A prior boss of mine, one of the smartest guys I've ever worked for devised a geothermal extraction apparatus (theoretical) back when the Obama admin was flushing DOE with cash for grants. He was attempting to tackle some of the common barriers to "domestic" geothermal. The issue being it's hard to drill deep enough to reach rock hot enough.<p>His geothermal patent can be seen here [0] - it's a novel approach to vary the extent of power extracted from a geothermal well, while preventing the necessity to acquire both water rights AND mineral rights (commonly one of the biggest hurdles in "residential" geothermal deployments). The root of the patent is a novel means of "sealing" a geothermal well, providing bidirectional flow to and from the well.<p>His background is pretty interesting - he was a construction engineer by trade, but initially made his first fortune by speculating and purchasing land use options on corn-fields in Iowa. Turned out his guess was right, and DOE purchased some of his land to grow corn for ethanol production.<p>[0] - <a href="https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/20/12/43/9c15aafd9ade67/WO2020257917A1.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/20/12/43/9c15aaf...</a>
Geothermal power always sounds like a great idea. And it used to be one.<p>But nowadays, anything that needs a steam turbine is going to be more costly to operate than wind or solar + cheap storage, because steam turbines need expensive periodic maintenance.<p>(Geothermal heating, or for extra credit heating and cooling, remains viable.)<p>If you want to rescue geothermal power generation, you need to put in the engineering work to make a viable alternative to the steam turbine, one that needs a lot less, or anyway a lot cheaper, maintenance. Presumably it is still a turbine, but designed for a different working fluid. Some have suggested supercritical CO2 for this role.
Back in summer 1988 in Champaign, Illinois, I was a guest in a new house for dinner, and it used geothermal heat capacitance (or some similar term...basically i think water tubes buried a bit lower than the house) to essentially provide access to average year round temperature.<p>Since the climate there swings between extremes, this significantly lessened their electric/gas bills to the point of being laughably small...essentially a heat pump connected to the water tubes, if I remember.
Does the term Geothermal apply to long-duration thermal driven power generation? I have a design for a large scale tidal power generation system, and as global warming continues it becomes more beneficial. Does that count?
Reads more like: "DOE to spend toilet paper money to advance domestic geothermal energy." given the pet projects of members of congress eclipsing this by many multiples.
Why do I get the feeling that much of the $155M is going to end up in the pockets of the oil and gas industry? When it would better off invested in startups without the baggage, conflicts of interest, tunnel vision, etc.?