> If you’re interested in working on this kind of tech we’re hiring.

All jobs onsite in Houston: https://www.erdosmiller.com/jobs

Interesting that the tech sales job is bilingual (haven't seen that too often).

Hey Ken!

It was great working with you at DigiDrill. Glad to see you're still pushing the frontier of high temp, high G MWD systems.

Keep up the good work!

How do you do inspections on the buried assets?

At least in Tuscany - where there is a cluster of geothermal power plants creating 1/3 of the region electricity (it should reach 40% in a few years) - they had to invent special filters to lower the emission of mercury and hydrogen sulfide https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/articles/2024/10/geot...

I don't know if it's "no footprint" at all. For what I know, which is not much, but just what a person living here might know, there's a footprint that can be somehow managed. But I'm not an engineer

> no pollution, no footprint, no hazardous waste

As a layman, I assume waste heat would still be an issue? Even so I would also assume it's still way less damaging to the environment than everything else.

Complicated permitting as compared to what? I would assume it's much more complicated than solar, and less complicated than... is there anything else available at small scale?

[dead]

It's so silly to use statues of liberty as a metric when nobody really knows how tall it is either (famously it's a lot smaller than people expect).

> 8,000–9,000 feet is approximately 2.5 kilometers.

The usual value for the geothermal gradient is 25 to 30 degrees C per kilometer. So at 2.5km, in most locations they might be able to get boiling water, but not superheated steam. Most of the geothermal enthusiasts are talking about needing to go down 4 to 12 kilometers. Is there something special about the geology at this site?

That’s close to the deepest geothermal wells which are about 5 km deep:

https://en.renovablesverdes.com/iceland-is-drilling-the-deep...

https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202411/07/WS672c6803a310f...

Actually, 3 miles means a lot more to Americans than 15,000 feet, much like your 2.5 kilometers.

And 50 football fields would mean a lot more, to less measurement-aware Americans.

The Statue of Liberty was made by France. This IS us Americans trying to use less American-centric units of measure.

Both made by the French

> 4.5 kilometers — roughly the height of 14 Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other!

Or about one Mont Blanc from sea level

Kinda. We have a lot of existing coal plants that we want to offline to decarbonize, and they've already got turbines.

Assuming we can drill deep enough and harness it, the thermal energy in the earth's crust is essentially infinite.

Alot of the heat comes from radioactive decay. Heavy radioactive elements under alot of pressure and heat. There's also friction from our moon (earth seems to have a more active core than many other planets) and simply being very well isolated. (Rock is a terrible heat conductor)

Also... Iceland. They're massive in aluminium production for a reason. They have basically infinate abundant energy boiling out from the ground. Here in sweden its used by alot of homes for heating; getting a well producing 60c water is pretty cheap. (A single home may have their own well)

The issue is using it for power really only becomes viable when you reach superheated steam temperatures. And at those depths; drills melt, so its use outside of volcanic regions has been real slow.

The maximum COP for a peltier device is 1, in practice it’s far below that.

Heat pumps go way beyond a COP of 1; an open-loop cooling system with an evaporative cooling tower can have a COP of 7. A closed loop heat pump alone can have a COP of 4.

Peltier devices are a dead end for moving heat around outside of specialized applications where you can’t drag around two heat exchangers, a valve, and a pump (like active cooling clothing). It’s impossible for them to even approach the efficiency of resistive heating (COP of 1).

I thought exactly the same thing. Peltier's themselves don't really have a pathway for becoming as efficient as steam turbines but there are other methods currently in research. One promising idea is to use sodium vapor in a fuel cell style device: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jpowsour.2017.10.022

[dead]

You didn't understand the article. A home heat pump isn't a power source.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Heat pumps are a completely different thing than geothermal energy.

Where Europe is ahead of the US is really in neighborhood wide geothermal for heating and cooling. The US tends to only use networked multi building geothermal for corporate and university campuses while having little central planning for a neighborhood of individuals to migrate to geothermal.

Well its clear you didn't read the article, it explains how this particular type of geothermal is a technological advance. Current geothermal electrical generation is limited to very specific geology, enhanced geothermal is able to be used in many more places.