The March Roundup
Links and other notes from the Underland.
Greetings from Austin! This week we host South by Southwest, which has the city overrun with erratic scooters, midlife crisis hats, and trying-too-hard brand activations. BUT if the festival has brought you, esteemed Unearthed reader, to town, please let me know, and I’ll buy you a coffee.
For this post I’m trying something a little different, rounding up highlights from my readings over the past month. Let me know if you’d like more of this, more long form essays, or something else!
1. Geothermal batteries?
Geothermal has received a lot of attention recently as a low-carbon baseload power source. But what if it could also be used as a battery?
MIT Technology Review: startup Fervo Energy has successfully tested an energy storage mechanism for enhanced geothermal power.
“Enhanced” geothermal takes the hydraulic fracturing approach developed in the oil and gas industry and applies it for geothermal energy. Water, sand, and other chemicals are pumped down into the rock, increasing the pressure and breaking it open. This creates a network of fractures, dramatically increasing the effective surface area of rock to which the wellbore has access.
What Fervo has shown is that this combination—hydraulic fractures in impermeable rock—can also be a store of energy, not just a source of energy. The geothermal operator could, during times of high solar or wind production, pump cold water down the hole and into the fracture network. Because the rock is impermeable, the water doesn’t flow away, but instead pressurizes up in the fractures. When solar or wind production drops, the geothermal operator simply reverses the flow and runs their plant like normal.
There’s a long way to go before successful commercialization of this technology, but this is very exciting news.
2. Two solar eclipses meeting in Utopia?
It’s hard to make this up: the 2023 and 2024 solar eclipse tracks intersect west of San Antonio near the town of Utopia. If you can only make one, make it the 2024, which will be a total eclipse.
3. US Shale Boom Shows Signs Signs of Peaking as Big Oil wells disappear
2022 marked the first year in quite some time where wells started producing less year-over-year in the Permian Basin of West Texas and SE New Mexico. This WSJ article, using data from Novi Labs — where I work!!! — showed that part of that reason is that the biggest wells are disappearing. This is likely due to a number of factors, but the exhaustion of the highest-quality drilling inventory is one of them. Keep your eye on this: without big growth from the Permian, incremental supply will have to get more oil from the deepwater, arctic, and OPEC.
4. Low levels of oil and gas investment?
If oil demand doesn’t peak in 2030, we may be in for another energy crisis, even without geopolitics: “For the first time in at least a decade, US drillers last year spent more on share buybacks and dividends than on capital projects”. (via Bloomberg)
5. The only winning move is not to play
With significant resource constraints on battery metals, decarbonization efforts should prioritize smaller vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles. Of course!!1
The above chart makes it glaringly obvious that not all batteries are created equal. A Hummer battery comes in at 3x the size of a standard EV, and a whopping 1200x the size of an e-bike battery.
I am a red-blooded Texan who works in oil and gas, but even still I would love to see governments do more to build out bike lanes and deregulate housing. As the maestro himself said, e-bikes can turn every hilly city into Amsterdam. Dear City of Austin, please build out more protected bike lanes and allow more density in the city core 🙏
6. Fund people, not projects
A good summary of why research funders like the NIH should expand open-ended funding of scientists, rather than funding specific proposals. Doing so would free scientists to work less on writing grant applications and more on research — especially the breakthrough, risky type that might scare off bureaucrats.
The Arc Institute, with funding from the likes of Vitalik Buterin and Patrick Collison, provides a nongovernmental model for how this might work.
If I’m honest, the researcher-government-funding life cycle was a one of the reasons I left graduate school for industry—despite having a couple years of NSF funding for a PhD already lined up.
The professors spent huge amounts of time writing grant proposals. To be successful, you had to be pretty savvy about taking some portion of existing funding and using it to do the preliminary research for your next proposal, so that the funding institutions could see that the project was lower-risk.
It also helped to shoehorn the proposal into some large controversy or hot-button issue.2 In our specialty, that meant framing research as helping to assess whether climatic changes drove tectonic activity, or tectonic activity drove climatic changes. The answer, of course, is both!! But tackling that type of question is much more appealing to funders than “I have a hunch that the people who mapped this obscure mountain range got it wrong, so I’d like to give it another shot, who knows what I might find,” even though paradigm-shifting discoveries often come from open-ended exploration of half-articulated inconsistencies.
I have been out of touch with the academic side of geosciences for a while, so please let me know if anything is changing there in terms of open-ended research funding. I’d love to learn more or help if I can.
7. Satellite image of the week: the world’s largest conveyor belt
Phosphorus is a critical ingredient in fertilizer, and unlike nitrogen we cannot pull it out of the atmosphere. Western Sahara, controlled by Morocco, is home to some of the world’s largest reserves. The above image shows the trace of the world’s largest conveyor belt, transporting phosphate from the Bou Craa mine to the sea. I’d recommend this recent New Yorker article on the subject.
8. Choose your fighter
Media coverage of climate change risks is 4x that of nuclear war, and 50x that of gain-of-function, and a million times that of AI risks (from
) :
9. Cool old oil photo of the day
A natural seep of bitumen in an Italian mine. Awesome. H/t Mark Tingay and Alan Foum.
10. Video of the month
Olive tree split in half by Turkish earthquake
11. Quote of the week
A contrarian is just a reverse weathervane. The point is not to think originally but to think critically.
-Michael Ignatieff, Liberties Journal
There are also options for harms mitigation and geoengineering, which I hope to go into in a future post.
NSF grants also usually require proposals to include “Broader Impacts,” which include (from the NSF): “full participation of women, persons with disabilities, and underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); improved STEM education and educator development at any level; increased public scientific literacy and public engagement with science and technology; improved well-being of individuals in society; development of a diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce; increased partnerships between academia, industry, and others; improved national security; increased economic competitiveness of the U.S.; use of science and technology to inform public policy; and enhanced infrastructure for research and education.”
All of those are important goals in their own right, but I worry about the cumulative impact of requiring every scientific proposal to include those broader impacts, which are judged, along with “Intellectual Merit”, as one of the two primary criteria for funding. Not every project should have an external component. Beyond that, it feels a bit….political…. to me. Once again, I’ll nudge you to go read Unearthed 2022 book of the year Where is my Flying Car?