Technology to SAVE THE WORLD!

[Valles]

While watching the latest ep of Gundam 00, I had a sudden cunning plan jump out and assault my brain.
It went thus: The biggest problem with operating at the deep underwater level is that the pressure difference can get insane if you want to try and build something a human can survive in. If you don't, though, and your machinery can survive getting wet, then there is, theoretically, no reason why the design problems can't be solved reasonably.
Wherever there is a continental boundary, particularly a spreading one, there is energy being released into the environment. Most such boundaries are underwater, thereby providing not only heat but working fluid.
The gadget I'm seeing in my mind's eye shouldn't really take any new technology even in a modern-day setting - you have a house-ish-sized 'generator' of maybe a couple MW capacity with a neutral bouyancy that gets ferried down by a remote-control rover and glued or anchored in place over a lava vent. Cable is run to a collector box on the seafloor nearby, which is, in turn connected to other collector boxes that eventually plug into a seafloor line leading to the mainland. Installing enough of the things to run a nation's full energy needs would be a massive undertaking, of course, but still far less than Gundam 00's Solar Power System... and would start paying off far sooner, too.
Thoughts?

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"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[CattyNebulart]

energy transmission is lossy, particularly over that kind of distance. There are ways around that but they don't tend to work well underwater. Also maintnance of the things would be a pain.
The thing about putting solar energy collectors in space is that it scales relatively well, with maximum capacity being that of a dyson sphere. By then we'd better have cheap fusion reactors.
Yeah it also suffers from energy losses, but more from the fact that solar panels are quite inefficient than the transmission itself, and once you have the satellite up it's easy to redistribute the power to elsewhere if it is needed.
Also designing stuff to be active on the sea floor at such a high temperature isn't exactly easy.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[yesilmavi]

I also remember reading about plans to mine (robotically) on the moon...
If those plans bear fruit, together with some kind of productional facilty for satalites, the price of solar satalites for power could be a lot more feasible.

[Necratoid]

First though that hits me is how far from shore are these vents typically? I subspect that most of the areas are in international waters... meaning it will either be required to annex further and futher out to sea... Which will start seaborn territorial wars, which will spread onto land, mainly starting with costal areas... or somehow end up creating an internation governmental body to control the things, which will end up weaseling its way into more and more control over international waters. To the point that it will start making its on tarrifs on shipping to go with the import fees for using 'international' resources.
That and the vents in question are likely be damaged badly from an ecological stand point. We are talking about sticking a stopper into parts of an exotic ecosystem and even if the real impact is marginal, negliable, or flat out fictional you'll have Enviromentalist wackos making up stuff about the horrible things it will do to damage the Earth. Which will result in ecoterrorists cutting the lines with explosives, a new group of lobbists trying for the banishment of the tech and/or new laws making the once cheap power rather expensive... or we are back to that massive government of the seas thing.
A map of Plate Techtonics shows the areas where this is usefully possible. The Western coasts of the Americas are notable as viable areas, as is the area around northern South America and the Caribean. As are Nothern Africa and of course it rings the polically fun middle east (like around western Isreal).Then for more fun we have a bit of uncontested viable area above Sibera... and then areas east of China like the Koreas and Japan... and the island nations right under it. So China will likely declare Japan and random island nations now part of China and that will be a hot spot of wars and intrege. New Zeland will likely be mostly left alone annexation wise, though this could give it a major energy trade with its neighbors. Another area of intrest for the fallout is Iceland... a land that is bisected by a continental plate and as of a few months ago has literally no military presence whatsoever.

[Valles]

Ecological impact wouldn't necessarily be that large - my understanding is that the sort of vent in question is fairly common, and even if it's not then drilling new ones wouldn't be terribly complicated. Also, my mental image had been of a 'once through' system that'd vent nigh-unaltered hot smog water out of its top rather than a highly-developed type.
There are existing uninterrupted power lines longer than the ones I'm thinking of, tho admittedly the longest submerged one is only a quarter as long as needed to reach the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from anywhere save Iceland.

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or we are back to that massive government of the seas thing.

