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Geothermal rocks in the age of sustainability

October 26, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

Take a moment to scan some of the news about geothermal energy from October 24, 2017. This is just another day in the life of geothermal and it’s very exciting. Money is pouring into geothermal from all directions on all continents. From this vantage point it looks like geothermal might...

Trump’s DOE tries to pick “winners”

October 25, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

There’s a disappointing story in the New York Times today about how Donald Trump's DOE (Department of Energy), under former Texas governor and sometime presidential candidate, Rick Perry, is lending disproportionate support to the coal industry. “Rick Perry’s Anti-Market Plan to Help Coal” by Jody Freeman and Joseph Goffman shows how Perry...

The free market and the Paris Accord

October 19, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

Climate change has become a free market issue as business adapts to profit-making opportunities. Beagle Research chief Denis Pombriant said today that the free market has become inextricably involved in the climate change debate with a decided interest in actions that will result in profits. The Paris climate accords are...

Geothermal is everywhere today

October 16, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

Geothermal energy still has a whiff of the exotic because it’s the least understood—or discussed—non-polluting and renewable method for generating sizeable amounts of electricity essential to kicking the fossil fuel habit. Even casual observers get the idea of solar, wind, and even hydroelectric power generation, after all they are for...

More batteries

October 11, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

[caption id="attachment_442" align="alignright" width="390"] Hydrogen fuel cell diagram[/caption] There’s a lively discussion building on the benefits of hydrogen fuel cell technology vs. lithium batteries to fuel electric vehicles in the near future. Each approach has its proponents but it appears that the electrics are winning and will likely be the...

Batteries

October 11, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

[caption id="attachment_443" align="alignright" width="300"] Lithium ion battery pack[/caption] Making a better, higher capacity battery has been a quest that has consumed scientists and engineers for decades. But progress has been painfully slow because a battery is essentially a liquid chemical device that turns chemical energy into electricity at rates that...

Change and the New Energy Paradigm

September 26, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

One of the hardest parts of change is, well, change. That’s not circular reasoning either, changing something about your life takes a bit if courage because you might be encountering something you haven’t before. Change also requires an amount of trust that things have been thought through and we’ll all...

Hydrothermal Heat Mining

September 26, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

There are two general ways to mine heat—hydrothermal heat mining and Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS). For simplicity let’s look at hydrothermal heat mining here and EGS in a separate post. Hydrothermal heat mining’s modern uses for electricity generation from go back at least 100 years on every continent. Also, people...

How Much Fossil Fuel is Left?

September 26, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

Nothing on Earth is available in an infinite supply; not oxygen, not gold, not fossil fuels. Nothing, and that’s especially true of the fossil fuels that we use for energy. Interestingly those fuels are also a great source of carbon compounds that serve as the starting materials for all sorts...

Heat mining and power production

September 26, 2017 by Denis Pombriant

One power-generating solution that is both non-intermittent and nonpolluting involves mining (or extracting) heat from the Earth’s crust to generate electricity. According to “The Future of Geothermal Energy—Impact of Enhanced Geothermal Systems on the United States in the 21st Century,” a 2006 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...