[OKC] From Slate's Green Lantern: Could Yellowstone Power My Home?

[Miles, Karen]

Could Yellowstone Power My Home?


The pros and cons of geothermal energy.

By Nina Shen RastogiUpdated Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2010, at 7:00 AM ET
  <http://www.slate.com/id/2272326/> Old Faithful
 
I recently took my family to Yellowstone, and the shooting geysers and 
supervolcano
<http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/supervolcano/supervolcano.html>
got me wondering-can't we tap all that energy to produce electricity?
 
Theoretically, we could. Super-hot water is the primary ingredient in 
geothermal energy production
<http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/geothermal_basics.html>  and the
earth beneath Yellowstone has it in spades, thanks to a massive, shallow
body of magma and plenty of snow and rain. However, the Geothermal Steam
Act of 1970 puts national park lands off-limits to geothermal energy
developers. 
Even if it weren't prohibited, there are compelling reasons to leave
Yellowstone alone-like its famous geysers, which could be damaged or
even quenched by geothermal energy development in and around the park.
(Areas outside the park's borders, however, aren't protected as strongly
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/8195r5086281403t/> .) Yellowstone
contains half of the world's remaining geysers, making them a precious
scientific commodity. The park's hydrothermal features host one of the
planet's greatest concentrations of extremophiles, organisms that live
in environments at the extremes of heat, acidity, pressure, and so on.
An estimated 99 percent of Yellowstone's extremophiles remain
undiscovered, but the ones we've found have been quite useful-one
bacterium <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermus_aquaticus> , for
example, made modern DNA analysis possible, while others help scientists
theorize about life on other planets. 
While drilling wells in Yellowstone might not be a great idea,
geothermal energy in general is very promising. According to recent
life-cycle analyses by Argonne National Laboratory <http://www.anl.gov/>
, geothermal power plants emit between 18.7 grams to 103 grams of
CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour-polite little hiccups compared with the
1,234.9 g/kWh belched out by coal or the 487 g/kWh by natural gas.
(Those figures include building and running the power plants as well as
extracting the fuel.) Unlike conventional coal-fired plants, geothermal
plants emit very little sulfur dioxide and no nitrogen oxides
<http://www1.eere.energy.gov/geothermal/geopower_cleanair.html> , which
are the precursors of acid rain <http://www.slate.com/id/2225509/> . And
unlike wind or solar power installations, geothermal power doesn't
fluctuate with the weather. Last year, the United States' 77 geothermal
power plants produced 15.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity
<http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb0802a.html> , or about 0.4 percent of
the U.S. total-more than any other nation in the world. (Wind machines
generated 70.8 billion kWh of electricity, and solar 0.8 billion kWh.)
But as with any big industrial project, geothermal energy production
also carries some environmental risks. The biggest issues revolve around
water. Brackish waters drawn from deep underground are sometimes laced
with toxic substances like mercury, so power producers have to be very
careful with how they store and dispose it. To cool their working fluid
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_fluid> , some geothermal power
plants withdraw large amounts of surface water. In areas where fresh
water is scarce, these plants may compete with farms and homes that need
water for irrigation, bathing, and the like-but that's a problem for
other kinds of power plants, as well
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/business/energy-environment/18iht-ren
cal.html?_r=1&sq=power%20water&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all> .
 
Article continues at: http://www.slate.com/id/2271717/?wpisrc=eDialog
 
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