Going Electric? Why Future Power Could Come From Hot Rocks
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If you think of the state of nova, you might think lost vegas, sin city, but five hundred miles from vegas in the northwest corner of the state. It's not so much casino and neon lights, but more mountains and wide open desert. And while in vagus you might be looking for a hot hand in poker, here, they specialize in hot rocks.

The reason we chose nevado was really because of its unique geology that sera duet.

the VP of strategy for further al energy, a start up that's working on geothermal power. IT was those hot rocks under foot that brought fervor to nevada to do an experiment trying a new technique for generating geothermal electricity for vo called IT project red.

I think project red was really an opportunity for us to show that all of the science and all of the math that we put in to this process, which really had never been used in geothermal erg before, was really applicable for geothermal development.

Geothermal refers to heat produced and released from the earth score. It's the same force behind things like hot springs and guizhou. Geothermal power is electricity generated from that heat. To harness its energy, companies put power planes on top of the places where water and hot rocks are close to the surface.

sort of ground floor. Geothermal energy, there is a steam bearing reservoir. And for a lack of more technical terms, you basically sik drawn to the ground, you can pull up steam, run up through a turban and generate electricity. That sort of geothermal zero points.

Geothermal zero point zero is also called conventional geothermal or hydro erma energy role in horn, the director of the geothermal program at ten for the university, says much of the geothermal energy being generated in the us. Is coming from the including states like nava.

Right now in california, we have six percent of our electricity generated from jethwa state of nava has ten percent of its our trusty generated from G O M mo.

the water and hot rocks that could generate geothermal energy. They're actually everywhere, but finding them together close to the surface, that's a bit more rare.

The reason that california nada have those percentages that we are in some of those geological advantageous places that close to the llanos, they've got a good water source, high temperature. So there are many of those, but they're not universal. They are not in every place.

Getting to that rock mean sometimes drilling thousands of feet or even miles underground.

And that means we drill sufficiently deep that we could have given al anywhere or everywhere.

New technology being tested here in the U. S. Could make that happen if proof of concept can become a fully scaled industry from the wall street journal.

This is the future of everything. I'm alexo sala. Today we're digging into geothermal energy and how new techniques could transform how more of us get our electricity stay with us.

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Geothermal energy has been produced for more than a century. The first geothermal planet on record dates back to one thousand nine hundred and nine four in italy's tne region. Here, stanford roll in horn.

Now they are, you know, more than twenty five countries in the world which are generating electricity from the today.

the us. Is the world's biggest producer of geothermal energy. IT generated seventeen billion kilowatt hours in twenty twenty two, enough to power one point six million homes for a year.

That may sound like a lot, but it's really not. Je dm will made up at just point four percent of all electricity generated in the U. S. Last year. Proponents say there's a lot to like about your thermal like solar and wind. Geothermal energy is renewable, so IT source doesn't get depleted as a generate electricity and also like solar and wind producing geothermal energy releases little or no planet warming carbon dioxide. But rolen horn says geothermal hasn't advantage over solar and went .

one of the important characteristics of jethwa is it's all the time power, so you can have IT running twenty four, seven. And that means that as you have solar and win going up and down during the day or during the month, then you have something to back IT up, something other than fossil fuel fired power stations.

Though it's expensive to set up a geothermal plant once it's in place, it's pretty cheap to Operate, and they often last for decades. Today, geothermal is generating at least some energy in countries like iceland, indonesia, in the us. And geothermal could produce more of our energy in the future.

A twenty ninety report from the energy department estimated that geothermal energy could generate eight point five percent of the U. S. S.

Electricity by twenty fifty. That would mean five hundred six million metric tones less of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. That's the equivalent of removing six million cars from the road.

9 thermal can also heat and cool individual homes。 9 thermal supporters say this could be an important way to cut down on our overall carbon emissions。 But to reach those twenty fifty estimates, we need new techniques to access those hot rocks beyond the surface. And for a while, we simply weren't looking for them. There were some investment in geo thoma in the one thousand nine hundred and seventies and eighties, but that money mostly dried up into the early two thousands, which means that in the fifty years old years since then, geothermal has been limited to conventional sources.

