20091112_TS

Source: YouTube

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNk7zCI8E_8

Date: 12/11/2009

Event: Al Gore: "the interior of the Earth is extremely hot, several million degrees..."

Attribution: NBC Universal: The Tonight Show

People:

• Al Gore: 45th Vice President of the United States, author of An Inconvenient Truth
• Conan O'Brien: American television host

Conan O'Brien: Now what about - you talk in the book about geothermal energy -

Al Gore: Yeah, yeah.

Conan O'Brien: - and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that’s generated from the core of the Earth to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal?

Al Gore: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy - when they think about it at all - in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places. But two kilometres or so down, in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, because the interior of the Earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the Earth is hot. And if you go down far enough, you get so much heat it can be used to generate steam and make electricity. And they say that here in the United States we have a 35,000-year supply of energy, just from geothermal. And they've now figured out how to do the drilling with the new drill bits that don't melt in that heat, in order to get access to that source of electricity.

Conan O'Brien: You're talking probably about drilling down further than we've drilled before, and then figuring out some way to transfer that heat from down there to up here.

Al Gore: Yeah, the heat is used to make steam and turn turbines, which is how most electricity is made.