Geothermal Startup Shows Its Wells Can Be Used Like a Giant Underground Battery 66
James Temple reports via MIT Technology Review: In late January, a geothermal power startup began conducting an experiment deep below the desert floor of northern Nevada. It pumped water thousands of feet underground and then held it there, watching for what would happen. Geothermal power plants work by circulating water through hot rock deep beneath the surface. In most modern plants, it resurfaces at a well head, where it's hot enough to convert refrigerants or other fluids into vapor that cranks a turbine, generating electricity. But Houston-based Fervo Energy is testing out a new spin on the standard approach -- and on that day, its engineers and executives were simply interested in generating data.
The readings from gauges planted throughout the company's twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours. The results from the initial experiments -- which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively -- suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.
There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today's grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems. "We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid," says Tim Latimer, chief executive and cofounder of Fervo. "But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more."
The readings from gauges planted throughout the company's twin wells showed that pressure quickly began to build, as water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself. When they finally released the valve, the output of water surged and it continued pumping out at higher-than-normal levels for hours. The results from the initial experiments -- which MIT Technology Review is reporting exclusively -- suggest Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.
There are remaining questions about how well, affordably, and safely this will work on larger scales. But if Fervo can build commercial plants with this added functionality, it will fill a critical gap in today's grids, making it cheaper and easier to eliminate greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity systems. "We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid," says Tim Latimer, chief executive and cofounder of Fervo. "But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more."
Every well is different (Score:4, Funny)
Every well is different and largely unknown, you can only learn so much from the surface. What works well in one well may not turn out so well in, well, another well.
Re: (Score:2)
Every well is different and largely unknown, you can only learn so much from the surface. What works well in one well may not turn out so well in, well, another well.
Well, well, well. Finally the hot water is going to hit the fan.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
You'd get out what you pumped in.
Lots of stuff comes out of thermal vents that you're not pumping in, and the more pumping you do, the more tends to come out as fluid reaches places it otherwise wouldn't have.
Re:Every well is different (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest problems are calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate, which form scale that clogs pipes. The scale can be cleared by flushing with HCl, but that requires more expensive stainless steel alloys that aren't corroded by the acid.
Re: (Score:2)
Lots of stuff comes out of thermal vents that you're not pumping in
That's for sure, but if ever some hot drinky poo hits your turbine fan, that certainly didn't originate deep down in the ground, but was something you pumped in before :-)
Re: (Score:2)
Did you hear the one about the three holes in the ground? Well, well, well.
Re: (Score:2)
fracking.
coming to a fault line near you
Re:Every well is different (Score:5, Funny)
Every well is different and largely unknown, you can only learn so much from the surface. What works well in one well may not turn out so well in, well, another well.
Well, well, well.
What do you know.
If we pump down some water
Will it get hot and blow?
And whence comes this water?
To get steamy and hot
If you're out in the desert
I don't think there's a lot
And what pumps it down there?
And when it comes bubblin up
If it's not turning a fan
Then what good is it, for man
There are so many questions
Things that we'd like to know
So open the spigot
And let them all flow
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You might be surprised about the desert. In North Africa there is a lot of water underground, and they are now extracting it to use for irrigation and general supply.
In any case, every solution doesn't have to work everywhere. We can use different ones for different places. This is actually a great idea if it scales, because we are already at a point where baseload isn't all that profitable and demand shaping is seen as the way forward. Any source that can load follow and cover peaks has an economic advanta
Re: (Score:2)
Water bubbling underground,
A treasure waiting to be found.
But how to harness its great power,
And make it useful by the hour?
Pump it up, let it flow,
Feel the energy start to grow.
As steam rises to the sky,
A new source of power comes alive.
But where does this water come from,
In the desert where it's hot as the sun?
A mystery waiting to be solved,
A puzzle waiting to be resolved.
With science and technology,
We'll unlock this precious commodity.
And turn it into a force for good,
A new way to power our livelihoods.
S
Re: (Score:2)
Thsi is basically fracking (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
The injection can trigger small seismic tremors.
