> that tech is coming from oil and gas. An industry with a track record of leaving the land they enter in terrible shape.

I think coal and most other mineral extraction industries would love to have the relatively good environmental record of oil and gas companies. One small opening at the surface, no need to send hundreds of people in. Pretty small and quiet facility above ground where all the work gets done, etc. As terrible as an oil spill is, they're not very common.

As terrible as oil spills are, gas spills are currently a much larger problem. They are just not as visible.

Once we get enough solar capacity to start thinking about carbon capture, maybe methane capture is the most interesting problem to start with.

> and look at it more like hydro electricity

I hope you are aware that hydro also has a reputation for destroying natural environments at a pretty huge scale

> We should harvest the electricity on the way down, not the way up.

Could you please explain what you mean?

I have to assume GP means that we should extract the geothermal heat at the bottom of the well/borehole, not by bringing the oil back up to burn it.

No, I mean we should use the motion of the water, not its heat. Like in hydroelectricity where water spins a turbine instead we are using a steam generator like gas fired plants

There's no reason to drill for this, and 6 miles down at 1000C presets less than ideal operating conditions for a turbine.

Any peak over about 2000ft should be sufficient for an atmospheric water generation plant to produce enough water for a down hill hydroelectric plant to power the atmospheric water generation plant with single digit ambient RH, and much lower elevations can be used in high RH climes.

I would recommend orienting collectors to the windward side to exploit the local humidity gain, in lower RH climes.

One of my projects is actually a water condensation, hydroelectric and gas liquefaction combined cycle plant.

That said, bores in areas with deep ground water do present an interesting opportunity for pumped storage, with the caveat that the turbomachinery is back in the bore hole and that's a really inconvenient place to fix it when it breaks.

A steam turbine essentially _does_ use the motion of the water.

In conventional hydroelectricity, gravity causes the motion through the energy differential of the waters' height.

In a steam turbine, the potential energy is from the high temperature of the water, and the energy input to rotate the turbine comes from the temperature differential of the steam cooling.

In theory you could capture the hydroelectric energy of the water on its way down a 12 mile hole, but that gravitic potential energy is negligable compared to the energy difference between superheated steam and water.

Geothermal does use the "motion" of the water.

There’s no need to drill down ultra deep if you leverage recent advances in horizontal drilling to creat a series of looping branches off of a central trunk, as it were. Can run a closed loop of circulating fluid too, which offers numerous advantages and obviates risk of fracking related earthquakes, as well as avoiding the corrosion challenges problematic with legacy approaches.

Conservation of energy. You could collect the energy that gravity generates, but then you end up with water/mass at the bottom and need to figure out how to bring it back up... Leading to net zero or negative gain due to other losses.