World’s Hottest Borehole
Our Terrible Addiction
As a race, humans are addicted to one thing and one thing only… POWER.
Power takes many forms, the power over others, empowerment, power over life and death but of course the most addictive power is electricity. The power to accomplish almost anything from generating heat to refrigeration. The power to light up darkness, to communicate and most importantly to make chips…. and gravy.
The problem with electricity is its generation which so far has been the cause of a significant proportion of global pollution reliant as it is on fossil fuels.
Good News For The Environment
With the notable exception of the president elect, the world now agrees that the use of fossil fuels is the major contributor of global warming. The view of this blog is that it is cars, not their exhausts but heat from their engines.
In any event, reliance on fossil fuels is the problem being addressed with ‘environmental generation’ such as wind, solar and in some places rivers and tidal. Not to mention good old nuclear. With the exception of nuclear, the remaining methods of production have two major drawbacks which are reliability and capacity.
You can’t generate solar power at night, tidal power between tides, wind power on a still day and they simply don’t have the capacity to generate enough power when they are working.
Bio-fuels are a good idea but they still produce CO2 which is not so good despite it being CO2 from the current era.
We need a dependable energy source with significant capacity. Step in Gaia, our good old mother earth has herself so much spare power that we could generate enough energy to power the world. There are one or two draw backs of course. . .
The Bore Hole
There is a project to drill a really. . . really deep bore hole and at the time of writing, they have almost reached their target http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38296251
The fact that a really deep hole needs to be drilled is one thing, the fact that they have done it where the earth’s crust is very thin is another. This is Iceland where they don’t have many resources to produce electricity so we can let them off for that but for heavens sake they need to be careful.
We are grateful as we should be that the Pacific ring of fire is.. well in the Pacific and so a massive global earthquake triggering the eruption of thousands of volcanoes and filling the air with toxic sulphurous gases just before the world fractures into a thousand pieces and everything is completely and utterly destroyed. . .is round the other side of the planet.
This bore hole is in a volatile and quake sensitive area so the question remains – how stable is this?
Followup question – how do you get the water down there to generate steam?