The solution is to build the facilities where few people live.
Re: (Score:3)
or build it where people lack political influence and have little legal recourse.
Re: (Score:1)
or build it where people lack political influence and have little legal recourse.
"Little Legal Recourse" is the name of my cover band that just lip syncs to recordings of popular music of the day!
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
No, the whole point of fracking is to "fracture" the rock to free up new passages. That's not being done here.
If I recall TFA, they pointed out the problem with geothermal is finding hot, porous rock near enough to the surface. They in fact frack hot, imporous rock to create pathways for water so it's exactly fracking.
While they were at it, the discovered they could get this other behavior out of the wells, behavior you can't get from naturally porous rock. You force water in, the rock moves a bit, the fractures expand, and you've got water under pressure. Release a valve on the production side and all that water c
Talk to the Petroleum Industry (Score:5, Informative)
Much like pumping unwanted produced water from oil & gas production back into formations deep underground, there are known issues that can arise from such activity.
Fluid injection & earthquakes [usgs.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
These small earthquakes are actually releasing pressure that can build up into a worse earthquake. It's debatable if it is a safety issue or actually a improvement.
No they are not (not any significant amount of pressure that is) and therefore not it is not (debatable). So much more energy is involved in a major quake that the minor ones are irrelevant. [utah.edu] It's unclear why you would be repeating fracking industry talking points, but please stop.
am I the only one? (Score:5, Interesting)
...who thinks "...water that had nowhere else to go actually flexed the rock itself..." is perhaps the kind of statement that would suggest this could end very badly?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The underlying rocks are held in place by gravity, not relying on any intrinsic strength of the material itself. The size of the well and pumped water compared to the rock means that it is not going to cause any issues at the surface.
Sure - because sufficient pressure to flex rock deep below the surface could never cause seismic activity [nationalgeographic.com], right?
Re: (Score:2)
Right now the technology is not precise enough to direct the seismic activity to low real estate value communities and away from important gated communities. So we should invest on directing the seismic activity, and not kill this wonderful new technology. It has so much potential for the pump, hee hee see the pun?, and dump schemes worth at least a couple of billion dollars for the vulture, sorry Freudian slip, venture capitalists.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Sure - because sufficient pressure to flex rock deep below the surface could never cause seismic activity [nationalgeographic.com], right?
Indeed what humans do cannot cause seismic activity. The article you linked actually reinforces that idea, humans can only contribute to existing seismic activity. The key word you're looking for is "induce" not "cause".
Now ultimately it becomes a question of geology itself. The article is quick to point out fracking. Well fracking for oil and gas is exactly the kind of activity that looks for weak geological constructs with the goal of breaking them. Literally the dictionary definition of the term frack is
Re: (Score:2)
Theories of causation in philosophy (including philosophy of science) are complex, diverse, and not agreed upon. For every common-sense notion of cause, there are 5 philosophers who can confuse your application of your intuition.
Arguably, a minor contributory cause is still a cause, particularly if the event would not
Re: (Score:2)
The underlying rocks are held in place by gravity, not relying on any intrinsic strength of the material itself. The size of the well and pumped water compared to the rock means that it is not going to cause any issues at the surface.
I expect I'm with you and I'd love to see numbers. My expectation is the rocks move a few millimeters five kilometers down. I'm sure it's less than a 0.1% shift and it's got kilometers of rock above it to mask the movement.
A cup of coffee says you can't measure this at the surface. I don't think people realize just how deep wells can be.
Side Effects (Score:2)
Reminds me of the heat storage approaches used in off grid applications. Combined with fracking. An interesting idea -- wonder what the side effects of heating and distorting the rocks will be this time? More earthquakes?
Re: (Score:2)
Reminds me of the heat storage approaches used in off grid applications. Combined with fracking. An interesting idea -- wonder what the side effects of heating and distorting the rocks will be this time? More earthquakes?
You do realize that the ground at that depth is already hot and that’s why they put a geothermal plant there right? They are extracting an infinitesimal amount of thermal energy percentage wise from the surrounding rock by cooling, it’s only large in human terms.