Geothermal had just treated water for decades. Es, so an unknown, the red headed stepchild of the renovated family. Nobody cares. irrelevant.

That's je beards, the executive director of project inner space, a nonprofit focused on the expansion of geothermal. But recently, he says geothermal has become a lot less staging.

Even in the last thirty six months, there has been a massive um I mean, we're in a renaissance right now for geothermal.

This renaissance is happening because of new technology and techniques and those are coming from a source that has a lot of experience digging into the earth's crust, the oil and gas industry.

And here's the cool part. The shalom spun off a whole lot of really relevant and really impact fall technologies that are enabling us to develop deep, formal resources in many, many more places in the world, not just where hydrothermal exists.

In fact, one of the leading techniques for this new age of geothermal is pretty similar to hydro lic fracturing, otherwise known as fracking. It's called enhanced geothermal systems, or E. G S. The two techniques are so similar, in fact, that they even share equipment for those sara IT, again.

because this process is pretty similar to what the oil and gas industry is doing. It's prety interesting. We pulled all of our equipment off of oil and gas sites, and then when they left our site, they went back to a and gas basin.

The area behind E. G S is that instead of relying on nature to put a hot water close to the surface, you can drill down, create space in the rock, add water to that space, and wala, you've engineered more or less the same conditions.

enhanced geothermal systems. This idea that you actually don't have to have perfect subsurface conditions to convey flew in from an injection well to a production well, but actually that all you need is heat.

This is what fur foo was testing in project red is experiment in northern nava. You told me how IT went.

We drill a pair of horion a walls into a really low premium service area.

Quit geology lesson premiership refers to how well fluid can move through rock. Sedimentary rocks like shale, where natural gas can often be found, have higher permeability than the harder mmorpg and ignites rocks. Those are the kind that fervor drill into for its experiment.

Then we use high pressure water to create pathways between those two wells.

The two wells are shaped like two giant capital else, each about seven inches in diameter. The vertical part of the l extends nearly eight thousand feet below the surface, and the horizontal part, the bottom of the l, extends out another three thousand feet. The rock here is about three hundred seventy five degrees fair height. And but IT creates a circuit.

and then you can basically push water out an injection well across the rest of our, where heat up an upper production well to generate electricity.

Verbo started drilling in early twenty twenty two and finished in march twenty twenty three. Once the wells were in place, the team spent at btm month doing tests to make sure everything was working the way they expected. They say the results were promising.

Project red was what we like to think about as really our proof of technology. I think the fact that our models matched reality shows us that we actually have a really, really solid approach, and we have the architecture in place to be able to go be successful in multiple locations. So is a smashing success for my perspective.

Since I was founded in two thousand seventeen, purfoy has raised one hundred eighty four million dollars in investment and been awarded roughly twenty million more in federal grants and IT plans to keep moving forward. IT just broke ground on its next project in southern new top. As with the nevada jew t, says a nearby facility plans to sell electricity generated from those wells. So far, val showed that E G S can work, but that doesn't mean it's without risks. The biggest one that E G S, much like fracking, could cause earthquakes, that's called induced seismic.

I think can do. Seismic is obviously huge issue for geo therm.

E G S projects monitor seismic and have plans in place for what to do, if any, is detected. The energy department has a set of guidelines for this there a detailed for .

of those protocol replace any seismic events that are sensed basically on a scale of Green, good to go, yellow, coster concern and stop Operations, or red, completely stop Operations altogether. And so as this project went on, we really, really adhered closely to this induce seismic education protocol and actually saw only in the Green seismic events, which are, you know, not detectable by human beings.

And researchers have found that geothermal systems don't often and do strong earthquakes s but they do happen. In twenty seventeen, a magi ude five point five earthquake struck the coastal city of poo, hung south korea, IT injured more than ninety people and caused tens of millions of dollars in the images. Two years after the quake, a south korean panel determined that a nearby geothermal experiment was the problem .

book cause another risk, even though .

geologists and engineers have gathered as much data as possible about what's going on under the surface, things might not go according to plan.

The whole earth x ray, that's what we would all have to have, doesn't exist. Unfortunately, we can very really, exactly measure the things that we want to know. So we're making a lot of indirect kind of inferences, is what is actually there in .

practice that might mean the companies have to drill deeper than they thought to get to rock that is sufficiently hot or they might encounter something unexpected that kills the product altogether.

