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Earth’s crust may yield clean energy

BASEL (Switzerland): When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this city on the Rhine, the engineers knew they had a problem.

“The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang,” recalls Catherine Wueest, a teashop owner. “I thought a truck had crashed into the building.”

But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of December 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth’s crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world’s search for new sources of energy.

Basel was wrecked by an earthquake in 1365, and no tremor, man-made or other, is to be taken lightly.

After more, slightly smaller tremors followed, Basel authorities told Geopower Basel to put its project on hold.

But the power company hasn’t given up. It’s in a race with a firm in Australia to be the first to generate power commercially by boiling water on the rocks 5 km underground.

On paper, the Basel project looks fairly straightforward: Drill down, shoot cold water into the shaft and bring it up again superheated and capable of generating enough power through a steam turbine to meet the electricity needs of 10,000 households, and heat 2,700 homes.

Scientists say this geothermal energy, clean, quiet and virtually inexhaustible, could fill the world’s annual needs 2,50,000 times over with nearly zero impact on the climate or the environment.

A study released this year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said if 40 per cent of the heat under the U.S. could be tapped, it would meet demand 56,000 times over.

It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equalling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.

“The resource base for geothermal is enormous,” Professor Jefferson Tester, the study’s lead author, told The Associated Press.

But there are drawbacks — not just earthquakes, but cost.

A so-called hot rock well 4.8 km in the U.S. would cost $7 million to $8 million, according to the MIT study.

The average cost of drilling an oil well in the U.S. in 2004 was $1.44 million, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Aeneas Wanner, a Swiss expert, says if you imagine Earth as an egg, “a bore hole would only scratch the shell of the egg a little bit.”

The United States led the way in demonstrating the concept with the Los Alamos geothermal project at Fenton Hill, New Mexico.

The project begun in the 1970s demonstrated that drilling 15,000 feet deep was possible and that energy could then be extracted.

But the project came to a halt in 2000 when it ran out of funds.

Meanwhile, the MIT report said, problems encountered in testing have been solved or can be managed — such as controlling how the water flows underground or limiting earthquakes and chemical interactions between water and rock. — AP

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