In the United States, California and Utah are developing geothermal energy for the long term.
Will this drilling deep into planet Earth destabilize it geologically and greatly increase seismic activity in these regions, for example, accelerate or escalate the incidence and severity of earthquakes beyond 7.0 on the Richter Scale?
I am not an expert and I cannot answer. However, it is interesting to know that geothermal energy is being developed. I thought that the concerns about geological stability came from fracking.
Dear Nancy Ann Watanabe ,
Your questions are very good. It's hard to answer...
I can confidently answer to one question:
Will this drilling deep into planet Earth destabilize it? This activity has a negligible effect on planet Earth as a whole.
In case of other questions we would need to know a lot about the plan in order to prepare a more accurate answer. We should know how dense the drilling points will be and where they will be drilled etc., (This must be a professional secret).
I think it's something else... Different activities will take place under the heading of this plan.
So we should know more about the plan.
The way I imagine what they're going to do, they shouldn't cause any trouble. However, if something else is the goal, then they may have unintended consequences, but they may have consequences that are exactly what they wanted to achieve.
Regards,
Laszlo
Los cambios meteorológicos y por ende los climáticos son problemas de muchas anomalías aprioristicas, porque el proceso evolutivo de éstas realidades, aún no tienen un nivel de conocimiento válido científicamente.
Geothermal energy, which harnesses heat from the Earth's core to generate electricity, has a relatively low environmental impact compared to fossil fuels. Here's why it's considered Earth-friendly:
1. *Low greenhouse gas emissions*: Geothermal power plants emit significantly less CO2, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide than traditional fossil fuel-based power plants.
2. *Renewable and sustainable*: Geothermal energy is a renewable resource, as the Earth's heat is constantly replenished.
3. *Minimal land use*: Geothermal power plants require relatively small land areas compared to solar or wind farms.
4. *Water conservation*: Geothermal power generation uses little to no water, unlike traditional power plants which require significant water resources for cooling.
5. *Reliable baseload power*: Geothermal energy provides consistent, reliable power, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and supporting grid stability.
However, there are some potential environmental considerations:
1. *Induced seismicity*: Geothermal operations can cause small earthquakes, but these are typically minor and temporary.
2. *Land subsidence*: Ground surface deformation can occur due to fluid extraction, but this is rare and usually reversible.
3. *Water pollution*: Proper management and disposal of geothermal fluids are crucial to prevent potential water pollution.
4. *Habitat disruption*: Geothermal development can impact local ecosystems, so careful planning and environmental assessments are necessary.
Overall, geothermal energy is a clean, reliable, and Earth-friendly source of power, offering a promising alternative to fossil fuels in the transition to a more sustainable energy future.
Dear Uthirasamy .S ,
You wrote:
"2. *Renewable and sustainable*: Geothermal energy is a renewable resource, as the Earth's heat is constantly replenished."
Yes, but the problem is the time. If you don't have a volcano in your backyard, i.e. in case of a normal heat flow, the rocks will cool down after a reasonable amount of time (some decades) and it will take a long time (a century) to reheat from below. Consequently, the plant will lose efficiency.
"4. *Water conservation*: Geothermal power generation uses little to no water, unlike traditional power plants which require significant water resources for cooling."
Are you sure?
In Hungary, it is compulsory to pump the fluid (=water) back into the same rock layer in another well (located at a certain distance from the primary well).
The lower heat flow in most of the areas allows only the recycling of the fluid. The interested reader may want to check this:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/electricity-generation
Kind regards, Balázs
Dear Nancy,
In your original question you wrote:
"...accelerate or escalate the incidence and severity of earthquakes beyond 7.0 on the Richter Scale?"
Basically, most of the natural earthquakes are the products of accumulation and eventually the release of energy due to accumulated stress in a certain time period. The vast majority of earthquakes (especially in the Ring of Fire) are due to large-scale geodynamic processes.
As you may know, Richter scale and other quantitative scales related to or measuring the energy release of an earthquake are logarithmic scales. It is not easy to think in logarithmic scales. To put simply, an increase of two units means a thousand-fold increase in energy (one unit means a factor of ca. 31.6).
Example: an earthquake of Mw=7.0 releases 1,000,000,000 times more energy than an earthquake Mw=1.0, i.e. you need 1000 million earthquakes of Mw=1.0 to release the same energy as a Mw=7.0 releases. If this energy release is spread over a year, there would be ca. 32 Mw=1.0 (or one Mw=2.0) earthquake every second (or one Mw=5.0 each 9 hours!) for a whole year.
Thus, based on energy conservation, even if making a borehole can induce the energy release of a single earthquake, the short answer to your question is no, because the energy that is released by an earthquake of Mw=7.0 is much higher and it was anyhow already stored in the stress field in the rock pile.
Kind regards, Balázs
- Badges
- Science topic