ERL FISH – Paul Woskoff (MIT)

Title: Accessing Geothermal Energy with Millimeter-Wave Beams

Abstract: Earth has a huge heat content equal to 20 billon years of current global energy consumption. This energy could be accessed almost anywhere for efficient electricity generation by penetrating deep into the crust >16 km and establishing a high temperature gradient >50 Co/m for high-power, supercritical extraction at temperatures >373 Co.  Millimeter-wave (30 – 300 GHz) gyrotron sources, more powerful, efficient, and penetrating than infrared lasers, developed for fusion energy research have successfully ablated (>2,000 Co) laboratory holes in granite and basalt more easily than a mechanical drill.  The physics, economics, and technology are favorable for bringing the virtually limitless, clean energy of Earth to the surface.   About the speaker: Dr. Paul Woskov is a research engineer at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering. He has worked on major fusion energy experiments and spin off technologies to nuclear waste remediation, environmental monitoring, and geothermal energy.  Dr. Woskov is a member of APS, ANS, AAAS, life member of IEEE, and has won 6 R&D 100 Awards.

About the series: The MIT Earth Resources Laboratory’s Friday Informal Seminar Series (FISH) features talks by our lab members as well as special guests from academia and the energy industry on our areas of interest including geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, machine learning for geophysics, multiphase flow, subsurface imaging, and uncertainty quantification. Titles and abstracts will be posted here when available. For more info or Zoom password please contact erl-info@mit.edu.