There have been some A G S plus, for example, particularly one of think of in switzerland called sand gallon, where they were drawing in A G S system and drill into natural gas red, not an Operating one. They found that actually in the process. But that, of course, was problematic for them because having natural gas coming in the geology lads was not good for the point of view. The geos will plant, so they abandoned IT for that reason.

The risk er isn't safety. So much economic, so much of geo thermos cost is up front at the drilling stage. Some projects can cost upward of five hundred million dollars, but most are in the fifty to a hundred million dollar range, depending on how deep you have to go.

A failed drilling effort like this can mean financial disaster for a company and its backward. Another potential issue is that E G S uses a lot of water, and energy department estimate says a single large plant could use more than six million gallons over the course of its lifetime. That amount can make a big difference in places where water is scarce still, horn says. These experiments show that the fundamentals are there for E. G S.

I didn't know that there are massive numbers of technological questions. I mean, I think many of the men raised and solved as we propagate A G S, for example, into a wide of exploitation of large number places, then we will get Better at IT and remove a lot of the risk.

You can also help pave the way for other approaches that push the limits of what geothermal can do more on those techniques after the break.

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We mentioned earlier that fur vo, the company that's been testing E, G S, is now working on a project in southern utah, about two hundred miles south of sallie city, but is not the only geothermal effort in that state. There's a long time geothermal research facility right next door. Joseph Moore is its managing principal .

investigator. The force project is is the frontier observatory for research in geothermal.

Eric like for a vo foregoes testing equipment and techniques for E. G. S. But forces in a company is a research project out of the university of utah and funded by the energy department. So what IT aims to get out of those test is a bit different.

We're not gone to produce electricity at this point. The real goal is to demonstrate the process and that we can do this anywhere. But that's really critical .

to get you a thermal closer to those twenty fifty estimates. More says there need to be many additional experiments.

The key right now is doing IT again and again and again, right? You can do IT here and say we figured out how to do IT. We're done. It's going to take duplication replication of these projects to get there. More projects, more tests, more trials, more forces is going to give us a long way to where we need to be.

okay? So we need more experiments. Doing them takes money. Law boyd is a senior adviser in the geothermal technologies office at the energy department.

We see this dramatic gap in where there is funding to have support technology companies and developers in testing in the field at scale and the opportunity learn by doing the opportunity to hypothesis, test and then to push along the learning curve to improve our technologies can only be done in these demonstrations.

For this fiscal year, the energy department's geothermal technologies office has a budget of one hundred eighty million dollars. For comparison, the department solar energy division had a budget of three hundred eighteen million dollars. The geothermal office uses that money to fund geothermal projects that come from academia, national laboratories and industry.

In february, the department announced that he was awarding up to seventy four million dollars for E. G. S. Projects alone. Winners are expected to be announced this month.

We're focused on a yes, because there is this new term potential.

But as project inner spaces, jammy beard points out, E G S is not the only technique that could help you.

A thermal scale E G S call. It's a piece of a puzzle. And if I was going to get my money, I would bet in on geothermal, not a very specific technology with n geothermal, right? Because I think we're too early right now in this reno sance period to bet on a horse. We need to be funding all the horses.

Let's talk about some of those other horses and who's betting on them. One approach is called deep geothermal. This is pretty much just what IT sounds like. IT means drilling really deep to get a hot rocks to a layer of crust called the basement.

The basement is much more universal across the world, and that's going to make things easier for many, many reasons. You less uncertainty, less differentiation, more compete than rock, less premier ly, the old attributes that actually allow you to drill.

ever. That's carless, a rocket cofounder and CEO of a company called quiz energy. And when he says deeper, he means really deep, twelve miles below the surface, twice as deep as now.

Everest st. Is high there. Rocks can be more than nine hundred degrees fair in height and depth. And temperatures like these conventional drilling equipment just won't cut IT. So quiz is working on a completely new approach.

We talk about millimetre wave drilling. It's basically using ideas from fusion research. We use energy beams, not lacasse, but masers, with the name to vice rock iraqi and his .

team planned to use their technology to drill two connected wells to generate steam, just like A G. S. At least that's the idea.

