From an article on Iceland's supercritical geothermal power project that might increase geothermal power extaction by an order of magnitude:
Beneath the calm landscape, though, Fridleifsson and his crew of geologists, engineers and roughnecks are attempting the Manhattan Project of geothermal energy. The two-mile-deep hole they've drilled into Krafla, an active volcanic crater, is twice as deep as any geothermal well in the world. [my emphasis]
This wonderfully evocative passage that may presage a revolution in power production contains a glaring error that Bush's goat story students would likely have caught though not The Decider.
From an article on German geothermal power:
Other plants now operating are the 3.5-MW plant at Unterhaching close to Munich, in Bavaria, which supplies 20,000 households with electricity and heat as well as Unterhaching, which is the first geothermal plant in Germany to use the "Kalina" technology that allows energy to be extracted from water of low to moderate temperatures. At that plant water is extracted at a temperature of 122 °C from a well 3,500 meters [2.24 mi] deep...
Is it really then so hard to convert miles to meters or the reverse?
Even the deep-thinking engineers at MIT and the august editors of Scientific American have, at times, served up disinformtion worthy of a National Enquirer.
EGS, often called deep geothermal, is most advanced in Australia in a relatively shallow resource, while the most promising research is on increasing permeability (flow) in conventional fields like that of a producing power plant near Reno that has DOE, Ormat and Google as partners. Meanwhile the Unterhaching producing well is very deep but quite conventional with low temperature waters.
I diaried the work of a graduate student at MIT examining distributed processing at an Indian reservation at the same time his superiors were causing a sensation at Fox News and even among some of the sun worshipers at Dkos. There was the usual wild apathy.
Little wonder our bankers have so much trouble with their accounts, when even engineers and scientists can't convert feet to meters.
Best, Terry