When it comes to green energy, there’s a whole wealth of potential power waiting just a couple thousand feet beneath the Earth’s crust. Geothermal energy—turning the heat inside our blue marble into steam power—could be a great supplement to all the renewable energy sources we already have. It’s just expensive to get to it.
The reason it’s so expensive is because drilling isn’t cheap. But Mark Russell of Hypersciences has an alternative that is both more cost-effective and more awesome. Basically, the plan would be to build a big gun that shoots holes in the ground with giant bullets .
As Popular Science points out, Russel recently got a patent for his idea , which involves loading a huge projectile into a launch tube, lighting a flammable gas behind it, firing the bullet into the ground at speeds of nearly 5,000 miles an hour (fast enough to totally pulverize the rock it’s hitting), slurp out the debris, and do it again. That process not good enough on its own? Line a couple of these things up next to each other for a bigger hole, or tip the projectiles with explosives.
Hypersciences has received some $1 million from Shell’s GameChanger program to pursue crazy ideas like this, and while the tech isn’t quite close to implementation, its potential is promising. More cost-effective geothermal energy is one of the main benefits sure, but the other one would be seeing this in action.
Source: Popular Science
Forget Drills, Let"s Shoot Our Way Into the Earth"s Crust - Popular Mechanics
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