The groundwater contamination angle seems a bit... hand-wavey?
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.
> In addition, being encased in solid rock far below any water table removes any need for a containment system. If things get really bad, fill in the shaft and cap it.
"Solid rock" feels like there's a lot of geological asterisks there. How about the casing around that mile-deep hole? Where do you pump all the inevitable leaks?
9 out of 10 startups go bankrupt, what happens to the hole if the company (or the project-specific LLC) goes belly-up? "Just fill it up" is a bit disingenuous and ignores how groundwater tends to seep into everything given enough dozens of years... Texas is littered with half-capped polluting shale wells that were just kinda left there when the wells stopped being productive and the project-specific drilling LLC was dissolved when it hit the bankruptcy-by-design phase of the corporate lifecycle.
Centuries of potential contamination feels like a risk that should have more than 2 sentences.