Why can't we just dig a big ass hole in the ground and generate power from the heat of the earth?

That will take a very long time to occur

that's what they said about oil

The heat is replenished only slowly, unless you're tapping in near where magma circulates or something.

You see, all the heat you find by digging in the earth comes out at the surface. But is the ground hot? No. The heat is only coming up very slowly, much, much less than the heat of sunlight falling down from above. The power that's heating the surface from underneath is all the power is.

As you dig deeper, there's a higher temperature, but no more power to maintain it, so if you start drawing that heat off, it'll replenish itself only very slowly.

What you end up needing is to collect from a very large horizontal area to get a useful amount of power. Solar takes a much, much smaller area to provide the same amount of energy.

To be more specific, geothermal power is an average of 65 milliwatts per square meter, compared to sunlight, which provides about a kilowatt per square meter, square on, or 100-300 watts round-the-clock average. If you want a megawatt of source heating (not power generation), you need over 15 square kilometers of geothermal collection.

It's true that you can sustainably extract the power somewhat faster if you're down deeper, due to there being less insulation with the deep heat, for instance, the sea floor (with a few km less rock) has about double the power per unit area. But notice what an absurd amount of rock you've got to drill down through to get those extra milliwatts per square meter.

Geothermal is quite unreasonable as a power source except at good sites for it. However, it might eventually be worth doing as an epic project to end earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, which produces some power as a byproduct.

Didn't that Russian attempt end when they got so deep the hot rock had the consistency of playdoh and kept clogging up the drill bit or something?

Why can't we just detonate a nuke or something really far underground and dig down like that?

I don't understand the image. How did they drill holes into water?

They froze it first

Something like that.

It actually ended because they sent a microphone down, and they could hear the tormented souls.

The earth generates more heat from radioactive decay, this is on the order of terawatts. Second, if we can put the effort into fucking up Earth's geodynamo over human timescales, we would certainly be capable of building an artificial magnetic field generator.

Induced seismicity is a bigger issue

This was a proposed method for generating fusion power, just detonate hydrogen bombs underground:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER

Too bad they fucked up one of the tests and ejected a bunch of radioactive steam in front of a bunch of reporters

Ah, so sad. I thought it was unexplained creepy noise, but it ended up being a "hoax". I use the word hoax lightly. It's actually a fantastic example of how religion works.

I think I will scare the hell out of my future children with these sound files/story and then will let them know this is how Christians operate in real life. They like to scare people into believing bullshit.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_to_Hell_hoax

aint core still producing heat trough fission?

I actually have an elementary school memory of my friend telling me about this, he believed it, I don't remember if I believed it or not, I guess I did because I usually believed everything I heard.

That would create a volcano.

>The earth generates more heat from radioactive decay, this is on the order of terawatts.
...for the whole Earth.

By comparison, the sunlight falling on all of Earth is over a hundred petawatts, ten thousand times greater.

Now, which seems easier to you:
- capturing all of the radioactive decay heat generated within Earth, or
- capturing one ten-thousandth of the sunlight falling on Earth?

We do. It's called geothermal energy.

This would take a pretty huge amount of time to occur. But eventually, yes it would accelerate the thermodynamic heat loss of the earth.

Yep it does. As soon as you liberate heat from a more pressurised environment, it is more susceptible to loss though convection/radiation/conduction.

Earth's core is nowhere ear hot enough for fusion. You're looking at the core of the sun type temperatures for fusion. If you genuinely meant heat though radioactive fission, then lol.

Jump into space.

When you can't, I'll tell you you're just giving up because it's hard, and then you'll realize you're a dip.

That really depends on a lot of things you didn't mention.

youtube.com/watch?v=yuu0QcnOVbo

Stupid analogy

Top comfy

>>Now, which seems easier to you:
>>- capturing all of the radioactive decay heat generated within Earth, or
>>- capturing one ten-thousandth of the sunlight falling on Earth?
>That really depends on a lot of things you didn't mention.
It really doesn't. For the most part, the escaping decay heat isn't concentrated anywhere, but leaks out at milliwatts per square meter everywhere. The exceptions are the only interesting geothermal sites.

Some expansion of geothermal power is interesting, but not terawatts, and the world uses terawatts.

It's just too fucking difficult and pointless. The Russians gave up because each time they were got the drill up to the surface to replace it, it took so much time that the progress they had done on the hole actually regressed because the unstable dirt filled it back up.

>But eventually, yes it would accelerate the thermodynamic heat loss of the earth.
But you could also say this about wind power, hydrothermal, even solar. But even if it's not valid for an energy source if it accelerates heat loss it could be used to combat climate change. If you regulated it well enough it could even be used as a thermostat for the earth.

