Engineers are Building the Hottest Geothermal Power Plant on Earth - Next to a US Volcano (yahoo.com) 37
"On the slopes of an Oregon volcano, engineers are building the hottest geothermal power plant on Earth," reports the Washington Post:
The plant will tap into the infernal energy of Newberry Volcano, "one of the largest and most hazardous active volcanoes in the United States," according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It has already reached temperatures of 629 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest geothermal sites in the world, and next year it will start selling electricity to nearby homes and businesses. But the start-up behind the project, Mazama Energy, wants to crank the temperature even higher — north of 750 degrees — and become the first to make electricity from what industry insiders call "superhot rock." Enthusiasts say that could usher in a new era of geothermal power, transforming the always-on clean energy source from a minor player to a major force in the world's electricity systems.
"Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential," said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and one of Mazama Energy's biggest financial backers. "To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of tens or hundreds of gigawatts for the country, and many times that globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures." Today, geothermal produces less than 1 percent of the world's electricity. But tapping into superhot rock, along with other technological advances, could boost that share to 8 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Geothermal using superhot temperatures could theoretically generate 150 times more electricity than the world uses, according to the IEA. "We believe this is the most direct path to driving down the cost of geothermal and making it possible across the globe," said Terra Rogers, program director for superhot rock geothermal at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmentalist think tank. "The [technological] gaps are within reason. These are engineering iterations, not breakthroughs."
The Newberry Volcano project combines two big trends that could make geothermal energy cheaper and more widely available. First, Mazama Energy is bringing its own water to the volcano, using a method called "enhanced geothermal energy"... [O]ver the past few decades, pioneering projects have started to make energy from hot dry rocks by cracking the stone and pumping in water to make steam, borrowing fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry... The Newberry project also taps into hotter rock than any previous enhanced geothermal project. But even Newberry's 629 degrees fall short of the superhot threshold of 705 degrees or above. At that temperature, and under a lot of pressure, water becomes "supercritical" and starts acting like something between a liquid and a gas. Supercritical water holds lots of heat like a liquid, but it flows with the ease of a gas — combining the best of both worlds for generating electricity... [Sriram Vasantharajan, Mazama's CEO] said Mazama will dig new wells to reach temperatures above 750 degrees next year. Alongside an active volcano, the company expects to hit that temperature less than three miles beneath the surface. But elsewhere, geothermal developers might have to dig as deep as 12 miles.
While Mazama plans to generate 15 megawatts of electricity next year, it hopes to eventually increase that to 200 megawatts. (And the company's CEO said it could theoretically generate five gigawatts of power.)
But more importantly, successful projects "motivate other players to get into the market," according to a senior geothermal research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, who predicted "a ripple effect," to the Washington Post where "we'll start seeing more companies get the financial support to kick off their own pilots."
"Geothermal has been mostly inconsequential," said Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist and one of Mazama Energy's biggest financial backers. "To do consequential geothermal that matters at the scale of tens or hundreds of gigawatts for the country, and many times that globally, you really need to solve these high temperatures." Today, geothermal produces less than 1 percent of the world's electricity. But tapping into superhot rock, along with other technological advances, could boost that share to 8 percent by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Geothermal using superhot temperatures could theoretically generate 150 times more electricity than the world uses, according to the IEA. "We believe this is the most direct path to driving down the cost of geothermal and making it possible across the globe," said Terra Rogers, program director for superhot rock geothermal at the Clean Air Task Force, an environmentalist think tank. "The [technological] gaps are within reason. These are engineering iterations, not breakthroughs."
The Newberry Volcano project combines two big trends that could make geothermal energy cheaper and more widely available. First, Mazama Energy is bringing its own water to the volcano, using a method called "enhanced geothermal energy"... [O]ver the past few decades, pioneering projects have started to make energy from hot dry rocks by cracking the stone and pumping in water to make steam, borrowing fracking techniques developed by the oil and gas industry... The Newberry project also taps into hotter rock than any previous enhanced geothermal project. But even Newberry's 629 degrees fall short of the superhot threshold of 705 degrees or above. At that temperature, and under a lot of pressure, water becomes "supercritical" and starts acting like something between a liquid and a gas. Supercritical water holds lots of heat like a liquid, but it flows with the ease of a gas — combining the best of both worlds for generating electricity... [Sriram Vasantharajan, Mazama's CEO] said Mazama will dig new wells to reach temperatures above 750 degrees next year. Alongside an active volcano, the company expects to hit that temperature less than three miles beneath the surface. But elsewhere, geothermal developers might have to dig as deep as 12 miles.
While Mazama plans to generate 15 megawatts of electricity next year, it hopes to eventually increase that to 200 megawatts. (And the company's CEO said it could theoretically generate five gigawatts of power.)
But more importantly, successful projects "motivate other players to get into the market," according to a senior geothermal research analyst at energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, who predicted "a ripple effect," to the Washington Post where "we'll start seeing more companies get the financial support to kick off their own pilots."
