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Scientists have an idea to get a new energy source, namely by digging a hole Earth. They want to use X-rays to melt rock and reuse it to generate coal and gas into deep geothermal wells, and turn dirty fossil fuel plants into clean ones.
The brain behind the concept is Paul Woskov, a research engineer at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The engineer has spent the last 14 years developing a method that can bring abandoned coal-fired power plants back to life completely carbon-free.
And his method, commercialized by a company called Quaise Energy, claims to work in nearly any coal and gas power plant on Earth.
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They intend to vaporize enough rock to bore the deepest hole in the world and capture geothermal energy on a scale large enough to meet human energy needs for millions of years.
Utilizing millions of years of energy sources
This aspiration is closely linked to the energy that lies deep beneath our feet. Geothermal energy is basically heat within the Earth, i.e. heat generated during the formation of our planet and the radioactive decay of minerals that generate heat, and is stored in the rocks and fluids in the Earth’s core.
Because it is constantly being created within our planet’s crust, it is a renewable energy source. However, although other renewable energy sources have increased in recent decades, geothermal energy has not been exploited because harvesting it is not an easy task.
Geothermal facilities exist only in areas where circumstances allow energy extraction at relatively shallow depths of up to 121.92 meters below the Earth’s surface.
Quoted from Interesting Engineering, conventional drilling becomes impractical beyond a certain depth because the deeper crust will be hotter and harder. This complicates the mechanical drill bit, so a new solution is needed.
The new solution might be a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron. The Quaise drilling system is centered around this device, which has been used for decades in research and manufacture for purposes such as heating materials in nuclear fusion experiments.
While Quaise has not overcome all the technical hurdles, it has set an ambitious goal of harnessing energy from a pilot well by 2026.
Next page, using gyrotron beam>>>
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