What if we designed a drill that could be changed without removing the previous. For example the drill bit has an expanding drill bit within it that expands once the previous one is removed. Not that user but I want to problem solve this

Unforeseen consequences.

Too bad right now solar energy isn't developed enough to replace other things.

Dig it too deep and the heat pump will lose too much heat on the return side to justify the hole.

Dig it too shallow and the heat pump won't be able to produce enough heat to justify the project.

Dig the hole just deep enough to heat a building and the heat will go away eventually.

why can't we just domesticate a volcano? You know, put a lid or something. Maybe a liquid nitrogen lake around her to keep her behave

While it's always enjoyable to brainstorm about these stuff, finding a solution would probably require expertise in the area (with a ton of academic education) and combining it with either some new technology or another obsucre field that the previous scientists have overlooked

It is highly unlikely that the solution (that is cost efficient and feasible) to such a problem was simple enough to be outlined by some irrelevant people and the researchers have failed to notice it

It really is a pointless effort.

that is not how it works at all (not good at english so I won't explain it)

>Too bad right now solar energy isn't developed enough to replace other things.
It is, it's just not competitive yet. We could use it and support a similar level of industry if we had nothing else. For instance, joule for joule, solar is already cheaper than coal. It's just that coal can be burned on demand, while solar comes in unpredictably.

When you want fuel, it's hard to beat the economics of hills and lakes of it just laying around to be picked up. If you want power on demand and you have fuel just laying around, it's hard to beat the economics of just burning it.

The portion of human effort spent on gathering, refining, and burning fuel is pretty small, we could stand the higher level of effort needed to make batteries and synthesize fuel using solar power.

Geothermal, on the other hand, simply couldn't meet the world's power needs at our current tech level. There's simply not enough there that's accessible without major technological advancement.

so you won't explain because its too hard?

>It's just that coal can be burned on demand, while solar comes in unpredictably.
so that means that unless you develop revolutionariliy impresive battery technology, it DOES NOT serve the current level of tech and industry

thats what current level of tech and industry mean. literally the same. If you have to stop civilization on rainy days then youre not replacing fossil fuels einstein

It's obvioulsy a bad idea to anyone with common sense. you are specially retard thats why you consider it, educate yourself on a basic level before asking questions, dont expect everyone to spoonfeed you every little bit of information.

this is how you look:
-Hey i like this girl, maybe i should shit in her lawn to get her attention
-what the fuck bro that's disgusting
-HA BUT CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHY IT WONT WORK
-fuck off sick fucker
-HA, HE CANT EXPLAIN WHY IT DOESNT WORK, I MUST BE RIGHT!!!!

seriously, i really hope youre just pretending to be a retare

the earth is like a balloon, if you poke a hole, it pops, and spews its liquid glory all over you

>spend the earth's inner heat
literally imposible

a compared to b. c compared to d.
nice fallacy bro

Say we did though, what would happen if we managed to cool the earth's interior.

I'm sure there was a time when nobody had any idea that one day human activity would be so significant as to actually alter the climate.

That could work....
The common earth worm digs its tunnels in a similar fashion...

>yfw a fucking bio-engineer crosses blue whale DNA with worms to form giant earth eaters.

0_0

Naturally Efficient.

O_O

>we open a hole in the earth.
>hit the mantle
>lava comes out from all the unreleased pressure points into one super pin sized hole.
>death is swift
:D
Its perfect OP.

When a volcano occurs, how come it doesn't depressurize the entire core?

GRAVITY YOU FUCK

You got the order wrong
>Greedy fucks spend [some of] the Earth's inner heat
>We all die
>Millions and millions and millions and millions of years
>Suddenly no more magnetism
>No more magnetosphere

Also the sun expanded and vaporised the earth at about the same time as the magnetosphere went poof

because it eventually cools the surrounding area and the heat transfer rate is too low for it to be economically viable

The pressure is due to thermal convection, the Earth isn't like a giant balloon.

You aren't even intelligent enough to realise how stupid you really are.

>make hole in earth
>get power and colonize other planets
>evolve into other races on each planet accordingly
>earth is long gone with half of our solar system cuz magnetic sphere and sun gets bigger
>different descendants of humans that evolved differently on different planets start a galactic war
>all goes poof
>evolution. Exe restarting
>first cell starts again
>alien jimmy gets an A+ on his school project by demonstrating how his little evolution system works
>good for you little jimmy
>good for you

this is what happened to mars

source: time traveller my name is robert nautili

what

>>The portion of human effort spent on gathering, refining, and burning fuel is pretty small, we could stand the higher level of effort needed to make batteries and synthesize fuel using solar power.
>>and synthesize fuel
>so that means that unless you develop revolutionariliy impresive battery technology, it DOES NOT serve the current level of tech and industry
Chimp.

