Geothermal Wells Mine Magma to Create Energy

Published on by in Technology

Geothermal Wells Mine Magma to Create Energy

Iceland's geothermal well will use Earth's crust to power 5,000 homes.

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Situated near the town of Reykjanes, the geothermal well (illustrated)
goes five kilometres into the Earth's crust and hits temperatures
between 400°C and 1,000°C; Credit: MUTI

Situated near the town of Reykjanes in southwest Iceland, the geothermal well goes five kilometres into the Earth's crust and hits temperatures between 400°C and 1,000°C. Started on August 11, 2016, it's being dug by the  Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP),  whose mission is to mine magma for energy.

Geothermal engineers on the project hope to find the sweet spot of temperatures and pressures to create supercritical fluid - water vapour so laden with energy it could potentially generate 50mW of power versus just five megawatts from a typical well. That's the difference between powering around 50,000 homes versus 5,000 homes per year in Iceland - although before IDDP connects the well to Iceland's energy grid, it will run a battery of impact studies over the next one to three years.

"This high-energy concentration of supercritical fluid will give us more output in terms of electricity than a conventional high-temperature fluid," says Bjarni Pálsson, manager of geothermal research and development at Landsvirkjun, which operates 17 power stations across Iceland. But don't the mines spoil the view? "We get more energy out of the same-sized footprint," says Pálsson. More power to them.

Read more at: Wired

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