Re: (Score:2)
Using it as storage means they are adding heat to the layer rather than subtracting it. And if you look at the history of fracking, there have been a number of operations that were shutdown because of the seismic events that followed pressurization. That is why my comment was tagged 'side effects'...
Re: (Score:2)
It's still a stationary power source (Score:2)
This sounds like a good idea but it only addresses power needs for stationary uses. It won't address the needs of mobile applications and batteries still can't outmatch the performance of the venerable diesel engine.
Re: (Score:2)
The stated purpose clearly was to generate electricity, which is suitable for most use cases and isn't stationary.
Alternatively...... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
If by "fear" you mean actual cost, then you might have a point. There has never been a nuclear plant built on time and on budget that delivered electricity at the promised price. And then, of course, we should probably have a look at the upstream costs of providing fuel, and the downstream costs of disposing of it afterward.
Looked at from a financial perspective, nuclear has always been questionable. Newer alternatives are eating its lunch.
Re:Alternatively...... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing expensive about nuclear are the lawsuits.
If you want to do it unsafely, sure.
Regulation came about because nuclear power was studied, and the regulations were required to do it safely. It wasn't a whim.
Re:Alternatively...... (Score:5, Informative)
If by "fear" you mean actual cost, then you might have a point.
No, he meant fear. And I will add to that spreading non-sense bullshit about nuclear.
There has never been a nuclear plant built on time and on budget that delivered electricity at the promised price.
Nuclear plants build between 1970 and 1990 in France were on time/budget, and electricity there is delivered at the promised price. At least it was until the European regulators passed laws so that all electricity prices had to be indexed on the highest electricity price by other means. Nowadays, it is indexed on gas because of the war on Ukraine, and we get to pay our electricity higher because gas costs more. Gotta love global markets. It is interesting to note that initially, this regulation was passed to make wind/solar artificially more attractive. Thus the subsidies targetting them. Subsidies going for most of them directly into China pocket.
Even nowadays, China is building ~7-8 nuclear plants per year (50 already in commercial use, 150 more planned for 2030), and doing it on schedule and budget. Why do you think the leader of solar panels/wind turbines is also building nuclear? Because they have common sense, actually listen to the science, and know solar/wind alone cannot solve our energy crisis. Sad to see that a communist country has more common sense than the west nowadays.
And then, of course, we should probably have a look at the upstream costs of providing fuel, and the downstream costs of disposing of it afterward.
Already done and provisionned for. Also, why do you think countries who have nuclear plants are keeping their "waste" instead of sending it abroad? Because most of that "waste" is actually fuel for the Gen IV reactors, and countries know that with the power crisis coming in the next decades, that should actually prove quite useful.
Newer alternatives are eating its lunch.
No they don't. Unless of course you are not taking into account baseload, minerals availability, land usage, recycling costs, maintenance costs...
Re: (Score:1)
Nice attempt at the "no true Scotsman" logical fallacy. You guys always have an excuse. My statement stands: no nuclear plant has satisfied the criteria I outlined above. The rest of your comment is a farrago of lies and misinformation. An easy example as that you claim upstream costs of providing reactor fuel, which includes uranium mining, are "already done and provisionned (sic) for". That's a blatant lie. Until recently, nobody even tried to claim uranium tailings were adequately dealt with. And a
Re: (Score:3)
You may want to sound smart by invoking the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, even if it doesn't apply here, but you may want to re-read, as you are the one not retracting from the initial false assertion after I gave you a counter-example. You end up just sounding stupid.
Just so you understand, because I am feeling nice this morning (thanks Wikipedia).
The “No True Scotsman” fallacy is committed when the arguer satisfies the following conditions:
- not publicly retreating from the initial, falsified as
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly, I've seen people claim a whole bunch of times that the mine tailings [propublica.org] are no longer a problem.
Re: (Score:3)
we could just get over our fear of Nuclear, build out modern Nuclear reactors, and call it a day.
That would not be sufficient because we'd still need something to even out the peaks and valleys on electricity demand. A geothermal power plant that can store heat from a nuclear power plant could be just what is needed to fill that need, a need that current 3rd generation nuclear power plants are ill suited to meet.
