My first thought was to wonder what the impact is on existing hydrothermal ecosystems.

The Axial Seamount area is not at all some dead barren zone we can just tap into without concern for ecological harm. Hydrothermal vent areas are very vibrant ecosystems that influence deep ocean ecology in ways we already understand, and probably ways we don't yet understand.

I am glad to see in their press release [1] they do mention careful selection of sites, conditions for operation, and ecological monitoring. And the area is already the focus of oceanographic research by various institutions.

[1] https://www.enduranceenergy.com/press/adelie

I have quite a few friends that work at Endurance. I’m excited by their development and to see them making news. Their concept is a cool one. Interested to see how they balance potentially disrupting those ecosystems with putting electricity on the grid.

Man how high is that equivalent LCOE. No way does capex and opex on this work out. Geothermal underwater with a heat source thats potentially changing a lot.

Seems like a headline grabber and not a real solution but hopefully some useful tech comes out of it.

Yeah I'm curious about that too. It's an interesting way to get non-weather dependent power in some remote locations, but how useful is that over solar+batteries really? Maybe it's cheaper than synthetic methane?

“The company is also developing a larger 2-megawatt commercial generator for its first planned commercial deployment with the Kingdom of Tonga in 2027. The Polynesian island nation in the South Pacific Ocean runs its power grid primarily on imported diesel fuel, which has significantly increased in price since the United States and Israel launched their war with Iran.

“The 2 MW commercial generators will be about the size of a shipping container, and we are deploying up to six of these generators [to] offshore Tonga,” Redd told Ars. “The physical footprint of this project will be relatively small.”

Nice potential application! I’m not sure of the scaling economics but I certainly do love to see all forms of power generation explored

Just build all new datacenters near underwater volcanoes and you got scaling

"Thank God it's only a motion picture!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_in_the_World

It is actually entertaining that there is a plausible use for the most super-villain-coded obsession with volcanoes

I have tried that in Oxygen Not Included. The problem is that magma quickly solidifies when you remove energy. I wonder if they took that into account.

I tried it successfully in a dream, but the fibrillium outlay eventually caused backflow. I assume they're compensating for that one.

I don’t think it would have any effect at human scale

They should try to recreate the origins of life there while they're at it.

So what's the key thing that determines feasibility?

The article references an expert who is skeptical, saying that this is unlikely to be cheaper than just doing it on land (standard geothermal)?

The article also references reasons to think this could be worthwhile. Cooling, pressure, etc. One could also guess that permitting could be easier.

But I'm left not really understanding whether they proved enough, or what really needs to be proven.

For goodness sakes don't puncture the crust. We'd be back to the Hadean era.

Or the Late Permian Siberian Traps when the crust ripped open, erupted for 2 million years, and "are believed to be the primary cause of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the most severe extinction event in the geologic record": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps

That, too.

Mankind needs to learn before it's too late.

βehemoth incoming

They delved too greedly and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Khazad-dûm. Shadow... and flame.

Came for the Peter Watts reference, glad to see it! Starfish (1999) focused around this idea and it and it's sequels are well worth the read, IMHO.

I disagree with the doom jokes. In Starfish the problem was the microbe getting out, not the geothermal plant. Vents have been venting for millions of years, and a pipe drawing off a sliver of that heat isn't going to wake anything.

Elon is going to demand access to the Yellowstone Caldera pretty soon I'm guessing.

In the Horizon games (2017, 2022) the egotistical world-wrecking trillionaire puts it elsewhere...

> TED FARO: "An automated geothermal energy plant, right under the city of San Francisco. A marvel. Even I can run it, and let's face it - I was always more of a visionary than an engineer. Which is why I had the foresight... to insist on the inclusion of a very unique feature, just in case anyone ever tries to steal my cheese, so to speak."

Hey man, shaving a few petawatts off that time bomb would be great.

Geothermal power -> some % saved for atmospheric carbon extraction makes it a carbon negative endeavor.

Relieve the US energy woes somewhat.

Use the carbon to make methane for his rockets.

And make some diesel fuel too, while he's at it (though he'll have to stock up on soybeans - great for his eventual presidential run)

Bonus if they accidentally make it explode and wipe the planet out. Simulation, restart.

Obligatory reminder that Yellowstone is at literally zero risk of exploding in the next couple thousand years.

Sounds like the plot of a James Bond story.

Great news for island nations and territories if this can scale. There’s something very sci-fi about islands powered by underwater volcanoes, and the jobs it could create would be fascinating. Going from pearl divers to subsea power-station drone technicians, ha.

I wonder what industries it could help thrive. afaik Iceland has a relatively big aluminium smelting industry due to its cheap, excess geothermal power. Could we see new opportunities spring up in places like Kerguelen, South Georgia or Tristan da Cunha? Modern takes on whaling stations?

Remote places don’t have a lack of jobs because of a lack of energy (many of them have a lot of it), but because they are remote. Exploration of a new resource might change how remote they are (Dubai is less remote today than before oil was discovered), but only if the resource is sobering with developing linkages for. Not sure why it would be worth tapping underwater volcanoes in a currently remote place when there are plenty of geothermal sources in less remote places available.

> There’s something very sci-fi about islands powered by underwater volcanoes, and the jobs it could create would be fascinating. Going from pearl divers to subsea power-station drone technicians, ha

Volcanoes and underwater jobs? Sounds like Sci-fi Horrors

> Sounds like Sci-fi Horrors

Correct, the novel is called Starfish by Peter Watts. Though it's mostly not the volcano that kills people.

I feel that I should be able name several Jules Verne characters, "B" movie villains, and such who powered their underwater lairs and/or sinister superweapons this way - but I'm coming up blank.

Anyone?

The Incredibles did it second, and almost certainly there is a Bond Villian or knockoff Bond show that did it.

Did they though? Syndrome had a volcano base for sure, but I don't remember them ever showing a powerplant. The guy was harnessing zero point energy somehow; doesn't seem like mere lava would interest him as a power source.

Blofeld from You Only Live Twice.

Small nitpick: Nomanisan is a surface island, not underwater, and IIRC the volcano was just hiding the base. And "second" is off anyway, since You Only Live Twice came out in 1967, nearly forty years before The Incredibles.

Subnautica bases can be powered entirely by geothermal vents, and one can enter the water by piloting a badass mecha right out of the moonpool.

Fiat Cliche :)

Some tropes become only known from their parodies, and they lead to other parodies.

All I can think of are supervillains in land based volcanoes not underwater ones

I’ve been expecting Oracle to do this. It’d solve their current data center power problem. And it gives a place for Ellison to have video calls with the UN.

Please avoid generic tangents and swipes on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> And it gives a place for Ellison to have video calls with the UN.

Dr Evil in shambles!

Ellison stays up late at night watching reruns of The Simpsons' "You Only Move Twice."

Anyone need sugar? He has some in his pocket. How about cream? No thanks!

Dr Evil at least had a maintenance contract. Who gets paged when the heat exchanger scales up with mineral gunk at 3am and the thing is under the ocean? Good luck with that in prod.

Can’t wait for my AWS region selection dropdown to include "us-pacific-active-magma-1"

I've always imagined him to be more of a space station lair sort of villain.

Also, let's not sell him short: those aren't video calls, they're ransom calls.

We priced out geothermal for a colo once, and generation was never the hard part. Getting transmission and fiber to the site was. A seamount means subsea cable, and those repairs take weeks and a ship.

So the clean energy plan is a lair under a volcano. Bond villains called it first.