TechnoTourist’s Engineering Expeditions

Haha. Yellowstone National Park > Rhode Island. That is really funny.

I like how the geysers were explained. I never knew that hydrogen sulfide was released. I am sure that glade plug in candle can make that go away!

I wish a candle would've helped! Some of them were on the mild side, but one was so bad we could barely stand the smell from inside the car - we had planned to hike around, but just drove on by!

Bush was criticized for allegedly cutting back on geothermal development funding. Whether that assertion is legitimate or not is difficult to verify. However, the funding has been pumped again so it appears possible that some method can be developed to harness the geothermal energy that the Yellowstone area represents.

Frankly, I'm surprised that there is no dialogue in the media or in the scientific community on the vastness of the Yellowstone caldera and the enormous pool of energy all that lava represents.

It's fortuitous that its relatively benign. The size of any eruption from so vast a resource would cause enormous damage to at least half the Country or at least so say the vulcanologist's.

It seems rather strange that at a time when so much effort is being made to relieve this Country from foreign energy dependence, that no concerted effort to harness Yellowstone's energy is in the pipeline.

L. J

You bring up a good point. With all of the media hype on alternative energy, most of what you hear about is solar, wind and nuclear. There seems to be very little said about geothermal. I think that this is a vast untapped resource, right under our noses, that we are ignoring.

I'm glad to hear there is funding for research in this area - people are finally waking up to look for means of alternative energy. Here's a preview to Part 2 in this series - the Yellowstone caldera has "blown its top" roughly every 600,000 to a million years - and could go again within the next 60,000. I'm thinking this potential instability may be one reason for leaving Yellowstone alone.

The fact that it's located in a National Park may be the other - I'm not sure what the exact regulations are for such areas, but I have a feeling energy use would require major legislation changes and would be met by a lot of protest.

If the caldera blows it will be a major disaster in north America.

Hi,

drilling to near an active volcano has been done in Japan and at temperatures near 550°C some equipment failed.

So there will be necessary a major effort to go to temperatures that high or higher.

There are plans inside the geological deep-drilling community to pierce a volcano in uninhabited northern Iceland.

Nobody is totally sure that this drilling into or near to a magma chamber is safe.

The surrounding rocks are fragmented and veins of very hot - may be liquid - material exist.

The magma may contain superheated water that is explosive on pressure relieve.

The bore-hole may add some water to the magma locally and this may result in local very high pressure.

If drilling was successful there is the need to either circulate water or extract the water from existing heated groundwater.

To use a heat exchanger down in the bore-hole will be more or less impossible.

So there has to be brought up very hot - may be supercritical - water or steam.

This with not too high heat loss - else inefficient.

The water that had contact to hot rocks at pressure will typically have dissolved 10% of its weight an assortment of minerals from the rocks. These will crystallise and corrode the metallic tubings on the way up and in the heat exchanger.

So the energy is there - a lot of fundamental research has to be done, I would not start with this complex supervolcanos as Yellowstone but more simple ones are abundant.

Prepare the people that some unusual events may happen. There have been some earthquakes above mag 3 that stopped (by protesters) the hydraulic hot dry rock cracking for a geothermal project near Basel, Switzerland.

If tapping volcanoes will have a breakthrough then there is a big amount of energy waiting. So this may be the best investment we can think of. Let this be known to everybody will help.

RHABE

Thanks for the info - I certainly didn't know that much about super volcanoes or drilling into volcanoes for energy use. I agree, lesser volcanoes - or at least volcanoes in areas less inhabited or that are not in preservation areas like Yellowstone should be "experimented" with first.