Friday, May 1, 2009

Geothermal... just an observation

I was reading about certain items that Obama wants to be put into effect. Such as alternative energy? What exactly does he mean by this?

Alternative energy isn’t exactly all it is cracked up to be… how does this affect Alaska?
Everyone is buying those (Stupid IMO) hybrid vehicles that don’t seem to work as well up here as they do in the Southern part of the Hemisphere. I wonder why? Cold and batteries don’t exactly mix, nor does Ethanol or Methanol as it gums up when in extreme colds and becomes a jelly like subsistence. British Petroleum tried the alternative diesel trucks and gave them BACK to the company and went back to the original diesels they had. That says something right there! You also can’t really use solar panels here in the winter. And if you are in area that is lucky to be windy consistently, you might have a chance at Wind Power, but you will also have to worry about it freezing up (I mean the oil and lube which is not “alternative”).

There isn’t much else to think about, except maybe Geothermal. Now, geothermal has been around a while, but mostly in the southern states such as California and Nevada and is gaining speed in many other states and places.

How exactly did it start? Well it has been around for over a couple thousand years as the Greek used it then. But it was hard to harness and made their “people” have hallucinations due to the chemical compounds and sulfur associated as well as depending on the tectonic area, it can scald you or even cook you!

Iceland has this technology, but at what price to their island? They say it is safe. I would like to see it first hand before I say yay or nay.

But I do know companies have tired and are trying up here for Geothermal. Unalaska was a base test, a number of years ago. The company actually drilled into the volcano itself to measure and test if it was feasible. Unfortunately, the project stopped due to funding as it isn’t cheap to get supplies and drilling equipment out to the island.

There is a new effort going on across the inlet. This company is also going to see how the feasibility of geothermal via a volcano again. This has me kind of leery, not that I am saying no to it as I do know it works, but the fact Alaska has some of the most active volcanos in the world. I wouldn’t want to have a bunch of money from private, federal and/or state poured into this and then the volcano blows and you have to start all over again and rebuild. Think of Redoubt and then the holding tanks that many are screaming about, and you have roughly the same concept.

But there is a lot to be determined concerning geothermal. Have they done shot holes around the areas in which they want to drill so that the area is stable and not plastic? There are quite a bit of “soft” or plastic ground in that area as it was scoured for methane. Data doesn’t lie concerning that, nor does core data.

I can go more into detail, but I am going to leave it at that.

But has anyone else heard of selling Volcanic Ash out of State to Farmers to revitalize the soil yet?

2 comments:

  1. No, I hadn't heard of selling volcanic ash in lg quantities, but I do remember when Mt St Helens blew. We got covered in ash even though we were several miles away. We could never really clean it out for the rest of the year. The plants sucked.

    Whoa! But what happened the next year and a few years after that? The best growing seasons we've ever seen.

    A lot of people did make a goodly amount of money out of using the ash and selling Mt St Helen glassware. We still have a couple of pieces.

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  2. LAW, I have a couple of ash glass. The reason they use it is due to melt it faster then regular sand to make the glass and in some cases (depending on the chemical compound) the ash glass can be harder.

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