The progression of this magma intrusion, particularly beneath the power plant itself, seems like it should provide a valuable case study to test the idea presented by this article. If there ends up being an eruption under that power plant we might learn something about the advantages and potential pitfalls of this proposal.
Iceland's event is much smaller, but we're not talking about the sort of thing that you can implement in a year.
Warhammer 40k sort of absurd.
Having said that, It should be considered to take advantages of clean energy.
>The size of volcanic eruptions can be expressed by the volume or mass of magma released (table 1), with super-eruptions yielding in excess of 450 km3, or more than 1×10^15 kg, of magma (Sparks et al. 2005).
Wikipedia says the Empire State Building has a volume of 1e6 m3 or 0.001 km3. So the eruption would be equivalent to at least 450,000 Empire State Buildings worth of magma. Mt Everest is some 90km3, so only 5 Mt Everest equivalents.
These amounts are too big for me to comprehend, but yeah. Going to need a bigger boat.
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.200...
Also remember it takes time for heat to transfer through so much rock, so a plant would have to continuously remove energy for a very long time to reach the places where it actually matters.
On the one hand, building a huge geothermal power station at Yellowstone would generate a large amount of (potentially cheap) electric power while simultaneously reducing a catastrophic risk. "
"On the other hand, in many ways Yellowstone is a particularly bad place to try to build such a plant. The harsh, corrosive conditions in and around the magma chamber would make drilling the wells especially difficult, and its location in the middle of nowhere would require the construction of enormous transmission lines"
"In any case, the debate is likely to remain academic for the foreseeable future. Using Yellowstone for geothermal power was made illegal by the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970"
So the answer is likely yes, in theory. But there are lots of other places, where it makes more sense to build geothermal plants. (for energy, but also security, there are lots of other potential super vulcanos that are not as activly monitored like Yellowstone is)
Better yet would be to put up short transmission lines out of the park, and set up a dirt cheap energy district for energy intensive manufacturing- smelting, data centers, that sort of thing.
The magma chamber stays cool, there's a nice new tax base, good potential for reducing emissions, everyone wins except for the people who want Yellowstone to be untouched wilderness.
I wonder when people are going to realise it'll never ever make more sense to filter co2 out of the air at 400-500ppm to deposit deep underground like that compared to not pumping it up and emitting it in the first place. It's always going to be vastly more difficult and a big net loss in the end.
All the carbon capture projects like that are funded in large part by the fossil fuel industries as a cover to reduce the pressure on their backs. Not as something they believe will work long term.
The ones that do make more sense at first glance like the recent increase in direct capture in the US started to get more subsidised by the previous administration but not to benefit the environment however but to reduce the cost of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. Because without there wasn't even enough incentive to do it right at major carbon sources when there was an industry willing to pay for the CO2.
Love or hate crypto, it is uniquely capable of quickly moving in and making remote energy production facilities valuable. Which could then provide the infrastructure for things like carbon capture plants to exist remotely.
I find it very much laugh-or-you'd-cry that the US would rather have Yellowstone winding up for a big one than allow geothermal power projects near a national park. Talk about catastrophically bureaucratic priorities.
It's flat out not feasible to do and wouldn't work even if we did. The scale and forces are far too massive for us to do anything about it.
It's like saying "why don't they stop earthquakes by removing earthquake faults".
Looking it up, we're of course already on top of harnessing the geothermal there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Valley_Geothermal_Pro....
One that is being tracked, and showing a present threat is the Vesuvius complex (which did in Pompeii), and is showing markedly increased activity [0]. I'd be more interested in proposals that might mitigate that.
Or more generally, studies finding out how late such a project could start and still be successful, i.e., able to extract sufficient heat from the system before it erupts, thus preventing the eruption.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/europes-mo...
Switzerland had two larger projects to dig deep enough for a geothermal power plant and both got cancled due to the triggered earth quakes. [1]
There may be another attempt but it's risky and I think doing this at Yellowstone maybe a lot more risky.
[1] https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/strom-aus-erdwaerme-trotz-sc...
Maybe learning more with simulations or theory is a good way forward, or maybe small scale experiments. If we do nothing and eventually notice that a giant eruption is about to happen, I suppose it would be too late. There seem to be many similarities in long term risk and possible prevention of asteroid impacts. I think these problems are worth exploring even though there is probably no direct benefit within a human lifetime.
That sounds overly simplistic. Volcanic eruptions aren't caused by energy accumulation alone (otherwise every eruption would have the same magnitude), and AFAIK it's mostly the accumulation of gas that triggers eruptions, and in many cases the gas is in fact steam…
Anything to relieve the pressure can, by definition, cause an eruption if there is an inadvertent feedback loop.
Doesn't this say that the heat bleed is already at least 300% of what's necessary to stop energy from accumulating?
“Bush Vows To Remove Toxic Petroleum From National Parks”
https://www.theonion.com/bush-vows-to-remove-toxic-petroleum...
Both of these proposals require political stability we're unlikely to see over 600 or 50,000 years. You have to be thinking some kind of self-sustaining and monumental Pyramids-type project.
I think you will have trouble finding many places that haven't been touched by conflict in 800 years, given anyone lives there. If there's humans, there will be war.
Huge infra structure projects like this are no longer feasible in terms of cost and political/collective will in the US.
It's almost a 99% guarantee this will never get built ever. At least not by the US. Any time you see speculative stuff about big projects in the US that aren't related to the military it's a pretty much a guarantied pipe dream.
The only way I see it getting built if they angle it as some kind of military thing to stay competitive with China. But that's really a stretch.
Any discussion on the topic has to begin with assuming the usual red tape has been cut (however much I agree with the impossibility of that happening aside).
Of course, this requires political will too, but unlike various other issues, I doubt that some old law protecting national parks is going to be held as sacrosanct as the second amendment. The GOP certainly doesn't care about protecting NP resources, and the Dems will agree too as long as enough scientists tell them it's a good idea.
If you consider that that heat is stored underground where it doesn't affect weather patterns, then moving it to the surface is bound to involve the use of energy to move it and that energy will contribute to global warming as well as the heat released by the whole project.
And if we're not careful there's a slight chance we could trigger an eruption instead of preventing one.
