The magnitude of negative responses to this comment is very encouraging.
Not because I agree with my sibling comments, but because I strongly agree with the parent, making me think my org and I are much earlier than I thought. :)
This isn’t really an evaluation of the company, just explaining how they had to use different financing approaches as they grew and derisked their technology (which makes sense).
Compared to some other new approaches for getting clean base load power, it seems like they’ve been pretty grounded and methodical.
They're way ahead of the microwave drilling people.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
> There's no reason why this shouldn't work. But they've been at it for 9 years, with considerable funding, and it doesn't really work yet. That's a concern.
It does work. They've had a pilot project producing 3 megawatts since 2023. But scaling takes a lot of time and money, particularly when it's something new and you have to go through a lot of operational learning.
Shale took something like 30 years to become a thing. 9 years is nothing in the energy space.
It does work technically I think it is still an open question if it can work economically. There are issues of commercially viable flow rates / thermal decline rates that are harder physical limits you run up against and the pilot design doesn't address. In human timescale terms it's more like heat mining rather than renewable heat due to thermal depletion rate vs replenishment rate. These systems have a targeted lifetime of ~20-30 years and net power will decline over this timespan.
Geothermal has had the same problem for its entire history. That problem is that the water being heated goes through the ground (not in a pipe) to "gather" more energy. But this means that when the water comes back up, it has a lot of weird salts in it (and other things). Those salts cause corrosion, lots and lots of corrosion, far more than even a maritime environment. So the plant needs to be shutdown a lot of the time for repairs. And that's what makes it uneconomical. Also, the salts often contain things that require special handling which also increases costs.
PS This is why geothermal works in Iceland where there is so much geothermal heat they can use pipes. In CA, they can't so it doesn't work there.
Fervo uses engineered reservoirs in granitic basement rock so this is less of an issue. Hot rock in a working fluid can still dissolve silicates out of the granite and lead to scaling / degradation of the flow rates through the reservoir and that is a risk but chemical anti scaling treatments are used to reduce this.
CA has the worlds largest geothermal power complex in the Geysers. That one field produces an equivalent amount of power as all the geothermal in Iceland and there are others.
Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.
This site doesn’t represent the world at large.
I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.
For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.
>> You don't repeatedly recompress along the pipeline length
Yes, you do. That is the primary purpose of transmission compressor stations. You may just lose a few psi per mile or something, but over the course of 100s of miles..
This is factually incorrect and has the direction of causality wrong.
Enclosed combustors are _more_ efficient than flares, and can be tested to show that they achieve complete combustion of methane (unlike flares, which do not combust all methane.) Because of this efficiency delta, enclosed combustors were introduced to adhere to new air quality regulations.
I.e. regulators forced companies to install them to improve their emissions; they aren't being installed to hide emissions.
"Enclosed flaring is, in truth, probably less efficient than a typical flare. It’s better than venting, but going from a flare to an enclosed flare or a vapor combustor is not an improvement in reducing emissions", based on vibes from a former regulator from the linked article, is incorrect. E.g. see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679082...
Not because I agree with my sibling comments, but because I strongly agree with the parent, making me think my org and I are much earlier than I thought. :)