Stupid analogy for a stupid question

Yes. If it's more difficult to do than other things which deliver equal or better results more cheaply, then it's not worth doing right now. This is an important part of something called 'engineering', which you may have heard of.

Geothermal energy is basically only worth doing in places where there's hot rock close to the surface. There's still development going on in ways to sink deeper holes and try to harness geothermal energy from places that aren't necessarily geologically active, but they just aren't practical,

This is called hot-dry rock geothermal (geologists are very creative huh?). It is possible in many locations to drill deep enough to reach a point with high enough temperature (either close to a magma intrusion, or just deep enough as in the earth's geothermal gradient). The major problem, besides engineering concerns, is water. All types of geothermal energy require water as a working fluid. In conventional geothermal fields, such as in northern California, confined groundwater that is found near a magma emplacement is channeled or pumped to surface through geothermal well, and if it is hot enough, the groundwater will automatically flash to steam at surface pressure which will run your turbine. If the water is hot but not enough to flash when reaching surface pressure, the water passes through a heat exchanger to flash a lower boiling point liquid, which then is channeled through a turbine.

Hot-dry rock, on the other hand, requires that an enormous amount of water be pumped into the geothermal well, heat up, and return to surface. Many areas do not have the water resources to supply this, and furthermore after water is pumped down for geothermal it dissolves too many heavy metals to be used for DW. Also, pumping down cool surface water will speed up the rate of cooling considerably.

This image shows the geothermal gradient at some different locations. Excluding a magma intrusion, which would be very close to the surface.

Oh. I thought it was the cool outer layer contracting and pressing on the core.

somehow the drilling hole in Windischeschenbach is missing in the picture.

I was there myself. Threw a coin down there.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Continental_Deep_Drilling_Programme

Solar energy does have some advantages over coal (besides being eco-friendly). It's relatively easy to put a value on any one solar project because we have a good idea of how much sunlight they are going to get and how long they are going to last. Solar panels also require little to no maintenance. Solar panels (photovoltaics) aren't the only way of harnessing solar energy, you can use a bunch of mirrors concentrate sunlight onto a pipe filled with a fluid.

Yes, it's called geothermal energy, look it up.

> geothermal energy

The big problem being that the average flux of energy from inside the earth is very low ~0.1 watts/m^s. Orders of magnitude less than solar.

What this means that anywhere you set up a system to extract the energy it becomes depleted very quickly and destroys the economics.

The main appeal of solar power is that it's available nearly anywhere and there's so much of it just falling for free out of the sky. Every day, more solar energy falls on the Earth than all of the fossil fuels we've burned plus all that's left in the ground.

The cost of harnessing it is only a matter of technological competence. We have in the example of the leaf a solar collector, atmospheric carbon capturer, and fuel synthesizer that is produced using only local materials and sunlight, and requires no labor at all.

Leaves evolved to serve the needs of plants, not to serve our needs, but the day will come when our solar collectors cost as little as leaves while serving us better than today's solar panels.

Underrated

1. Economic Cost of the hole.
2. Energy cost of pumping the heat up.
3. Impossibility of fixing anything you screw up down in the hole.
4. Weather doesn't guarantee temp difference.
5. Alternatives are better.
tl;dr: Move to Iceland.

>I was only pretending to be retarded

You sure showed him.

We could obviously do it but it's just not worth it.
Nobody would want to fund such an enormously expensive and even riskier project.

Why not just do it at volcanoe instead of drilling miles into the earth?

god doesnt want us to

>literally impossible
>but just in case it did

Why can't we just split an atom in half and generate power from the heat it releases?

the outer layer is crumbly

By the time that happens, we will all die from the sun expanding.

That is true, but you are still gonna have a hell of a time harvesting enough geothermal to have an impact on Earth's geodynamo. That's the argument I'm making here.

Solar power is going to eat everything though

>saharan giant death worms become a real thing

I'd be down for it.

Because it's too difficult brah

>spend the earth's inner heat
American education

English chunnel is 30 miles long.

WHY can't we just turn one of these digging machines sideways to dig straight down?

It gets too hot and the sides of the walls start pushing in harder and harder.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

*tip*

Exponentially more expensive with depth

As you get deeper the problem is the inertia of the rotating mass. Materials science needs to work on it.

Disappointed so far Veeky Forums.

The reason that this isn't viable is because the temperature gradient is too shallow in most of the world. This makes the losses ridiculously high when you are trying to move your heat to the surface (you can't make an efficient heat engine without a large temperature difference). In some parts of the world when the heat gradient is not so shallow we already have geothermal plants everywhere.

>This makes the losses ridiculously high when you are trying to move your heat to the surface

What is an insulator

>implying completely efficient insulators exist
>What is the difference between theory and practical application

>what is a very very thick wall of insulation

>Your drill is the drill that will pierce the Heavens!