Lately there has been a discussion of global warming, where the earth is warming up. The creation of this is that when oil and coal burns they create a gas, called carbon dioxide (CO₂). Carbon dioxide is not dangerous in small amounts, but when millions of cars drive the roads and even more people needs to take hot showers, the gas is produced in much larger amounts. When this occurs the CO₂ creates a layer underneath the ozone layer, which when the heat rays from the sun hits the earth and bounces back off, they cannot escape the earth, but remain on it and heats the earth up. But how can we prevent this from happening when oil and coal has been our biggest resources in the last two hundred years according to the Greening Earth Society? Maybe we cannot remove the entire usage of oil and coal, but what we can do is reduce the amount we use, by looking for other resources, one of the many solutions, is to use geothermal energy an energy that comes from already heated water.
On the earth there are several hot spots, which are the places in which lava runs closer to the surface of the earth, than just the inner core of the earth. These hot spots are located mostly around areas where there are also volcanoes. When it rains, the earth absorbs the water, allowing the water to drizzle down to the lava or lies in pools that are then heated by the earth. As just warm water you can run water through big pipes that can then lie in houses and underneath roads to heat the houses and roads up, that way oil is not used for heating in places of hot spots. Another thing that those hot spots can be used for are to create energy. When those water droplets get so close to the lava, they start heating to above boiling point that they become steam. When water changes into steam it expands and needs a way to escape the undergrounds. When this happens we get something called geyser, which are the steam and water that tries to escape earth and can jump several meters into the sky. But instead of jumping into the sky we are now capable to capture that energy source and use to our benefits. There are three ways of capturing that energy, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The first way is used through a dry steam method, in which the heated water and steam runs through a pipe and through a turbine that rotates to create energy, and then the steam is compressed through a condenser to allow the water back into the earth. As shown here:
"The second way to produce the same kind of energy is to use more of the hot water by depressurizing it into steam that then drives the turbine." (UCS) As shown to the here:
And the third approach is to use the heated steam and water to heat up another liquid, which then is pumped through the turbine, as shown here:
Now you might say that there aren't enough hot spots in the entire world to heat up all those houses and bath water. And the answer is no there aren't, but if we use the geothermal energy in the places where we can we have already reduced the amount of carbon dioxide down to almost the half, because geothermal only produce half as much as CO₂ as oil and coal. And on top of that using water is much cleaner than oil and coal. Also those places that do have hot spots such as the entire west and northwest of America and Iceland should use their energy resource more. Iceland does indeed, but only few places of America are the geothermal energy used. Instead of having Marie use all that energy that causes more harm than use, she can have a whole house and all her energy resources from the geothermal energy, while the only thing that does not run entirely on heated water would be her car. It might not have solved the problem completely, but it has reduced our oil and coal needs.
Line Winslow
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