Everyone loves a TED Talk. Here’s one of our favorites:
There is rising anxiety in Americans, especially younger adults, about global warming and climate change, and scientists all over the world are trying their hardest to find ways to fight against the clock. Governments across the country are starting to invest in cleaner sources of energy like wind and solar, moving away from traditional sources of energy like coal and oil.
However, Environmentalist Jamie Beard and executive director of the Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization at the University of Texas at Austin argues that we have been ignoring a potential alternative that have been beneath us for millions of years—geothermal energy.
But it is not that simple. Scientists must figure out just how to harness this energy both efficiently and effectively anywhere in the world. Places like Iceland and continents with active volcanos will have no problem extracting and harvesting this energy because of the nature access scientists and the like will have to the Earth’s crust. It would seem like trying to use this type of energy would be inequitable because what has to happen is we would have to “figure out how to mimic the conditions that occur in places like Iceland…that make geothermal easy to tap and extract and harvest. Those conditions seem simple, but they actually occur naturally in very, very, few places in the world.”
However, the foundation for accessing this energy has already been laid. Beard says, “There have been really disruptive and breakthrough technological innovations that enable us to engineer the subsurface to mimic Mother Nature’s geothermal.”
High pressure, temperature and directional drilling are just some of the innovations that can allow us to give every country better access to this natural source of energy. In the past year and a half, or so, more geothermal start-ups have launched than that of the past ten years. With innovations like closed-loop systems, engineered geothermal systems, or EGS’s, and geothermal hybrids we are close to thinking of having a goal of being able to use geothermal energy effectively and efficiently as a viable energy source, but we may run into another problem. How do we continue to drill into the earth repeatedly without a catastrophic amount of damage? Who does that now? The oil and gas industry, and according to Beard, the geothermal movement is being led by those who are veterans of the oil and gas industry.
Beard suggests that we if we combine forces, we can solve the energy and environmental crisis in the next 30 years and ease anxieties about meeting 2050 climate goals.