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Government is like kudzu, or the common cold. You're never getting rid of it, the goal is to control the problem. So are crazies, for that matter. Failing to provide a particular excuse will do fuck-all to reduce the overall population.
Besides, I'm conceiving these things out of the Gundam 00 setting, in which they're giving non-Solar states an equivalent resource - most of the world's nations are already plugged into the solar power ring, this concept is just supplying the overflow.
Re: Maintenance. I have given quite a bit of thought to that, actually. My understanding is that modern power turbine technologies have some shockingly long maintenance cycles, on the order of years or decades. I suspect that alloys with the needed properties to handle raw sulfurous seawater at the intended temperatures already exist but haven't been applied to this field yet; if I'm wrong then I doubt that they're outside the realm of the feasible. The outer bits of the generator station - control computers, anchor lines, on-site maintenance remotes, etc - would be designed to be plug-and-play modular. If one of the (multiply redundant) things breaks, then the support ship swings by, sends its big rover down with a spare, swaps them out on site, then brings them back up for maintenance cycle.
If the core turbine starts showing problems, then the entire station can be shut down, unplugged from the network, and replaced in exactly the same way. Remember, these things are designed for neutral bouyancy a relatively small robot can manhandle them all the way to and from the surface with perfect ease.
Solar power does scale better, I agree, but the energy and other costs of setting up this system are far lower.

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"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[ordnance11]

It's doable, but as it's been said..the transmission loss is going to be quite huge from an engineering standard. All maintenace is going to be a pain unless you have a modular design where you can just "plug and chug" failing components.
Solar power arrays...
The Glaser powersat concept
The concept has already been researched...economics is the key to making it feasible..I'd see this one go up first before your underwater geothermal concept goes.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Acyl]

Well, let's look at basic economics.
If we want to produce goods...
The revenue gained must be at the very least equal to current costs of production.
That is to say, it need not pay for all the fixed costs of, say, initial investment in the technology.
But the revenue must meet the current ongoing costs of running and maintaining the system.
Preferably there should be some revenue exceeding merely the current costs and actually working towards recouping the initial investment. Profit.
So the question is not whether this technology will work...
...but how well.
Would the power produced justify the expense of putting it in place and maintaining it, given all the difficulties involved?
It probably wouldn't in the real world, but I don't know about the Gundam 00 universe. I know absolutely nothing about it. It might well be that other sources of energy like, I dunno, fossil fuels, are so scarce or otherwise taboo for whatever reason...and people so starved for energy... that they're willing to go through great material expenditure and effort for a power generation mechanism like this.
That is the opportunity cost - the cost of alternatives - is high, and the value placed on power is high. It all depends on the valuation.
-- Acyl

[CattyNebulart]

the problem is competing with fossil fuels, since they will drop in price again soon, as it takes years for new refineries/oil drilling to start having an effect on the market but the projects started when energy prices began to spike now are starting to affect the market, and another low point for fossil fuel costs is predicted to occur in 5 to 10 years, at which point funding for the expansion of fossil fuel usage drops will be at nothing again and demand will drive the price up again over several years.
An SPS might be economially viable now, but 10 years from now it won't be unless there is a massive breakthrough in either the efficieny or in startup costs.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

[ordnance11]

I've been following the energy market for about a year now and I've come to a following conclusions:
1. The era of cheap oil is at and end..and probably has been for the pst 5 years.
2. The price of oil would probably spike to 100 and fall down to 75 and stabilize there for 5-1o years. At which point it'll probably start going up again.
Let's face it, the ease of extracting crude is only going to get harder in the next 20 years.
You're right about the massive start-up costs...only a megacorp or a governement can afford it. So the only question is who has the will to seize the oppurtunity to do it.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

[Necratoid]

