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Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard
Recently, and MIT lab developed a way to drill a 7-8 mile deep hole relatively easily; using a gas cutting head rather than a mechanical one.
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So I can call up my local drilling company and hire one of these, no? Until then, it's still theoretical/prototype stuff. Might work, and certainly worth looking into, but we need technology that we can build today - or that should have been built 20 years ago - not "we'll have the bugs worked out in a year or two" pie-in-the-sky.
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The heat down that deep is pretty darn close to inexhaustible.
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It's not a question of it being inexhaustible or not. It's a question of how fast the heat will flow through rock. So you drill a well: that's a narrow cylinder. Pumping water down it will boil the water, but will also cool the rock at the surface of the cylinder. That sets up a gradient, so heat will flow from the surrounding high-temperature rock, but since the rock is not a good conductor of heat, it will not flow very fast. For any particular situation - size of well, temperature at the bottom, etc - you will quickly reach a steady-state, where heat flows at a constant rate, which generates X amount of steam and so some fraction of X MWatts of electricity. That's why the geothermal plant up the road only generates 90 MWatts (or whatever the number), and not enough power to run the whole West Coast: because that's the amount of heat that flows into the geothermal area.
Any engineer could easily plug numbers into the relevant equations, and figure out how much power you can expect to generate from a given well. The drilling people can give you a cost on the well, then you need generators, ongoing maintenance, and so on. Do the math, and figure out how much a MWatt is going to cost.