Heat Pipes from Earth’s Core to Warm up Canadian Cities

OK, I admit it, this headline is a hoax. No one knows how to do this (safely*), but I have a fantasy–walking around cool northern shelf cities like Winnipeg, Regina, Edmonton, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec city in January with just a light jacket on.

All the snow is melted, grass is green, and the first few meters of the atmosphere are heated to about 6 degrees Celsius because underground pipes that descend to the earth’s lower mantle are conducting unlimited amounts of warmth to the surface… After all, the earth’s core is hotter than the surface of the sun, about 6,000 degrees Celsius. 

If engineers can figure out how to frack the earth for oil and natural gas, maybe they could do it for heat too. I know that when Senators Sports and Entertainment was thinking of bringing MLS to Canada’s Capital City, Cyril Leeder (their president) told me they would heat the field so its surface would be soft and players warm.

@ quantum_entity @ profbruce

* Fracking as well as conventional oil and gas drilling have been blamed for earth tremors and sinkholes, so it would be best, if we found a way to do this, we not unleash a volcano under Regina.

But I have used geo exchange heating where water is pumped from one well to a 2nd one on a single property; heat (or cooling) is extracted from the flow via a heat exchanger. What’s interesting is that, unlike oil extraction, volumes in the earth don’t change so there is no possibility of sinkholes or earthquakes. Just saying. 

This is also a very efficient form of heating/cooling, and much cheaper than anything else I have ever used.