Drilling vs. Mining for our energy needs? (Scientific American)

Stop Mining for Oil (and Coal), Start Drilling for Heat

By David Biello | Jun 20, 2011 06:01 AM | 29

The center of the Earth is a roiling ball of heat, roughly 6,000 degrees Celsius as near as we can tell without a sci-fi tunneling effort. The closest humanity has come to that molten core is some 12 kilometers beneath the continental crust in Russia, which isn't even halfway through said crust and akin to drilling into an apple without piercing the skin. Yet, it's pretty clear that a lot of that core and mantle heat makes its way to or near the surface—witness: Yellowstone, the big island of Hawaii, all of Iceland—offering a cheap, constant and potentially clean source of energy. 

There are already several methods for harvesting the energy in this rock that's heated by the decay of radioactive elements. It's also something humans have been doing for a long time—at least since 1911 in Italy to be exact when locals opened the world's first geothermal power plant in the Valle del Diavolo. We even have an industry devoted to refining and improving the drilling techniques to make such energy available on an even grander scale—you know it as the most profitable enterprise on the planet, yes, the oil and gas industry.

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