They planned to start two field based tests in texas and oregon next year with the hope of generating revenue starting in twenty twenty eight. okay. So what this approach means going deep, but there's another different technique that means going deep and far.

It's called closed loop ever. A canadian start up is working on this. John redburn ever is president. And CEO explained his company's technique.

You got two drilling raggs, side by side. Drilling in parallel. The branch showed into twelve laterals each, which are then connected. And so IT makes a continuous circuit from the surface through these multilateral. Then back up to you, we all IT like E.

G. S. The ever loop is created by drilling down vertically and circulating water between the surface and a hot rock below.

But one major difference is that after they drill those vertical wells, they're connecting a whole bunch of horizons wealth deep underground. That's the twelve laterals reference mentioned. Those horriston tal wells give the water more space to heat up as a circulate.

Essentially, what we're constructing is a huge radiator kilometres below the surface that you flow clean water through and circulates just like the radiated in your house.

Reference says close loop has some advantages over E G S. IT requires less water and can be used in a wider range of geological context, though both close loop and deep geothermal come with risks like generating earthquakes right now ever is working on its first commercial project in garrets, read germany.

The site will start producing power and heat at the end of twenty twenty four, but drilling will continue into twenty twenty six once it's done. Ever plans to have drilled about a hundred eighty miles. Two of ever s investors include the energy companies B, P. And chevron.

Geothermal obviously really placed to our strength both in our history of geothermal, but also in subsurface and drilling and wells in major capital project execution.

That's barber Harrison, a vice president at several new energies where SHE oversees projects working on novel ways to generate power. Chevre is investing ten billion dollars over seven years in lower carbon solutions that isn't just limited to geothermal energy, though that makes up a part of IT.

We are at the point now with these novel technologies where they are technically feasible. We know the technology works, and our opportunity now is to say, can we make these competitive commercial solutions? We have a number of pilots that we're progressing around the world. So it's a very targeted and strategic pilate approach with the goal to then be able to grow out to larger projects that really become competitive solutions in .

a global landscape. As for other oil giants, B, P says IT isn't significantly involved in geothermal beyond an investment and ever shell and exxon mobile did not respond to request for comment, so geothermal has the potential to change how we power our homes and offices. But even if everything goes according to plan, going going to take time for these new geothermal techniques to scale.

So let's look further into the future. What will the geothermal landscape look like in two thousand fifty? The energy department laun boyd says that may make a difference in your .

electric bill goal is for power production that's at a cost that's on par with with what folks paid today or in many cases, would be lower local. Here is to deploy technologies that are going to save america's money and also provide them with clean carbon, three powered.

But stanford rollin horn says expanding that technology may take a while.

Once you get for the east towards the east coast, the subsurface of the country gets colder, and therefore you'd have to drawl deeper. So in the next twenty thirty is ags is likely to be texas and west. But if we're talking about fifty, two hundred years, we could imagine expanding to the entire country if you control the sufficient depth to get useful temperatures.

Jimmy beard, who runs the non profit project inner space, said that will take more than one technique to bringing a thermal to all those places. But betting on all the horses could mean that we all win.

So geothermal is kind of like a buffet. So all the concepts that are out there, some of them are Better for some regions than others. We're onna need to make sure that when we look to scale geothermal globally, a one concept fits all approach isn't going to be the way to go. We're gonna need to match the concept to the specific place that the concept is being built.

The future of everything is a production of the wall street journal. Stephanie egan, fruits is the editorial director of the future of everything. This episode was produced by me, alexo la.

Our fact checker is a partner, Nathan Michael, level and jasa fin or sound designers, and road the music. Cain milsom is our supervising producer. I shall all muslims is our development producer.

Scott salary and Christianity are the deputy editors. And philon a patterson is the head of news audio for the wall street journal. Like the show, tell your friends and leave us a five star review on your favorite platform. Thanks for listening.

Amazon q business is the new generative A I assistant from A W S, because many tasks can make business slow, as if waiting through .

mod a help. Luckily.

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Q got this. Learn what amazon q business can do for you at A W S dot com flash. Learn more.