Geothermal isn't clean. Many projects produce as much CO2 as coal plants. How do you expect to manage this? Sulfur and arsenic are also major pollutants from geothermal wells. These are managed well at smaller scales but it's not a tech that scales well.
I toured a 30MW geo plant some time back. The amount of hydrogen sulfide that came up with the steam was astonishing. They could fill a 40ft trailer with sulfur nearly daily.
so
1) not all sites will have the same pollutants (and yes, I know you didn't say they would, and you're discussing one site that may be an outlier).
2) so they collected the Sulphur ... so it's not a pollutant (unless you can't use the solid waste) ... ok, it's not an atmospheric pollutant (well, not until you burn it)
3) how does this relate to CO2 emissions ?
"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.
A)We need to do a better analysis of true costs of these types of projects. Geo is not suitable in many locations due to high CO2 content. Iceland has relatively low CO2.
B)The operators at the plant joked that the sulfur was being shipped to China to be burned. The combustion turbine with sulfur scrubber in my link had not been envisioned yet.
"C)You steered us here." ... un, no, t'was not I ...
"TugboatEng (Marine/Ocean)24 Nov 22 06:04
Geothermal isn't clean. Many projects produce as much CO2 as coal plants. How do you expect to manage this? Sulfur and arsenic are also major pollutants from geothermal wells. These are managed well at smaller scales but it's not a tech that scales well."
"Hoffen wir mal, dass alles gut geht !"
General Paulus, Nov 1942, outside Stalingrad after the launch of Operation Uranus.
In the icelandic case they found the deeper the wells the lower the CO2 emissions.
But maybe there is something to ponder here, the internal heat of the earth is caused by radioactive decay. If we're going to be bringing this heat from deep within the Earth might bring a lot of radioactive waste products with it.
Anyways, the deep geothermal is in the news a lot lately because a company has figured out how to use microwaves to drill deep holes beyond the capabilities of conventional methods. Is it a viable technology? They haven't drilled the hole yet. This one reeks of another venture capital scam just like the gravity battery.
Tapping into the million-year energy source below our feet
MIT spinout Quaise Energy is working to create geothermal wells made from the deepest holes in the world.
How does millimeter wave drilling work?
Millimeter Wave Drilling uses a continuous beam of energy waves between 30-300 gigahertz (millimeter waves) to melt, vaporize and bore through extremely hard and hot rock layers located deep in the Earth's crust
while most geothermal wells do produce a lot of off gas I worked on one project that didn't.
They had a very hot dry rock formation, then they pumped water into it which returned to the surface very hot.
The only catch was that the injection pumps had to develop a lot of head, like 14,000'.
We used multistage centrifugals designed for downhole oilfield pumping.
