So what happened?

[Anomalocaris]

Hello!

Ah. I see some one mentioned the geo-thermal power system.

They're using that in.. Iceland (I think?) and New Zealnd.

people are learning alot about how to do the tech well.

Like, one of the problems is keeping the water IN the system. It's actually hard to cross connect the two 'bore' holes. SO when you pump water down one... Not all the 'water' comes back up.

I think the folks in Iceland have a good-er-er way of resolving this issue.... don't have any links atm.

I've heard.. possibly in New Zealand? That one of the other down-sides is kind of making a 'Mud volcano'.

Basically you allow higher temperature material to rise up closer to the surface. It mixes with ground water and spoul and 'BLURT" steaming hot mud errupts out of the round.

So.. it's kind of a viable way to parasitically suck the heat out of the planet.... but there are still tech hurdles to over come.

Plus... you can only really do it in places where the crust is kind'a 'THin' or 'Faulty' to begin with.

The idea would be rather a non-starter in a place like Australia. The continent sits pretty much smack in the middle of its 'Plate'.

Cheers!

Not at work.

Indeed, the largest geothermal facility in the world is actually the Geyser geothermal plant in California, about 100km north of San Francisco.   It is associated with both recent volcanism and is at a place where the crust is extensively faulted.   It was largely developed since the 1960s.   But by the year 2000 the field has shown increasing signs of depletion.   

However, there  can be areas of great geothermal potential in the middle of a plate, see Yellowstone.   Basically wherever there are recent intra-plate volcanos (say last half million years), there can be geothermal potential.   In some locations geothermal potential seem to linger for over a million years after the most recent major eruption of a large intra-plate volcano, see Valles Caldera in New Mexico.   There are thousands of intra-plate volcanos that erupted in the last quarter million years, and most of those are not even associated with hot spots like Yellowstone.