Drilling for electricity or geothermal energy is a common human-caused source of earthquakes. Drillers or engineers inject water into the earth to fracture underground rock through a process known as fracking. This allows scientists to produce clean energy almost anywhere on Earth by heating up water in the cracks using facilities called enhanced geothermal systems or EGS plants. However, fracking causes earthquakes, which are a major concern for people’s safety globally. Therefore, scientists are looking for new fracking methods that cause fewer earthquakes.

Fracking for EGS plants can trigger earthquakes by changing the pressure underground and adding stress to the surrounding rock. However, these earthquakes happen at pre-existing, naturally occurring cracks called faults, which are different from the newly formed, man-made cracks. Faults are naturally under pressure from the overlying rock and the surrounding earth since they reach deep underground. As pressure builds up over time, it eventually causes the rocks to shift along these faults and release energy in the form of earthquakes. 

During fracking, engineers use 4 different shut-in strategies to finish off water pumping. The standard industry strategy is called instant shut-in, where the injection pump is turned off immediately, but the water stays underground, causing the pressure to lower naturally. In a similar strategy, known as the tapered shut-in, engineers gradually reduce the water injection rate to zero instead of immediately turning it off. For the high-rate and low-rate extraction strategies, they pump the water back out after injection is complete, at different pump rates.

Recently, scientists aimed to mitigate the risk of earthquakes by testing these 4 shut-in strategies to determine which is most effective. They compared the shut-in strategies using crystalline basement rock with low porosity and permeability, meaning water couldn’t easily flow through it. Engineers use this same type of rock for EGS plants so they can control where the water flows. The scientists pumped water into the rock, then measured the pressure and stress levels where rocks began to move along faults, determining the point at which earthquakes would occur. 

The scientists applied high-rate and low-rate extraction methods to the rock and found that pressure and fault movements decreased. However, when they applied instant and tapered shut-in methods to the same rock, they increased the pressure and caused continuous fault slipping. They measured stress in the rock during these methods and found that high-rate extraction stabilized the fastest, while low-rate extraction stabilized more slowly. In contrast, instant shut-in continuously increased the pressure and slip, and tapered shut-in caused the highest stress of all.

The scientists also used a computer model to simulate what happened at an EGS site in South Korea, where earthquakes occurred after injections using the instant shut-in method. They set up the model using a rock with the same characteristics, injection wells, and faults as that site. Then, they simulated periods of injection based on the previous real-world events and modeled the effects of pressure and stress to determine if the earthquakes could have been prevented. 

The team used the model to compare how a site like this would respond to the instant shut-in method versus the other shut-in methods. They found that the tapered shut-in method increased pressure and stress in the rock, while the high-rate and low-rate methods both decreased pressure and stress. The high-rate method decreased pressure and stress more than the low-rate method. 

The scientists concluded that high-rate extraction is the most effective method for reducing the risks of post-injection earthquakes during EGS fracking in crystalline basement rock. Additionally, the scientists determined that the earthquakes in South Korea could have been prevented if engineers had used either the high-rate or low-rate extraction methods. They recommend using high-rate extraction to reduce earthquakes during EGS fracking, which would allow EGS plants to generate clean energy more safely.

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What if your daily coffee routine could help power the world around you? 

Scientists are exploring ways to transform everyday waste, like spent coffee grounds, into materials for greener energy production. One promising method, called triboelectrification, uses electricity generated from motion. With this approach, materials that gain positive and negative charges are rubbed together to generate an electrical charge that can be harnessed by devices called triboelectric nanogenerators, or TENGs. TENGs are a greener alternative to fossil fuels because they generate electricity from everyday movement, such as pedestrian or vehicle motion. 

However, many negatively charged materials used in these devices are made from nonbiodegradable plastics, like PTFE, that persist as long-term waste in the environment. Over time, TENGs are also easily damaged by environmental conditions outside the laboratory. To create sustainable TENGs for real-world applications, scientists need to develop biodegradable and durable designs. 

To address this problem, researchers from Guangxi University in China developed a TENG that uses coffee grounds as its negatively charged material. Their design repurposes coffee waste to create a robust, low-cost device that can harvest energy.

To create the coffee-based material, the researchers mixed coffee grounds with a biodegradable glue-like plastic called polycaprolactone (PCL). They heated this mixture to 80°C (176°F) and molded it into cylindrical pellets. Then, they used a biodegradable plastic called polylactic acid (PLA) to 3D-print a fully enclosed box-like TENG containing vertical channels arranged like the parallel slots of a file organizer to house the pellets. 

Their TENG worked by shaking the coffee ground pellets within the channels, causing them to repeatedly rub against the PLA surfaces. Because coffee grounds strongly attract electrons, the pellets become negatively charged while the PLA surfaces become positively charged. This repeated pellet movement drove the electrons back and forth, generating electricity that was harvested through the TENG’s external circuit. 

To evaluate their TENG’s electrical performance, the researchers used an instrument that measures small amounts of electricity, called an electrometer. The electrometer measures electrical output based on how strongly the device pushes electrons through a circuit, called its voltage, how quickly electrons flow through it, called its current, and how many electrons flow through it, called its transferred charge.

The researchers verified that coffee ground pellets could serve as a viable TENG material by comparing their performance with commercial plastic pellets. The coffee ground pellet system produced a voltage of 0.6 Volts (V), a current of 18 nanoamperes (nA), and a charge transfer of 0.25 nanocoulombs (nC). This output was more than twice that of pure PCL pellets and over half that of nonbiodegradable PTFE. The researchers suggested that the negatively charged components of the coffee grounds altered the surface of the PCL to increase its charge generation and transfer. 

To optimize the TENG, the researchers experimented with different coffee grounds to PCL mass ratios, pellet lengths, and device vibrational frequencies. They found that their device achieved the best electrical performance at a 3:1 ratio of coffee grounds to PCL, with 8 millimeter long pellets, at a vibrational frequency of 2.6 Hertz. These conditions boosted the device’s electrical output to 4.7 V, 75 nA, and 1.3 nC, high enough to power tiny environmental sensors. 

The team also tested their device’s long-term durability by comparing its electrical performance before and after 6 months of storage. They observed only a 6% drop in voltage after storage, demonstrating that it could maintain stable long-term electrical performance for at least 6 months. 

Finally, to explore real-world applications, the researchers integrated 4 TENGs into a wind-energy harvesting system designed for remote island settings. The system used a wheel of rotating cups to capture wind energy and a sliding mechanism to convert it into repeated shaking of the TENGs. As the TENGs shook, the moving pellets inside generated enough electricity to power an LED light and a small weather-monitoring device. 

The researchers concluded that spent coffee grounds can function as biodegradable TENG materials while reducing dependence on fossil fuel-derived materials. By combining coffee waste with biodegradable plastics, the researchers created a TENG with good electrical performance, sustainability, and long-term stability. They suggested that with further development, the device could someday power road warning lights and provide sound-based alerts in remote areas.

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