It seems people lose just how valuable energy storage systems would be to nuclear power. They completely grasp the concept of using energy storage to fill in gaps in supply when the wind and
contaminated water? (Score:2)
It seems like the water would pick up a lot of minerals, and possibly even metals. I assume they would keep it in some kind of cooling reservoir and reuse the water, but then it would be accumulating the contaminants. Maybe they can precipitate it out somehow, but that could be a lot of water to treat.
Re: (Score:2)
Not my field at all but my guess is if they let the water cool in a pond they'd eventually just dredge the pond. Hopefully someone in the field pipes up.
(Sorry, I was too late for the well jokes, doing my best).
Re: (Score:2)
There are some experiments pulling the minerals out of geothermal water. Minerals like lithium carbonate.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:2)
I had seen news about that and I hope it works, but hot geothermal brine is notoriously corrosive and hard to do anything with.
Maybe it isn't such a problem, they are already set up to use the heat from the brine to generate electricity. This step apparently would generate electricity from the water pressure. That probably means a turbine that the brine flows through. It could become corroded or fouled, but maybe there are known solutions..
Re: (Score:2)
And an awful lot of pipe. Having visited Iceland, I'm pretty sure there are some solutions out there.
Won't Fix Grid Problems in Rest of World (Score:2)
This is very cool, I think. But this is once again a first world solution. Most of the world doesn't even have a reliable electrical grid. Even if poor countries could afford to build these, dubious at best, they still have no reliable way to distribute the power. There are billions of people in the world where daily black outs, or outright lack of electricity is a reality.
Re: (Score:1)
They can drive Teslas powered from their solar farms.
Re: (Score:2)
This is a dumb take. The large majority of technology discussed on Slashdot is out of reach of a good portion of the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Most developing countries use coal. Solar and wind are much cheaper than coal, and are also much easier to install where there isn't existing infrastructure. Geothermal is also cheaper than coal, in places with reasonable geology. Not everywhere has that, but in places that do it's probably the cheapest and easiest way to get reliable power, and if this works out it makes a nice complement for even cheaper sources.
Much of the developing world is fairly rich in geothermal resources.
Geothermal is reliable 24/7. Why limit it? (Score:2)
Unlike solar, wind, and tidal power, geothermal power doesn't fluctuate throughout the day. Solar is nice in that it can offset air conditioning during the day and power usage goes down at night anyways. There are salt storage mechanisms that serve as batteries to some solar plants.
There is certainly some value in geothermal power being able to scale up and down due to demand: excess power can't be used unless there's a storage mechanism (which will have some loss thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, usua
Re: (Score:2)
It's just where and how much is available and at what cost.
There was an article a while ago about using directed energy to dig super deep bore holes to get to geothermal at many many more locations.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Unlike solar, wind, and tidal power, geothermal power doesn't fluctuate throughout the day...Still, if geothermal power is a viable solution, why not prefer it to the less reliable methods rather than concocting schemes to use it in a supplemental fashion?
Well, from TFA, the issues is there are few places with hot, porous rock near enough to the surface to get to and close enough to people to make it cost-effective to ship the electricity. Other than that, nothing.
I read a different article which pointed out another issue. Rock isn't a very good conductor of heat. If you run a geothermal well long enough, you cool the rock to the point you can't extract any more energy. You then have to wait for the rock to reheat. I don't know how long that takes (I think b
Re: (Score:2)
Geothermal is considerably more expensive than wind and solar. If you can build one geothermal plant with schedulable output and a bunch of solar, it's better than having to build two geothermal plants.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:2)
Straightforward Extension of Recharge (Score:2)
Conventional geothermal has used reinjection of condensate/brine and recharge of steam fields from other sources (treated municipal wastewater at The Geysers in California) to maintain field production. This sounds like a straightforward extension of that to a dry-rock field that needs fluid to be injected anyway. I'd wonder how long it would keep working - essentially, they're fracking the rock, and that may not "breathe" for long.
Re: (Score:2)