Quote:
Originally Posted by buffa98
A neighbor has a geo thermal. I went over when they were installing it and here what I can say. The GT system is a closed loop system. He has 2 375 ft deep loops for heating and cooling. All the glycol is the tube either heats or cools the house via a heat exchanger/air handler.
Fracing if I understand the process uses High pressure to "FRACTURE" the shale to release the gas.
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The geothermal system you are talking about is different than the one referenced in this article. Home systems are indeed a closed loop. It is very similar to the refrigeration cycle on one's refrigerator or the A/C system in your car. It compresses a coolant and the resulting gas/liquid change causes heat at one end (condenser) and cooling at the other (evaporator). So one in a home can be run in the summer, by using the earth as the condenser taking the heat out of the home and then running backwards in the winter for heat compressing the coolant coming out of the Earth for heat.
The one in the article drills deeper into the Earth at locations of tectonic activity or other "hot spots" (think Iceland) to gather the Earth's heat (through magma) and turn it into electricity (usually, sometimes for heat itself). Thus the drilling is a bit different (larger scale than your neighbor's home) and since it is in a tectonically active area (usually) to begin with it probably wouldn't be too hard to link a connection to some Earthquake. activity.