UK geothermal project passes milestone
Assisted by a £460,000 grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Newcastle University scientists have created a giant twin borehole central heating system, so the hot water can be raised up from 1,000m down, passed through a heat exchanger and then reinjected, via a second borehole, back in to the rocks 420m down.
Well hot damn. Even the backward former colonials have been doing some stuff like that but not so much. We are more addicted to coal, oil and natural gas so much so that we are filling the oceans with petroleum.
Because the water is twice as salty as seawater, it cannot be discharged into rivers. Pumping it back underground resolves an issue
Very good.
Whatever will those scientists in the land of Sir Isaac Newton think of next?
Shouldn't be poking fun at the English, who are doing some good stuff. For instance they realize what we former colonials seem to have trouble getting in our heads:
Deep geothermal energy is an answer to the intermittency problem that affects many renewable energy sources
Their idea of deep ain't very deep but at least they got that intermittency thing down pat.
Use of geothermal heat for cooking by paleo-Indians in North America occurred about 10,000 years ago. The Roman baths used geothermally heated waters. Buildings were heated geothermally in Oregon in the 19th Century. Italians first generated electricity from geothermal brines over 100 years ago.
But our preference is fossil fuels for all those things while we diddle mainly with intermittent wind and sun.
Best, Terry