One of the reasons I still frequent this forum is to countertrade the espoused opinions. Meta@100 was such an easy buy, Everyone was talking as if they were going out of business because they did not like the idea of the metaverse. A quick look at their earnings said that was utter nonsesnse. So bizarre to see all jounalists and many users here to attribute the turn around to them pivoting to AI when that was not at all what the CEO was saying during that time. Always look for primary sources, opinions are funny.
"Our gyrotron-powered drilling platform vaporizes boreholes through rock and provides access to deep geothermal heat without complex downhole equipment.
Based on breakthrough fusion research and well-established drilling practices, we are developing a radical new approach to ultra-deep drilling."
This company looks promising in the geothermal space. They are looking to be able to create 10km boreholes in 100 days. This would make geothermal viable anywhere in the world. Bonus points if you create the borehole next to an existing coal plant to use the existing turbine and infrastructure.
Bhauth wrote an analysis of this idea, and tldr is that trying to get an energy payback on literally vaporizing such a long cylinder of rock is brutally difficult, probably enough to make the economics of the plan unworkable.
This is a really interesting perspective but I wish they finished writing the equations out. My attempt at verification didn't match.
Per [1], “[wells] with a regular production casing diameter of 200-250 mm have an average capacity of 5.5 MWe”. Quaise has deep bores that could potentially have higher temperatures, but let's stick with 5 MWe.
At the article's 12 MWh/m³ for drilling, and 250mm bores of depth 10km, WolframAlpha tells me that is 6 GWh.
Divide through, you get 1000 hours or about a month. This doesn't match their “significantly over 10 years” they gave before mentioning waveguide losses.
The main difference I suppose is the thermal conductivity comment, where I didn't follow why Quaise wouldn't be able to use enhanced geothermal approaches. More specifically I think that if a Quaise well has ~1% the energy output of a normal geothermal well, it's pretty weird to frame the problem as about the energy cost of drilling, and not the whole factor-100 reduction in energy output.
To be clear, this seemed like an interesting article and I'm not claiming my napkin math is definitive, I really am neither an expert nor someone who has spent a lot of time investigating this. I do think some more clarity on how the math looks would help their case.
The article you linked is about conventional geothermal wells, which drill into reservoirs of hot water; they just have hotter water than has been typical. Extracting hot water is not limited by thermal conductivity of rock, but what Quaise plans to do is.
Enhanced geothermal involves fracking. Typical proposals involve creating crack paths between 2 nearby wells by fracking from both. It's been tested some but so far has not been economical.
Apart from the cost issues of enhanced geothermal so far, Quaise plans to drill deeper to higher temperatures to reduce power block costs. Sufficiently hot rock flows a little bit which makes fracking ineffective. Fracking also doesn't work as well with supercritical water. (If not drilling to rock hot enough to flow a little bit under high pressures, it would be much better to use conventional drilling techniques.)
I'm afraid I'm not really following the argument though. I don't have the technical background to judge how economical EGS is or not, I just want to understand this energy-based argument. I checked to be sure, and Quaise's initial plans (per cofounder Matt Houde) are indeed EGS-based[1], just deeper. It seems correct to me that if they succeeded at building wells that way, they would produce at least comparable energy to standard wells.
It's entirely possible that EGS just doesn't work at really deep depths as you state here, but this seems like a qualitatively different argument to the one presented in the article.
[1] https://youtu.be/yz6rRw59Huw?t=675 "but what we're interested in in Quaise is this novel idea here all the way on the right which we call like to call superhot rock EGS systems"
Actually, they address the energy balance question at the end of that talk.
https://youtu.be/yz6rRw59Huw?t=3016 "[...] we could be using around five megawatts for the drilling process to drill our wells, and let's say we use that five megawatts over a year to drill three holes, so we get an injector and two producers. We predict that configuration of the two producers and an injector at superhot conditions can produce something around 50 to 100 megawatts of electrical energy, again owing to the benefits of producing this superhot, supercritical steam."
They also answer a question on borehole stability, admittedly claiming largely that they don't know.
> It's entirely possible that EGS just doesn't work at really deep depths as you state here, but this seems like a qualitatively different argument to the one presented in the article.
A different argument to the one presented in the article, you say. Huh.
I suppose I can't claim to know more about geothermal than the author of that blog post, but if you check again, you'll find it does mention EGS. Apparently something made the author decide the problems with Quaise using that are non-obvious enough to need explanation.
cf. "but I wish they finished writing the equations out"
The article mentions EGS but, as far as I could tell, only seemed to present it to contrast it with the claim that Quaise is using a worse single-bore strategy.
If I'm just misreading, and it sounds like you're saying I am?, it'd be really helpful to show your working so I can see where the models are differing. There is a factor 100 difference somewhere, it shouldn't be that hard to spot!
