormous amounts of energy are just ten kilometers away.
Turbines could be placed in mines to get them closer to the heat source until materials are available. I'm not talking about hot spots, I'm talking deep drill.

I friend of mine works at an RnD company and has told me that they are working on these types of applications. From what I understand there are a number of unique engineering challenges with this type of mining (heat, pressure, distance).

I know the earth has a massive amount of energy in heat just below the surface, but of the energy systems this seems like the one with the most danger to the future of the planet. Our atmosphere is pretty special and part of the reason it exists is that we have a spinning core of melted iron. Better it stays hot. Also a large scale geothermal might create a down-facing bump in the crust leading to more movement on a plate. This type of movement is bad.

Sea water is 3.5% desolved salt. So for every 100 gallons of water you pump down the well, you leave behind 3.5 gallons of salt. That would quickly clog up any saltwater geothermal system.

Salt is useful, check out salt batteries. It's not just salt, plenty of other stuff too.
There are obstacles for sure, we'll sort them out. It's crazy living on a ball of energy and not dipping in to it. Material technology is going to make this work.

Geothermal has a high barrier to entry and is accessible to corporations with cash. There are lots of energy sources to chase, whether the primary source is at the center of the earth (geothermal) or the center of our galaxy (solar/biogas/wind).

IMHO, people often get an idea for generation and quickly get wound up in the engineering solution to deliver it (I know I do, engineering is fun). But we seldom sit back and look at all the options available to us and prioritise which ones to invest our passion in. When we do, it's usually a base pub argument.

For small domestic people like us I think the focus should be on projects with a low barrier to entry such as biogas and domestic wind/solar. This probably explains why pakistan now has a million domestic biodigesters. Less time to tinker and more focus on delivery.

I like geothermal, but I think there is plenty that the average consumer on a 600sqm block can do to make geothermal unecessary, and remove the argument that corporations or governments deny us access to investing in it. Take em out of the personal energy loop.

Samd said:

There are lots of energy sources to chase, whether the primary source is at the center of the earth (geothermal) or the center of our galaxy (solar/biogas/wind).

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Though really it's the center of our solar system that creates those--the center of the galaxy is a wee bit too far away to provide us with any useful energy.

(if we could harness the gravitic energy of the likely supermassive black hole there, we could get some awesome amounts of "free" energy--transporting it back to us here would be problematic, though!)

Pocket Tokamaks

Gravitic wave energy harvesting is a possible future source of power [assuming they exist], but unless we capture a ufo and back engineer it, it may be beyond our abilities, for now...
However, geothermal using seawater as an exchange medium is not too hard.
Many years ago I came up with an idea to actuate valves with pneumatics instead of cams, giving you variable valve timing and a great deal less drag in the motor. I took plans to various firms, but they couldn't see it. I knew it was the future for ICE, it's obvious. Recently I found this...
http://www.worldcarfans.com/112021041021/koenigsegg-is-developing-a-camless-engine---report
I wrote to Christian Von Keonigsegg to congratulate him on the development and explained that I had thought of it but was unable to build it, and was happy that it worked. I told him of my idea [I say "my idea" but I realize I'm not alone]. I asked him to use his notoriety and credibility to get in touch with Larry Page [ Google, asteroid mining], he could make it happen.
As yet I haven't received a reply. He's probably mulling it over.
Engineers I met when I was building the gearbox for my bike told me it wouldn't work "or they would have them already". But that's another story.
I gave up on the valve idea when I discovered electric vehicles, which many of us realize to be the future of transport. I wanted to be amongst the pioneers.

Would you like Christian's email? We share hairdressers. I spent some time there in 2005...
No it's not shopped.

Lol, same hairdresser as me!
That's me in a wig on my avatar.
Streamliners.
If you have his ema, I would indeed like it.

You'll never guess it in a million years

You should consider Elon Musk and Nunzio LaVecchia if you're looking for backers from the fringe!
pm sent.

lol Thank's samd, it's beyond me but maybe one of those bots will pick it up and we can all benefit.

Have you heard about Seawater Greenhouse? Those guys are in South Australia and have proof of concept examples of using nothing but seawater and solar power to grow commercially viable fresh fruit and vegetables. Next they are going to try to do chickens. Fascinating stuff:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/24/growing-food-in-the-desert-crisis

That's great stuff [except the chicken bit, lol]. Ingenuity will save us.
I've been looking into algae farming in my area, nearly all the boats have gone now they've run out of fish. It would be great for the town, and the world. It's a great source of bio fuel.
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/research/OMEGA/index.html

Here's another idea, instead of putting rubbish in landfills, combine it with molten iron and build rail tracks and ships with it. It's mostly carbon.

Geothermal in Australia has been having a few set backs.
I've just been designing off grid solar for Australian outback.
With proper energy management i'm going on a 4kW standard solar system will power a 5 person household, no worries, obviously a small genny would have to be on standby once in a while for bleak periods.
COP's for small air conditioning is around 5, making them really efficient.
We waste so much energy, electricity wise would say on average over 50% goes to waste.
Solar research is up to this lately.
http://m.phys.org/news/2013-06-solar-cell-world-highest-conversion.html#jCp

There's so much energy in the immediate enviroment.
The double edged sword with waste on the other side is only just starting to be attended to.
If it's not solar, it's wind, wave, etc.

garp said:

Here's another idea, instead of putting rubbish in landfills, combine it with molten iron and build rail tracks and ships with it. It's mostly carbon.

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I can only imagine how much quality of the steel would plummet, not to mention all of the pollution caused by burning so much garbage. I bet in the next hundred or two hundred years though there will be an entire industry devoted to going through landfills to recover what we now consider "waste".

Google will be on it soon after the technology is available to make it competitve to other energy costs. Those two lines are going to interesect sooner than later as they are headed towards eachother.

If geothermal conversion technology becomes efficient and affordable, we'll see it happen. Right now, you have to get a the scale of VERY large plant / production scheme to make use of it. Solar on the other hand is readily supplied to all of us living on the surface and the investment in hardware is much less, but it still is having a tough time taking off due to current production costs and efficiencies.

Because ultimately its the relative cost performance of an energy source that drives commercialization. I have often wondered why, for instance, ExxonMobil invests in the Alberta tar sands, with a EROEI (Energy returned on energy invested in the range of 5, when they do significant R&D in Algae energy production, hold patents, and which promises much much better performance. I believe the answer to be complex and they have PhD types running the analytics all the time. Somewhere in that equation is a consideration of scaling. The black answer to green energy continues to be that, hey, what with all the promise, renewables still deliver a miniscule 6% of the worlds energy (less biomass).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy

The unbuffered(/uncorrected for their intermittency) EROEI for the following energy sources were stated in a 2013 paper in the journal of Energy: Solar PV (Germany) - 3.9, Biomass(corn) - 3.5, Wind (E-66 turbine) - 16, Solar CSP(desert) - 19, CCGT (gas) - 28, Coal - 30, Hydro (medium sized) - 49, Nuclear (PWR) - 75.[5][6] .

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On the basis of EROEI and low-carbon demand, I still advocate nuclear, albeit with newer designs (pebble bed, and China's HTR-10 design in particular).
http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/pressreleases/2014/may/name,51005,en.html