deftnerd

The goal is to pump water down one, and extract it from the other borehole and then use a heat exchanger to pull the anticipated 160F to 180F temperature to provide heat to the entirety of the campus.

It's similar to the University's Lake Source Cooling system, which they use the naturally cold water temperature of the local Cayuga lake. At the 250' depth they draw the water in, it's a constant 39F year-round. The cooling system is used to provide chilled water to all the buildings, and a few thousand homes, removing the need for standard air conditioners.

The Lake Source Cooling system has saved the university 20 million Kwh a year, an 85% reduction in power usage, since it was made in 2000. It's hoped that the Earth Source Heat project will have the same kind of impact on the energy necessary for heating.

There are a lot of unknowns. Nobody has drilled a borehole so deep in this area before because there hasn't been a reason to do it before.

"SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities."

"SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market."

You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration...

But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing.

After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright.

That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1]

Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018.

This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla.