Geothermal Energy
The enviros tend to be a short-sighted bunch. They are willfully ignoring a source of electrical energy with almost zero carbon emissions and significantly reduced mining impact (compared to Coal).
Not only are they shorting Nuclear, they are also ignoring Geothermal.
From
Technology Review:
Abundant Power from Universal Geothermal Energy
An MIT chemical engineer explains why new technologies could finally make "heat mining" practical nearly anywhere on earth.
The answer to the world's energy needs may have been under our feet all this time, according to Jefferson Tester, professor of chemical engineering at the MIT Laboratory for Energy and the Environment. Tester says heat generated deep within the earth by the decay of naturally occurring isotopes has the potential to supply a tremendous amount of power -- thousands of times more than we now consume each year.
So far, we've been able to harvest only a tiny fraction of geothermal energy resources, taking advantage of places where local geology brings hot water and steam near the surface, such as in Iceland or California, where such phenomena have long been used to produce electricity. But new oil-field stimulation technology, developed for extracting oil from sources such as shale, makes it possible to harvest much more of this energy by allowing engineers to create artificial geothermal reservoirs many kilometers underground.
Tester calls it "universal geothermal" energy because the reservoirs could be located wherever they're needed, such as near power-hungry cities worldwide.
The rest of the article is an interview with Dr. Tester.
He is looking at providing about 25% of our current energy needs with simple and existing technologies. Also, this is heat that is being continually generated from nuclear reactions within our Earth's mantle, this is not a pool of residual heat that will decay over time.
Talk about an ultimate renewable resource. What's not to love?
Posted by DaveH at August 1, 2006 10:13 PM