Articles
The $100 million magma drilling project, dubbed Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT), will be the only place on Earth where we can actually have access to and study magma in situ.
So far, 38 research institutes and companies from 11 countries have signed up to the project – including Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, South Korea and the US. The research could give us insights on how to better protect the 800 million people living near live volcanoes, and could also help to improve and scale up the use of geothermal energy.
Geothermal energy derives from the heat of magma within the Earth, ranging from 700°C to 1,300°C, and is used to heat cold water and produce electricity. Hot underground streams are typically found at shallow depths, but there are also sources of extremely hot water and rocks miles under the Earth’s surface. Iceland is one of the leading users of geothermal energy – thanks to its large volcanic resources, several geothermal power plants meet the heating and hot water requirements of 87% of the nation’s housing.
The KMT organisers are still raising the funds for the project to go ahead. But if all goes according to plan, in 2020 a geothermal drilling rig will bore a 2.1km-deep hole directly into a magma chamber below the Krafla volcano. This magma chamber was discovered by chance when Iceland’s energy company Landsvirkjun was carrying out a deep drilling project in 2009.
What we’ll find will provide us with information that we have never been able to access before – just as the Hubble telescope has done in space. It will be ground-breaking to be able to monitor the magma body itself and understand more about the environment down there.
Here’s what we are hoping to get out of it:
• To better understand the science of the Earth’s crust and to allow researchers to calibrate the measurements they have been taking for years on the surface with what is actually occurring. Until now this has generally been based on theory and speculation.
• A better grasp on how we can predict what is happening below the Earth’s surface and reduce the risk of living close to volcanoes.
• To understand more about how to recover geothermal energy from magma, or as close to the magma as we can get. There is a lot of research going on in this area.
For example, a research project the Icelink, is looking at how to transport geothermal energy from Iceland to the UK via a 1,000km cable.
The KMT project will certainly help answer questions around the geophysics involved in using the geothermal field closer to the heat source itself. If we can reach the heat source, we will increase the efficiency of the energy output and we may even export geothermal energy to other countries.
During the first drilling phase, the scientists will take a core sample of the rock and magma itself – and this alone will give us a huge amount of new data. Costs for this first phase are estimated at around $30 million and we’ve already requested a mining licence.
The plan is to establish a permanent research facility at the site, with more boreholes, which would cost $100 billion. The facility would be open to the international science community for a 30-year-programme of research, including repeated sampling of the magma. Scientists could send down instruments to measure temperature and stress pressure in the crust and rock, as well as use fibre cables to measure microseismicity (very faint tremors). This data could be compared to information available from the seismic network and imaging from satellites.