Mind your step: this is the hottest hole in the world.
Situated near the town of Reykjanes in southwest Iceland, the geothermal well goes five kilometres into the Earth's crust and hits temperatures between 400°C and 1,000°C. Started on August 11, 2016, it's being dug by the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP), whose mission is to mine magma for energy.
Geothermal engineers on the project hope to find the sweet spot of temperatures and pressures to create supercritical fluid - water vapour so laden with energy it could potentially generate 50mW of power versus just five megawatts from a typical well. That's the difference between powering around 50,000 homes versus 5,000 homes per year in Iceland - although before IDDP connects the well to Iceland's energy grid, it will run a battery of impact studies over the next one to three years.
On January 25, the project reached a significant milestone when drilling of the IDDP-2 well was completed at a depth of 4,659 metres. Temperature at the bottom of the well was measured at 427°C, with fluid pressure of 340 bars.
"This high-energy concentration of supercritical fluid will give us more output in terms of electricity than a conventional high-temperature fluid," says Bjarni Pálsson, manager of geothermal research and development at Landsvirkjun, which operates 17 power stations across Iceland. But don't the mines spoil the view? "We get more energy out of the same-sized footprint," says Pálsson. More power to them.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
