eli5: If we’re all sitting above the magma and heat in Earth’s mantle, what are the barriers to tapping that heat in each municipality to provide local affordable electricity?
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The Kola well super deep bore hole is 12 km deep, that is the deepest hole anybody on Earth has ever reached and the pressure and heat is what made them stop, it was just too much for the equipment to keep going, the Earths crust is 30 to 70 km deep on land, and certain places in the ocean its as little as 5km and that would be under idk how much pressure from the water, however, the incredible pressure and heat would stop someone before they even made it 10 km deep, so there just really isn’t a feasible way to drill in to the Earth’s Mantle. Plus even if we could drill that deep we would only be able to make a tiny hole in the ground, nothing anywhere big enough to make a commercial enterprise to power a city with, much less doing that in every major city. Basically it is a technical impossibility to even reach the mantle much less try to use it for any geo thermal electricity production.
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