I said they'd make a huge issue out of it reguardless... They are enviromentalism wackos (not enviromental scientists). Their doesn't actually need to be a real threat enviromentally, only lots of loud people who think there is... Granted they may be more concerned with the whole enviroment impact random falling colonies. Or was that 080?
Its not so much the local governmental Kudzu I was taking about as the attempts at world government kudzu that would try to strangle the seas. I'd have to have a global political map of the 00 gundam world to explain this specific to that world.
Also ordance11, I've watched the world oil market for longer than you have apparently.... and its a matter of price manipulation rather than supply shortages. There are literally people that buy up huge amounts of oil and then stick it in supertankers and the supertankers do donuts and figure 8s in international waters until the price is high enough to sell it off at major profits... its rather a matter of the oil markets having the same issues as the diamond markets. Its called the oil futures market.
You also have things like Iran purposely screwing with the price. Part of the reason Iran does so many threats and such is that they literally need the price of oil above (I think its) 64 dollars a barrel... or they implode economically. Iran has decades old equipment and has managed to tick off all 3 of the worlds makers of oil drilling and well eqipment and it can't get replacement parts, let alone new stuff. This means they are economically dead men walking, if things procede naturally. If they don't keep the price per barrel artifically high the country of Iran goes away in a few months.
The same kind of minimum price and economic colapse thing hits Chavez (Venezuela) at around the same price per barrel. I'm not trying to be that political here, but they make great examples of why they are making threats to the world.
In general the cost to extract a barrel is something like 40 a barrel... And if Iran is shut up (by being removed militarily or economially) the price will drop like a stone. Currently Iran's only major ally is Russia and that is mainly because its keeping itself a float by selling old military tech to Iran. Remove the Iranian lynch pin and its purposeful price inflationary activities and the price drops.
Anyway, now some of the range effects could be mitigated by using the power on some kind of floating/submerged facility. I can see a megacorp building such a thing in international waters to avoid taxes. Basically make your own Island nation kind of thing.

[Valles]

The world of Gundam 00 is basically three roughly coequal superpowers, assorted small fry, and a wildcard.
The Superpowers are the Solar Energy Union (essentially the US, the rest of the Americas, and Australia, Japan, and New Zealand), the AEU (I forget the acronym, but it's the EU, basically), and the Human Reform League (China, India, Indonesia, and much of the rest of Asia). They owe their status (and quite possibly their existence) to the fact that each of them owns a 1/3 share in the Solar Power System, which is an engineering project so massive that its components so far either mentioned or seen on screen include three space elevators and a complete artificial ring around the Earth.
Fossil fuels are not merely obsolete but completely played out - extinct, fin, nada, empty. Any nation that isn't a founding member of one of the three big coalitions is essentially relegated to subsisting on handouts and the relative trickle of 'alternative' power sources.
The new player in the game is Celestial Being, a 'private organization which has control of Gundams', sworn 'not to take action for our own benefit' and to act by whatever means necessary to eliminate war. So far, this has essentially boiled down to showing up and bitchslapping anyone trying to start or continue a fight.
Leaving aside my hindbrain's question about the relative energy loss rates of fiber-optic cables, reasonable-temperature superconductors aren't supposed to be that far off.

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"Reseeestunce ees fiutil. Yoo weeel bee Useemooletud. Borg Borg Borg."
===========

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"V, did you do something foolish?"
"Yes, and it was glorious."

[Sirrocco]

my intuition is that the amounts of energy you could actually pull out of a system like this are not terribly high, on a per each/per size level, and the sea is pretty hostile to most available forms of technology (particularly when you're dealing with sea + volcanic outgassing). Given the rather severe difficulties in getting down there for repairs (remembering that the initial thought was "well, if we didn't *have* to make it human-acessible, it would be *cheap*) you'd have to have a system that was ridiculously reliable, while submerged in seawater, straddling a volcanic vent. I'm not saying that it's not doable, because I don't know enough about current state-of-the-art in such things to know for sure, but it would take a *lot* of initial investment to get the tech working properly, and I could see it being the sort of situation where discovering that you had a .1% failure rate rather than .001% meant that you went from being somewhat profitable over time to horribly unprofitable.
Side note: unless you have someone with a lot of money who is doing this for other reasons, you not only have to do slightly better than break even, you have to be able to give the investors a degree of return on their investment. Monetarily, if you're making back 2% per year on initial time and materials, that's hurting you.
Now, in a gundam-style universe, it might well make sense. In terms of current real-world? I'm suspecting not.