About Fucking Time! (Score:1)
I can't believe it took this long for somebody to do this. This planet can give us more juice than we can shake a stick at.
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This planet can give us more juice than we can shake a stick at.
Not exactly.
* The total heat flux from the Earth's interior - all that primordial heat and breakdown of radioactive elements - amounts to about 47 TW [wikipedia.org].
* Humanity's energy consumption is about 650 exajoules per year [iea.org], or about 20 TW.
* So all the Earth's heat output is only about 2x global energy demand. IF you could somehow capture all of it over the entire planet.
But that heat output is incredibly diffuse - about 0.1 W/m^2 on average over the Earth's surface. Being so diffuse makes it nigh impos
Uh oh... (Score:5, Funny)
You know this isn't about geothermal...Trump is trying to forge the ring of power.
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The problem with "hot rock" is that, while it has incredibly high thermal mass and can retain a lot of heat, the thermal conductivity of rock is very poor - so poor that once you take the heat out, it takes weeks or months to put it back..
Oddly enough, you just described how it might work perfectly if you had a few sites to extract that energy source that’s more dependent on timing than physics.
Extract the energy from “hot rock” when hot. When it cools to a non-optimum temperature, you switch back to primary power and target the next hot site to pull energy from and wait for the first one to heat back up to become an optimized energy source again. Rinse and repeat.
Switch to geothermal sources in times when the primary is
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Well, when you extract the heat from the rock it becomes less fluid.
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Most geothermal heat plants aren't long term without repair for various different reasons. IIRC, internal fouling is one of the main reasons. This sounds like it might be a different approach, though of course you need a volcano to make it work.
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Which explains Khosla's interest. If this ends up not working out as a retail power play, it can pivot to the supervillain volcanic lair market.
Although Zuckerberg has already probably had to solve power for Koolau Ranch.
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I'm not an engineer, but here's what Chat-GPT thinks, when I shared your comment with it:
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Not quite. This criticism is valid for old-school “hot dry rock” geothermal (1970-2010), but it doesn’t apply to the new superhot-rock designs.
It’s true that rock has low thermal conductivity and that conduction-limited systems cool locally if you withdraw heat faster than it flows back. That’s exactly why the early HDR [Lion: -- this means "Hot Dry Rock"] experiments never scaled.
But su
Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score:5, Interesting)
In the late 70's, early 80's geothermal wells were drilled in the Campi Flegrei, the very large volcanic area north of Pozzuoli. (Italy)
Here super heated water zones at depths between 1200 and 1900 meters were produced and the resulting steam gave at surface around 50 MW of power per well.
But the condensate of this steam was very poisonous containing arsenic and heavy metals, the produced H2S was just a minor detail.
When cleaning the steam the resulting power dropped to around 15 MW but the process was not economically viable and the project died.
(I did some of the measurements)
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Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!
So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:
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The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the ph
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Thing is, who says the deeper wells don't produce these pollutants by dissolving them from the rock?
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I'm not an engineer, but here's what Chat-GPT thinks,
And here's what Grok thinks:
Elon Musk would be able to fix this. He can do anything. He makes the sun shine and the bird fly. It's a miracle how we ever got by before he arrived.
It's possible there may be some bias in that answer.
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Well I shared the thread including your thought with Grok, and it said this:
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Here’s my actual, unbiased take on the technical debate (no Elon worship, no green hype, just physics and engineering reality as of 2025).
The original Slashdot skeptic is repeating a criticism that was 100% correct for the classic 1970s–2000s “hot dry rock” (HDR) projects (Los Alamos, Rosemanowes, Soultz 2000s era, etc.). Those really were conduction-limited. You drilled two wells a few hundred meters ap
Breathless article doesn't mention corrosion (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes. It really is a moral duty to tell the Wright brothers that their pie in the sky visions have a track history of failure -- to remind them that there are good reasons flight isn't already a commonplace thing.
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Exactly. And hot water is an excellent solvent. When it flashes to steam, where does the solute go?
In this case, it stays deep in the ground, where it came from.
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high temperature steam containing minerals and salts is highly corrosive to plumbing, valves and turbines
The dry rock method described in the article significantly reduces this problem, because it doesn't rely on groundwater steam that has had millennia to dissolve high mineral loads. Instead, it injects low-mineral surface water into pressure-created cracks. That water does pick up some minerals from the rocks, of course, but the result is far less corrosive than natural groundwater. In addition, super-hot rocks flash all of the water to steam, and H20 in gaseous form cannot carry any dissolved minerals (thi
Makes sense (Score:2)
As technology progresses we can better handle the dangerous waste power from Gooble Boxes [fandom.com] currently being routed to the special disposal volcano.
No, do Yellowstone first! (Score:1)
Yellowstone needs to be drained of heat, otherwise it will burst the ugliest of bursts.
Another concern (Score:2)
Skimming the comments, the thought that was in the back of my head finally crystallized.
Drilling towards the magma.. would that not weaken the wall, and if more magma comes up, might it not find the boreholes a weaker point of exit?