You say, “if there's enough pressure to make a little crack, then the fluid can instantly expand and immediately make a big crack”. My admittedly quite surface level view of the research is that it is viewed as feasible in this regime.
“Close to the brittle-ductile transition conditions of pressure and temperature, new findings suggest that fractures are sufficiently permeable to allow fluid circulation and, in case of insufficient fracture density, enhancement strategies are likely to be successful”
I also believe that EGS fracture enhancement marginally prefers hydro-shearing (crack expansion) rather than hydro-fracking (crack formation), so if creating cracks is problematic, that leaves options open.
I also note that to my understanding gas fracking is already a thing, cf. nitrogen fracking. So gaseous behavior doesn't obviously seem like an instant write-off to me.
I'm sure that isn't convincing to you, but it's a bit challenging for me as a layman wrt. geothermal to see why I should trust your gut here, so to speak, and I'm wondering if you have a concrete argument I can evaluate on merits?
For example,
"The hypothesis that the brittle–ductile transition (BDT) drastically reduces permeability implies that potentially exploitable geothermal resources (permeability >10−16 m2) consisting of supercritical water could occur only in rocks with unusually high transition temperatures such as basalt. However, tensile fracturing is possible even in ductile rocks, and some permeability–depth relations proposed for the continental crust show no drastic permeability reduction at the BDT."
I'm definitely not claiming to take these on faith, I'm just saying I haven't really been given a reason to believe those arguments are less trustworthy than your claims otherwise.
It makes it all sound like a problem of engineering, not of physics.
It's really hard to vapourize all that rock and suck it out to the surface with a vacuum. But it's really hard in the sense that the vaporised rock might recondense and stick to the sides of the hole, not in the sense that vaporising the rock costs more energy than you get out of the hole in its 30-year lifetime.
Would it be possible to blow chilled air down the hole that would quickly condense the rock vapor into particulates that don't stick and instead get vacuumed out ?
I find this thinking difficult to reconcile. When I setup up my workstation it does usually take me half a day to sort out an encrypted rootfs mirrored volume with zfsbootmenu + linux, but after that its all set for the next decade. A small price for the peace of mind it affords.
I am somewhat wary of trying this, mucking something up and wasting a lot of time wrestling with it. Will probably play around with it in a vm and use it during the next ssd upgrade.
Would have been so much better if the distros showed more interest in ZFS
In principle there's no reason you can't install this next to GRUB in case you're wary. If you're not using ZFS native encryption, and make sure not to enable some newer zpool features, GRUB booting should work for ZFS-on-root.
That said, I've been using the tool for a while now and it's been really rock solid. And once you have it installed and working, you don't really have to touch it again, until some hypothetical time when a new backward-incompatible zpool feature gets added that you want to use, and you need a newer ZFSBootMenu build to support it.
Because it's just an upstream Linux kernel with the OpenZFS kmod, and a small dracut module to import the pool and display a TUI menu, it's mechanically very simple, and relying on core ZFS support in the Linux kernel module and userspace that's already pretty battle tested.
After seeing people in IRC try to diagnose recent GRUB issues with very vanilla setups (like ext4 on LVM), I'm becoming more and more convinced that the general approach used by ZFSBootMenu is the way to go for modern EFI booting. Why maintain a completely separate implementation of all the filesystems, volume managers, disk encryption technologies, when a high quality reference implementation already exists in the kernel? The kernel knows how to boot itself, unlock and mount pretty much any combination of filesystem and volume manager, and then kexec the kernel/initrd inside.
The upsides to ZFSBootMenu, OTOH,
* Supports all ZFS features from the most recent OpenZFS versions, since it uses the OpenZFS kmod
* Select boot environment (and change the default boot environment) right from the boot loader menu
* Select specific kernels within each boot environment (and change the default kernel)
* Edit kernel command line temporarily
* Roll back boot environments to a previous snapshot
* Rewind to a pool checkpoint
* Create, destroy, promote and orphan boot environments
* Diff boot environments to some previous snapshot to see all file changes
* View pool health / status
* Jump into a chroot of a boot environment
* Get a recovery shell with a full suite of tools available including zfs and zpool, in addition to many helper scripts for managing your pool/datasets and getting things back into a working state before either relaunching the boot menu, or just directly booting into the selected dataset/kernel/initrd pair.
* Even supports user mode SecureBoot signing -- you just need to pass the embedded dracut config the right parameters to produce a unified image, and sign it with your key of choice. No need to mess around with shim and separate kernel signing.
Sounds very interesting. I will try it out. Thanks.
GRUB can become a nightmare very quickly. Currently I am on systemd-boot + ext4 for the boot drive. Has been working without any major issues. But boot drive backup with rsnapshot is very underwhelming
