Iceland Volcano Could Bring 'Boundless' Power

Scientists are planning to drill into an Iceland volcano in the hunt for near-unlimited energy.

The project, helmed by the Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) organization, is set to start drilling into a magma chamber by 2026, in the hopes of using the magma to heat up water and generate electricity.

"Imagine a future where the world [is] powered by the boundless energy of magma, the secrets hidden beneath volcanoes are revealed and catastrophic volcanic eruptions can be predicted," KMT wrote on its website.

Volcanic regions have long been used to generate geothermal energy, but this will mark the first time a magma chamber has been directly drilled into for energy harvesting.

David Pyle, a professor of earth sciences at Oxford University, told Newsweek: "Volcanoes are already used as a source of green energy around the world, mostly in locations where the hot water formed by heating of groundwater by deep sources of magma can be tapped safely by drilling boreholes. Mostly, these fluids are at temperatures of less than 250 degrees C [482 F], and the steam is used to drive turbines to produce electricity."

Pyle continued, "Drilling directly into the magma has been done—by accident, rather than design—in several places around the world, including near volcanoes in Kenya and Iceland."

Magma is molten rock found in the Earth's mantle, below the rocky crust. The temperature of magma deep underground has never been directly measured, but molten lava exiting the surface is usually between 1,300 and 2,600 degrees F.

Drilling into a magma chamber was done accidentally during a previous mission near the Krafla volcanic caldera in the northeast of Iceland, where researchers tried to get near the chamber but ended up drilling straight into it. This showed that drilling into a magma chamber does not cause the volcano to erupt, but in that case, it did destroy the drill well because of the powerful 800-degree heat.

Creating equipment that can withstand the conditions of a magma chamber is one of the major roadblocks to using volcanoes as a power source.

"The new drilling project will need to overcome a host of technical challenges, not least because drilling deliberately into squishy and very hot molten rock will be really difficult and will need new sensors, built to cope with these extreme conditions," Pyle said.

He went on: "It's unlikely that the drilling would cause an eruption, and in a research drilling experiment the team would be able to monitor the effects of the drilling on the subsurface by using instruments to measure any seismicity, changes in pressure and ground deformation."

If the project succeeds in creating equipment that can withstand the temperatures of a magma chamber, scientists would need to find a way to use the heat to generate energy.

"If the drilling is successful, the next parts of the challenge would be to work out how best to extract the heat," Pyle said. "Again, we haven't solved the problems of how to handle the ultra-hot fluids that the drilling might tap into and what infrastructure might be needed to work with this as-yet untapped geothermal resource."

This project will also allow for research into the magma chambers, their structure and what triggers eruptions.

"Being able to go into the crust and sample magma would give us huge knowledge," KMT's Hjalti Páll Ingólfsson told New Scientist. "We hope to be able to have a direct measurement at least of temperature, which has never been done before."

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