When researching geothermal energy in the Guilderland databases I found that there are a lot of older articles. A rule of thumb for scientific research is to normally stray away from anything older than a few years. I first dismissed these articles and adapted my search to "geothermal energy" articles within the last 12 months.
I found an interesting article on Pohang, South Korea. Pohang had experienced a man-made 5.5 magnitude earthquake (that's about a moderate size as far as earthquakes go). This earthquake was caused by a geothermal power plant. The article focuses on how it happened and apparently there were a lot of signs that this was going to happen, there were low-level earthquakes happening almost constantly due to this site. The interesting part about geothermal energy is that if a country is located on natural fault lines, such as Iceland, then geothermal is the by far the best source of energy as the Earth is already releasing this heat and humans have the technology to use it. On the other side of this, a country that needs to man-make these breaks in the Earth's deeper rocks may be risking a lot.
After I reflected on this piece I looked back at some of the older articles to see what the appeal was back then, if there was a promising market for geothermal energy that was neglect or never looked into. I found pieces from 2011 and some from 1988. I chose an article that was comparing geothermal to fracking. Fracking is breaking the rock for oil and is much more harmful to the environment than geothermal. The problem with this article is that it states that Fracking has environmental benefits, but that is to be assumed as this is a dated source. It is very interesting to see how the beliefs on energy sources change as their technologies become more advances, that is why I have become a little skeptical with geothermal, there may be disadvantages and risks that are unknown now and in the future, after companies have invested too much, it's too late to turn back.
Comments