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Harnessing the Earth's Heat
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# : |
17910 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
2,382 Words |
| Author
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Deepak C. Kenkeremath
Deepak C. Kenkeremath is president of Technology Prospects,
Inc., an energy and environmental engineering firm. He has
been involved with geothermal energy for more than ten years. |
Deepak C. Kenkeremath is president of Technology Prospects, Inc., an energy and environmental engineering firm. He has been involved with geothermal energy for more than ten years.
Mother Earth is like a giant furnace so hot that her high interior temperature would melt the cast iron in a residential furnace. This tremendous reservoir of heat has played an important role in geological history and continues to do so today, causing the release of vast quantities of molten rock into the environment each year.
In an energy-hungry and environmentally sensitive world, the earth's environmentally benign heat (geothermal energy) must surely be included as a primary candidate for exploitation, especially where it is most accessible along the edges of the mosaic of crustal plates covering the earth's surface. Yet the most visible channels for releasing heat and pressure from deep within the earth, volcanoes, are wild and powerful far beyond human powers of exploitation. Until recently man has had to be content with harnessing the most manageable geothermal sources--the so-called hydrothermal sources, hot water and steam.
Hot water from the earth has been exploited for direct use in heating homes and baths at least since the time of the ancient Romans. Steam from the earth was first used for generating electrical power at Lardello, Italy, in 1904. Since then the technology for converting the hot water and steam types of geothermal energy to electrical power has been improved many fold.
Today, more than twenty countries are exploiting hot water or steam from the ground, generating a total of more than 5,700 megawatts of electricity per year and conserving the equivalent of about 40 million barrels of oil annually. Many other countries are using hot water or steam direct from the ground for residential, commercial, and industrial applications, thereby conserving another 25 million barrels of oil annually.
Hot water and steam, however, are not the only geothermal resources occurring within a few miles of the surface. Molten rock (magma), methane-containing brines under high pressure (geo-pressured), and hot dry rock are also sources of heat energy with good potential for being economically extracted from the earth. Research is under way to develop and improve the technology for harnessing all these forms of geothermal energy.
What is Geothermal
...
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