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It seems like the Lawrence Berkeley Lab is always getting in the news for something or other. Now, it’s for getting a pretty sweet cut out of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act pot—$7 million, to be vaguely precise. And this time the funding is for geothermal energy research.
“Now wait a minute, Clog,” you suspiciously ask.
“Isn’t geothermal energy what kept the human race alive in a machine-run world in the Matrix series? Is this just the beginning to the inevitable end of humanity as we know it?”
Well, no, actually virtual reality worlds and Keanu Reeves have little to do with it.
Basically, there are geothermal technologies out there already. And they kind of suck. The LBL has four programs looking into methods that can get energy where the current technologies are woefully impotent.
The four programs are known as: Fluid Imaging, Estimating Fracture Surface Area, CO2 As Fluid and THMC Modeling. Respectively, they are probably way more complicated than a layman’s explanation.
Fun facts about geothermal energy, taken from the LBL site:
*Total electricity used by the U.S. that is generated by geothermal energy is less than 1 percent.
*Eight percent of renewable energy is made geothermally.
*Enhanced geothermal technologies could go up 40 times, up to about 10 percent of total U.S. energy consumption.
Image Source: VancityAllie under Creative Commons
Berkeley Lab Receives $7 Million for Enhanced Geothermal Energy Technologies [LBL]
Tags:American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Department of Energy, geothermal energy, Lawrence Berkeley Lab
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