[Acyl]

Let's look at some oil market history now. And this is all relevant to Valles' Gundam 00 concept.
Seriously. I'll explain how it relates in a moment. =)
Oil prices are high now, but why are oil prices high? The normal understanding of a market is that, well, demand and supply are related. As demand rises, supply should rise. If supply does not rise as quickly as demand, then you'll see a rapid increase in price. The same will occur if supply falls, but demand does not decrease at a corresponding rate.
Now.
The thing is, there are several factors influencing the oil market.
Necratoid brought up the idea of speculation. People buying and hoarding oil. This is true. As prices rise, demand also rises, as people purchase oil in expectation of the price going even higher. This is not "actual" demand, since folks aren't using the oil they buy. It's speculative.
That's how it works in theory. In practice, of course, it's much harder to determine how much of an impact speculation has on the market. But it does have some impact.
Next up, let's consider the oil cartels.
Oil prices are also kept high in part because most oil producers - particularly OPEC - generally prefer high prices. For profit reasons. This isn't universally true, but it has been historically true for OPEC.
OPEC does not control the whole supply side of the oil industry, but it obviously has influence. OPEC first reached prominence in 1973 when members agreed to restrict their oil production. Because of the diminished supply, oil prices rapidly increased - because demand for oil remained largely unchanged. People still needed it, so they had to pay the higher price.
Let's look at that again. What OPEC did was produce less oil. Less oil. But each barrel sold at a higher price. So that was a profit.
In the long run however, the high price of oil led to the tapping of alternative oil reserves...but also development of more energy-efficient technologies - and alternative sources of energy entirely.
So the market for expensive OPEC oil shrank, and income for OPEC countries started to fall. So individual OPEC countries started to violate their quotas, argue with each other - and the agreement basically fell apart. This reflects the inherent instability in any cartel; individual producers are always elf-interested. After all, they're in this for profit.
So oil prices fell - but this only really happened in the 1980s, so you had a good ten years of high oil prices. More or less.
The thing is, though, OPEC has its act together again by now. World consumption of oil has increased, particularly in the US, China, and India. Discovery of new oil supplies has fallen. There's fewer oil reserves that can be brought online to fight price increases.
In the very long run, though, we still can expect prices to fall - one way or another. Because demand cannot remain at the current level. It's just too expensive. People are going to cut down on their oil consumption, either by changing habits or industries, or finding alternatives. The only question is when that shift in demand will happen, but it will happen...
...eventually.
It may take a long time, but it'll happen eventually.
How does this relate to the Gundam 00 situation, as outlined by Valles?
It makes the technology he outlines even more viable, because it is clear that any non-solar state is going to be really desperate to find an alternative source of power. Any alternative source. One can also expect that such states would limit their use of power as far as is possible, and would be leading champions of energy-efficient technologies.
Again, in the long run, particularly if some viable alternative is discovered, one can expect reliance on solar energy to fall - demand will decrease, at least to some degree. So the question is, what would the solar-producing states do then?
-- Acyl

[Bob Schroeck]

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individual producers are always elf-interested.

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It makes the technology he outlines even more viable, because it is clear that any non-solar state is going to be really desperate to find an alternative source of power. Any alternative source.

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Just as a cross-reference, I'd like to point out that a year or more ago, Wired magazine published an article which cross-referenced all the extant and speculated alternate energy technologies against gas prices to show at what point they become economically feasible to pursue. Sadly, my attempts to search Wired.com for it have turned up nothing, and I don't have physical copies of the magazine handy to check; maybe someone else can point to it?-- Bob
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One of the primary differences between the Left and the Right is their attitude toward the Future. The Radical wants the Future to have gotten here yesterday. The Reactionary wants the Future quietly shot and the corpse buried where no one can find it.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[ECSNorway]

In another note, an Israeli company recently patented a method to extract oil from oil shale - which is estimated to run to about triple the original size of the currently-exploitable deposits, worldwide - for about $14/barrel. Once they get this up and running on a mass basis (assuming they manage to avoid getting nuked by Insert Random Islamofascist Fucknugget Here), oil prices are going to drop rapidly and stay there for 30-50 years, I think.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

[Sirrocco]

Cracking oil shale does leave you with a fair amount of depleted shale that you need to find something to do with, but it's not that bad. It's certainly nothing like tar sand.