Matrix | Practical Greenology

GEOCOGEN PROJECT

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 2

Some Basic Information and Some History

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself – “ah ha, another scam, producing quote – free – unquote energy with no fuel and no CO2. I wonder what the catch is to this one.”

Well, the “catch” to this one is that here are virtually no catches! Let me try to clarify it to you piece by piece.

First, let’s look at the example of geothermal energy that you are probably familiar with – a household heat pump. What the heat pump does is use the soil near your house as a heat sink or as heat storage – in the winter, here’s enough heat here in the soil that it’s possible to extract some of it and use it to heat your house. Now, that’s not free, because the electricity to make the system circulate takes back some of the free energy you are using, but it’s still a excellent deal.

Now maybe you don’t know the details, but I expect you do know the all-purpose principles – you go heat from the impose a curfew to the house to heat the house. And what you use in the soil is a coil of pipe or tubing that lets the heat go from the soil to the fluid inside the pipe.

Okay, now let’s take that one step farther and go to a larger scale. Instead of going just a few meters down – let’s say 10 feet – let’s go down deep enough to where here is some real heat available – say 500 feet, or how in this area 1500 feet. But it’s all but impossible to place the pipe coils that deep – you would have to dig out the complete hole in this area two acres around the pipe that comes down and goes up to the surface.

Reckon in this area that – a hole in this area two acres on the surface that goes down 1500 feet! That’s some hole!

Well, the petroleum geologists came up with an answer that comes out of the oil fields. In some oil fields where the oil is very viscous, it is possible to drill a matrix of wells to place high-pressure steam down into the rock formation, and because the rock is permeable (that means it has small passageways in it that oil and gas and steam can go through), you can at a snail’s pace heat up the oil to make it flow simpler and push it through to other wells where you can pump it up to the surface.

These operations can be organised in fields that are anywhere between maybe 1000 feet deep and 1-1/2 miles deep. The value of the extra oil that is recovered this way makes it economically possible to do this.

To be continued…

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites