Drill, baby, drill!

With earthquakes much in the news lately, it occurs to me I haven’t mentioned here my Mad Science plan for dealing with them.

Background: geothermal energy is a very low-carbon way to generate electricity. Normally, it requires that the earth already be supplying the hot water for you (as in geysers), but enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) let you drill down to the hot layers, pump down cold water, and get out hot water. You’re effectively mining the heat out of the earth’s crust. (One well should last about 20–30 years, and take a lot longer to recover.)

One of the problems with EGS is that they can trigger earthquakes. They already shut down one in Basel because of that. But earthquakes happen because there’s pent-up energy from tectonic plates moving and the ground not having caught up— so why not turn the earthquake-triggering to our advantage?

Step one is to upgrade building codes and do seismic retrofitting. This means that pretty much everything vaguely near a fault line in California has to be ready to cope with an 8.0; in Seattle, where there’s a subduction zone, you need to be ready to cope with a 9.0. This is preparation we should make anyway, but with a Mad Science initiative looming, it should take on some urgency—

Because step two is to sink EGS wells up and down the West Coast, right near the fault lines. This will likely trigger earthquakes. Probably some big ones, especially on that stretch of the southern San Andreas Fault that hasn’t had a major quake in three centuries and has about 7 meters of continental drift to catch up on.

Once the big quakes are over, equilibrium should settle down to more frequent but smaller quakes. It would be interesting to see the actuarial numbers on this— it’s a massive infrastructure outlay, but between the value of the very-low-carbon power generation and the lowered risk of losses due to quake damage, it might be efficient.

Now if I could just come up with a way to tap the energy of the tectonic plate motion itself...