Hot Rocks Energy Generation

I call this blog ENERGY TOUGH LOVE because digging combustables up or cutting them down is so easy it is hard to stop. We, as a species have been doing it for 1000s of years and its a tough habit to break. But we are at a point where burning stuff up is damaging the environment to the point where its STOP BURNING OR DIE.

Lets Face IT, the Sun is on fire, and for all intents and purposes so is the center of the Earth. There is enough stuff burning already in our Solar System that we don’t have to burn more stuff. To prove the point below is a partial discussion of Geothermal steam generation on a scale that could rid ourselves of standard burning type electrical generating stations. 

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Presented by Alexandra de Blas

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Hot Rock Energy
Saturday 19 June  2004 

Summary
The idea of geothermal or hot rock power has been
around for years. Now it is one of the technologies
that might benefit from the Government’s low emissions
energy fund.

..Program Transcript
–>.. PRINT_CONTENT_START –>Scientists say that pumping water underground to heat it and drive clean electricity production is just around the corner.

The idea of geothermal or hot rock power, has been around for three decades, but realising the vision has proved difficult.

Now though, it’s one of the technologies that might benefit from the government’s low emissions energy fund.

Dr Prame Chopra from the Australian National University is a passionate advocate.

Prame Chopra: The idea is this, you find a place on earth where you can get access to rocks that are at high temperature inexpensively as you can. Everybody knows I guess that the earth gets hotter as you go deeper, in fact the centre of the planet is about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. In fact the deepest well that’s been drilled is only 12 kilometres deep anywhere in the world, and that’s cost billions of dollars, so accessing temperature at shallow depths is the key to making this technology work. Now there are plenty of places in the world where high temperatures come very close to the surface: volcanoes, and geysers and things like this come to mind immediately. Think of New Zealand or Japan or Indonesia, places like this. And of course Australia doesn’t have anything like that, we don’t have any active volcanoes on the mainland, so the original feeling about this technology for Australia was that we really didn’t have a significant resource.

For more of the discussion go to http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s1135215.htm

The point being we don’t need to dig up coal anymore to heat water..we can do it directly from the source..but it takes the political will to do it.