We can drill down and pump out oil and natural gas from anywhere in the world, even building refineries on massive rigs in the middle of the ocean.
We can dig down and extract coal through endless tunnels that stretch out under the sea.
Why is it not feasible to just drill down far enough to pump water down and allow steam to rise up and power turbines? I know some parts of the world have the required heat closer, but surely tapping into the heat that perpetually sits under our feet is a huge contribution to the solution of replacing fossil fuels?
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Most human settlements are in places where the crust of the earth is many miles thick, and the necessary heat sources are buried beneath thirty miles of solid rock.
The costs and engineering challenges of boring and maintaining huge numbers of the world’s deepest boreholes (current record is short of 8 miles) have so far been prohibitive.
Most of the thin points in the crust are inconveniently located in ocean trenches, and prone to seismic activity that would damage your delicate miles-long geothermal piping.
There’s a few hot spots like Iceland where upwelling magma have brought heat much closer to the surface and we do build geothermal plants there.
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