Well, so THIS is why Newberry has been having so many quakes…
In short, you pick a thermally hot area, like Newberry, Yellowstone, or Mammoth, and you pump water in, and pump water out.
Now, a factoid for those not ‘up’ on volcanoes…
There’s a reason most volcanos happen about 70 to 90 miles from a subduction zone, as in, the Pacific Ring of Fire. The subducted plate dives down at about a 45 degree angle, loaded with, of course, ocean bottom water, and at a predictable depth meets, yes, heat, which boils that water, which helps lubricate all that hot rock. A lot of heat. A lot of water. 70 miles inland is where the angle of descent meets the hot rock and the column of watery heat riseth upward—bringing hot, as in molten, rock with it.
What about landlocked volcanoes? They sit above a different kind of hot spot, a mantle plume, which is where the core’s heat has just overflowed upward: these plumes last for eons, and actually stay in one spot as the earth’s plates migrate over them, so you will see ‘strings’ of volcanoes: Hawaii is one. Yellowstone is one. There’s another in New Mexico which may or may not be a plume… These usually don’t blow up so much as produce boilouts of magma, as in the Deccan Traps, the Siberian Traps (so named because of the ‘stairstep’ mode of basalt columns that form as a result…[traps is similar to the Norwegian word for stairs.])
And then there are the big splits in the Earth, the midocean ridges, one of which goes on land in Iceland, and becomes visible to hikers who want to play tag with volcanoes buried under glaciers…
Well, Iceland uses this sort of power quite successfully. Their part of the ridge is so waterlogged already, they’re really another issue…they get steam. A lot of steam.
Injecting water to produce steam in something like Newberry, which is not that near the coast, and which is really a type B, a plume sort, as opposed to A or C, is an interesting venture. As they say, 200 small earthquakes and the requirement to secure your china collection would be a bit of a burden for an area, but cheap nearly-forever electricity would be nice…granted they understand this beast as well as they hope they do. It should NOT blow up. It should not do much but rumble and thump as cooler water fills the cracks and heats up and moves on. And it could produce a lot of power.
We shall see.
