Geothermal Steam

I woke up this morning with excitement in my veins. It's a chemical thing - I ate the right food yesterday or something - but I was wired to brainstorm. As I assessed my life and where I should go, I confirmed once again that for me, happiness will come from truly making a difference while I'm here on this planet. And the holy grail, once again, is developing abundant clean sustainable renewable power. And the idea came next: tap into geothermal energy deep within the earth's crust, ideally generating steam from water. Drill deep enough, inject water, and receive steam. Tap the steam either below the crust or at the surface. The catch: is "deep enough" too deep?

I called my brother, the jack of all trades, to vet the idea. He knows something about everything. And true to form, he knew something about this idea already. He had seen a documentary on a similar concept that is nearing production in the Australian outback.

Further research

The Australian site is covered briefly here:

• Small news blurb about GeoDynamics
• video

Hot Dry Rock (HDR)is the "official" name for the basic technology. The Wikipedia entry says "this technology has the potential to power the world at little or no cost to the population." Bullseye!

This tech was investigated in the 1970's at Los Alamos. It has since been researched all over the world. Since the 1970's until recently, funding in the US has been minimal. MIT led an interdisciplinary panel that produced this substantial report in 2006. MIT Energy Lab: (617)253-3401

Research funding

Since much research has already been done, I will focus on expanding upon it towards achieving the following goals:

• conduct a survey of exploitable geothermal resources
• minimize installation and maintenance cost
• maximize sustainability, including earthquake risk assessment

We're excited to try to get some research funding. I want to keep the research totally open and cooperative. No copyrights, no patents, no marketing. Ideally, the results of any research will be the ability of anyone and everyone to tap into this energy source. Opportunities:

• NSF funding
• Dan suggested Google Venture, but "overriding investment criteria will be ROI", which may not fit my philanthropic agenda.

I am going to work on a grant application next.