I’ve heard tell of a few projects to sink a shaft down to the Moho, and I’m here wondering what could be gained from digging down so deep. Power generation, sure. We already have geothermal power plants in geologically active areas like Iceland. But how viable is drilling down and making your own personal volcano? Wouldn’t the cost outweigh the advantages – digging a couple of miles down is gonna cost a pretty good deal of capital.
Or waste disposal, perhaps. While I can’t imagine dumping millions of tons of trashbags down there, I can imagine dumping nuclear waste and hazardous chemicals. But again, cost. It’s cheaper, at least in the short run, to burn fossil fuels to light up a city, although geothermal energy is pretty hard to run out of or put tariffs on. It’s cheaper to dig into a mountain to dump your glowing garbage and hope nobody sneaks into the compound and makes off with a few tons of spent fissile material.
Furthermore, what would be the environmental impact of drilling down to the mantle? I am imagining something like Isengard after the orcs took over, but then again, I have an overactive imagination. What sort of consequences would industrial exploitation of a borehole down to the mantle bring?
I’m not sure how possible it would be to push stuff down a borehole that went right down there; wouldn’t we have magma (that is under pressure, isn’t it?) trying to come out of (or at least up) the hole
As far as commercial exploitation, I don’t know. It seems like it would be far to costly to consider for waste disposal, and you don’t need to go that far to tap geothermal energy. Eccentric academic Tommy Gold as well as suspect hypester J.F. Kenney have ideas about abiotic hydrocarbons that predict you would find 'em down there, but even if Gold were proven right, it’s not presently economically viable to pursue them.