its some variant of distributed acoustic sensing. Basically strain within the fiber causes a phase shift in the light scattered along the cable.

Wow. The original article has some pretty compelling earthquake clusterings. I don't think we've managed to image upper mantle magma plumbing in quite as much detail as they have.

There’s something relatively unique about the deposits in china that makes them very economical to mine.

This is not a great visualization. Try a spider plot and normalize values to a standard.

Lots of geothermal plants use a binary cycle. Look up Ormat or the FORGE project.

the energy in the system is limited by both how much fluid you pump down and how hot the fluid is. Even for a static flow rate you can just keep increasing the temperature of the injected fluid to increase heat transfer. Even if the steam is supercritically heated, everything should still work.

Infact, supercritical steam is preferrable! It helps catalyze the conversion from CO2 gas to stable calcite minerals, opens up pore space at depth for more efficient heat transfer to the rock reservoir, and is much more thermally conductive than plain water or steam.

Look up the FORGE project. Its basically a non issue, especially compared to O&G

Yes. Look up the FORGE project. EGS systems are coming online with orders of magnitude less induced seismicity than conventional fracking operations

> electricity limited to the power requirements of the water pumps?

Nope. Geothermal stations don't pump up water from depth. You're limited by the ability to throttle the turbines and how much energy you can inject into the geothermal loop.

Edit: there's also only so much heat the surface heat exchanger can use. Typically geothermal plants are run as stable base power loads but its possible to add a 'peaker' capability similar to natural gas plants.

Yes. But there are logistical challenges to getting enough battery grade lithium soon enough to effectively combat climate change. Using existing geothermal reservoirs as a stopgap solution to store excess energy across years is a great way to transition the grid.

Solar thermal plants do use molten salt as thermal storage. However, they aren't able to store heat energy seasonally.

The Earth is such an excellent thermal insulator that volcanic areas that received their last pulse of power 150,000 years ago are still hot! Geothermal energy storage could locally solve the solar "duck" curve where the subsurface conditions and economic factors are optimal with no need for tons of battery metals and virtually no greenhouse emissions.

Yes. Because we can't make the entire planet a hydroelectric dam. Dams are great! but they require lots of fresh water.

Geothermal and hydroelectric power are both incredibly low carbon sources of electric power and potential energy storage mechanisms. It makes sense to use both depending local economics and logistical constraints.

Sure. but the way newer geothermal binary cycle plants work is the hot geothermal water goes through a heat exchanger at the surface but is never allowed to change into a gas. The intermediate working fluid is typically something like butane. round trip cycle efficiency is limited by the carnot cycle but its not like closed cycle geothermal plants are just leaking water left and right into the ground.

There’s very little leakage in these systems. They mostly operate as closed loops

But you can store excess power for years underground

The EGS he talks about doesn’t need a high enthalpy system to operate.