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+--- Thread: Volcanoes as a source of limitless energy (/showthread.php?tid=1687)
Volcanoes as a source of limitless energy - Leftiris - 01-15-2024
I ran across this article and found this to be very interesting. Could our volcanoes be a limitless source of energy, if we could somehow harness it?
From Business Insider:
Scientists in Iceland want to drill a hole into a magma chamber about a mile underground in an attempt to generate limitless energy.
The Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) aims to create the world's first research center above a magma chamber to monitor, sample, and test the molten rock in situ for the first time.
The center, it hopes, could offer unprecedented insights into how volcanoes work and open new avenues for limitless geothermal energy.
Magma within the Earth is the last unexplored frontier," KMT's Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson, told Business Insider.
Research into magma chambers is crucial. These pools of molten rock, located in the Earth's crust, can create volcanoes if they find a way to reach the surface.
But they are fiendishly difficult to locate with surface equipment and hard to track ahead of an eruption.
"We don't have any direct knowledge of what magma chambers look like, which is crucial in understanding volcanoes of course," Paolo Papale at Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Pisa, who has written on the subject, told New Scientist.
In 2009, scientists identified a potential candidate about 2.5 miles underground near the Krafla in Northern Iceland. So they started drilling.
But about a mile into their descent, their drill got stuck. It's only later, when it came back up carrying shards of volcanic glass, that they realized what happened. They had accidentally poked their head into a magma chamber.
The scientists managed to make a few measurements, but eventually, the wellhead became too warm to operate, per New Scientist.
They decided to pour cold water into the well to cool it down, releasing black, billowing clouds that destroyed their rigging.
Now, 15 years on, KMT wants to drill into the chamber again — but this time it wants to be able to stay, with the help of a few clever engineering tricks.
If it is successful, KMT could offer a whole slew of new insights into volcanic activity, Gluyas said.
"From a scientific perspective, being able to sample an active magma chamber would give you a whole lot of information, which is normally excruciatingly difficult to obtain," said Gluyas, who is the president of the Global Geothermal Energy Advancement Association.
After all, most of what we know about volcanoes is what we see on the surface.
But by the time molten rock turns into lava, it has lost a lot of the gas that propelled it up to the surface, so we know very little about magma composition before it erupts.
"I'm sometimes insulting some scientists when I say that basically everything we know about inside of a volcano is kind of a guesstimate — an educated guesstimate of course," said Ingólfsson.
Sampling and monitoring the magma directly could shed crucial information on what it's made of, and hopefully help us find ways to track its path underground. The glassy rock created when freezing the magma could also be a gold mine of evidence, as it could contain bubbles encapsulating the precious magmatic gases, per Gluyas.
There's loads of fundamental science which will come out of it and there'll be unexpected bonuses, but there is a practical piece of this, which is better understanding of the way the Earth behaves and therefore better preparedness for potential natural disasters," said Gluyas.
KMT plans to drill a second hole dedicated to geothermal research.
Ingólfsson expects one well on a magma chamber could be as productive as 10 other wells elsewhere.
Not only is it very hot down there, but the magma also changes the composition of the rock, which KMT believes could make harvesting geothermal energy more efficient.
"The source of geothermal is always the magma and getting closer to magma is obviously a higher efficiency," said Ingólfsson.
Their research, he said, could inform new ways to collect geothermal energy.
KMT hopes to break ground on the first hole into the magma chamber in 2026. But it still has a long road ahead.
https://www.businessinsider.com/iceland-scientists-drill-magma-chamber-source-kmt-geothermal-energy-limitless-2024-1
Any thoughts, Rogue-Nation? Sounds promising to me.
RE: Volcanoes as a source of limitless energy - p358 - 01-16-2024
The problem with this approach is that you loose your infrastructure when the volcano goes bang.
Volcanoes have a habit of going bang.
When it does go bang you have destroyed infrastructure, no power and a long lead time to replace the infrastructure before getting power back on for the people.
Can't see it working long term.
P
RE: Volcanoes as a source of limitless energy - Ninurta - 01-16-2024
I know what happens when I poke a hole in a 55 gallon drum full of a liquid substance, so I can't wait to find out what happens when they poke a hole in a pressurized chamber of hot melted liquid rock!
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