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A NASA plan to stop a supervolcano from erupting would also be a source of geothermal energy:
Beneath Yellowstone National Park is a giant volcano. The heat from this volcano powers all of the park's famous geysers and hot springs, so most tourists probably don't worry about having tons of hot magma under their feet. But perhaps they should: The Yellowstone supervolcano is a disaster waiting to happen.
The supervolcano erupts about every 600,000 years, and it's been about that long since the last eruption. That means the volcano could erupt any day now, and if it does it'll send enough dust and ash into the sky to blot out the sun for years, along with blowing a 25-mile-wide crater in the western U.S. That's why a group of NASA scientists and engineers are developing a plan to prevent an eruption by stealing the volcano's heat.
[...] NASA's plan is to drill a hole into the side of the volcano and pump water through it. When the water comes back out, it'll be heated to over 600 degrees, slowly cooling the volcano. The team hopes that given enough time, this process will take enough heat from the volcano to prevent it from ever erupting.
As a bonus, the scientists are proposing to use the heated water as a source of geothermal energy, potentially powering the entire Yellowstone region with heat from the volcano that wants to destroy it. A geothermal generator could produce energy at around $0.10 per kWh, competitive with other energy sources.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday August 22 2017, @12:52PM
By that logic we ought to be having earthquakes all over the planet due to people drilling water wells. Fracking is a very different thing...
First off, in fracking it's not really water that they're pumping down there -- the water is there to carry the sand and abrasives and hundreds of assorted chemicals. If you wanna break up rocks, you need to do that. If you want to generate electricity, that's just going to fuck up your turbine. They won't be pumping in all the "additives" here.
Also, fracking is done under high pressure -- high enough to break up the rocks. In this situation you'd want the opposite -- if the rocks break apart, that creates more places the steam and water can escape, resulting in less steam to generate power! The only pressure here should be the steam pressure, and there would have to be some kind of release valves so the pressure doesn't blow up the equipment that's trying to harvest energy from it.