Comments

Geez, this is a profoundly ignorant article. He completely misunderstands the nature of the HCl reactivity, assuming that is important, and implies some magical property to supercritical water which doesn't exist. The fact that the water is supercritical means exactly zero. The only reason it can supply energy is because it's at high T and high p, and that's it. Doesn't matter whether it's liquid, gas, supercritical, or anything else under the Sun. I had to laugh at the ignorance on display in the comment that supercritical water was useful because it kept the "high-energy" H-bonding network intact. Gee, in that case, you'd expect plain water at 100C ("high energy" H-bonding network intact!) would give you more energy than steam at 100C. Which, of course, as anyone who's had the bad luck to come into contact with live steam can tell you, just ain't so. This guy could usefully look up the Wikipedia entry on "heat of vaporization." But beyond that, he implies that somehow Iceland's experience drilling a hole in a volcano could somehow be a miracle for global energy needs. What kind of cluelessness is this? He's forgotten that geothermal power requires a very special set of circumstances, namely an active volcanic region with lots of water? Or does he think that people have bizarrely failed to map each and every one of those potential power sources over the past century or so? And that to the extent any of them are economically exploitable, they already are exploited? I mean, next he's going to write a breathless article explaining how some ingenious person in country X has discovered that if you put a waterwheel in a swift-flowing stream, you can use it to generate power. Amazing! Who'd have thought? Imagine the possibilities! Feh.