
Linking an excellent article on a renewable energy alternative that BOE has been following closely.
Good assessment:
I’m confident because the externalities that come with wind, solar and batteries, which are the other top candidates, are too large to bear at multi-terawatt scale: too much land, too many minerals, too much labour per unit of energy. Geothermal is very different: it is more like fossil fuels without the carbon. It’s more like nuclear – except fusion doesn’t work yet and fission is controversial.
Carlos Araque
Challenges:
A lot of the challenges are the same as for oil and gas. The subsurface is an uncertain environment. The deeper you go, the more extremes you have, but we’ve come a long way with the oil and gas industry to develop a whole suite of technologies, techniques and measurement systems to minimise that risk. The main challenge is maintaining wellbores from closing in on themselves as you go deeper. There’s a lot of pressure in the rock and these holes eventually will collapse. The way we answer that is by creating a glass wall in the rock as we burn it. When our technology vaporises the rock, it creates a glass wall and that remains on the walls and prevents the hole from collapsing.
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