'Breakthrough' Geothermal Tech Produces 3.5 Megawatts of Carbon-Free Power (engadget.com) 106
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Fervo Energy says it has achieved a breakthrough in geothermal technology. It carried out a 30-day well test at its site in northern Nevada and says it was able to achieve a "flowrate of 63 liters per second at high temperature that enables 3.5 megawatts of electric production." The company says the test resulted in flow and power output records for an enhanced geothermal system (EGS) and that it was completed without incident. A megawatt can power around 750 homes at once. Fervo is expected to connect its Project Red site to the grid this year. It will be used to power Google data centers and some of the company's other Nevada infrastructure. Google and Fervo signed an agreement in 2021 to develop a "next-generation geothermal power project."
This is the first time an energy company has shown that an EGS can work on a commercial scale, according to Bloomberg. It's been a long road to reach this point, as scientists have been trying to make EGS a reality since the 1970s. [...] Fervo says it's the first company to "successfully drill a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3,250 feet, reaching a temperature of 191C, and proving controlled flow through rigorous tracer testing." The company is hoping to replicate its success at a site in Utah. If Fervo sees similar results there and it successfully implements design upgrades to maximize output, the site is expected to generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes simultaneously, Latimer said. That's around a quarter of all homes in Utah.
This is the first time an energy company has shown that an EGS can work on a commercial scale, according to Bloomberg. It's been a long road to reach this point, as scientists have been trying to make EGS a reality since the 1970s. [...] Fervo says it's the first company to "successfully drill a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3,250 feet, reaching a temperature of 191C, and proving controlled flow through rigorous tracer testing." The company is hoping to replicate its success at a site in Utah. If Fervo sees similar results there and it successfully implements design upgrades to maximize output, the site is expected to generate enough electricity to power 300,000 homes simultaneously, Latimer said. That's around a quarter of all homes in Utah.
Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:5, Interesting)
From TFA
An EGS creates this permeability artificially by drilling deep underground and injecting fluid to create fractures in the rock. That approach can vastly increase the number of potential sites for a geothermal power plant.
Sounds like fracking! Hope all the people that think fracking causes earthquakes don't get wind of this.
The article was a bit scant on details, but I gather once the fractures occur they are permanent? I was wondering if there was any potential limit to the lifespan of the plant, and how much water it used and where that came from... all just recycled through the system? Seems like there would be some loss.
Greenwashed fracking 2.0 (Score:3)
The fracking industy is just looking for another source of income with the same old methods.
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The fracking industy is just looking for another source of income with the same old methods.
Is there anything wrong with that? Sounds like a reasonable thing to do to me.
Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:5, Informative)
There's a lot of misinformation around this. A lot of it is a bit like climate change. There are even those who think that fracking prevents earthquakes because it relieves stress in the ground. Even the USGS (first hit on Google) says that fracking itself doesn't cause earthquakes, but the wastewater storage after fracking does. And then you only have to scroll down the results 1/2 a page to see a report stating the exact opposite.
The entire information dissemination behind it is a mess. But it's a bit like stage 2 of global warming denialism, they've stopped denying that that they are causing earthquakes and have moved on to saying it's not a problem and that those earthquakes would happen anyways.
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Fracking and some forms of drilling actually do cause earthquakes, just ask the USGS if you don't believe me. I have no idea why you would think this isn't true.
Because most people's definition of "earthquake" is "earth is moving, buildings are toppling, run for your lives!!!" not "our hyper-sensitive seismograph recorded something".
Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:5, Informative)
This.
With all the gas fracking in North America, the total number of earthquakes from it that have actually led to damage is... ... zero.
China seems to be the exception to the rule, in the Shangluo shale gas field. It has strong, brittle rocks and a lot of preexisting fault stress, and they're doing massive wastewater injection into the site, apparently without any care about the demonstrated significant induced seismicity. Combine this with China's poor building standards in many places, a 5,7 in 2018 (the largest fracking-associated quake in history) caused 17 injuries, and in 2019 a 4,9 main shock with two slightly smaller pre-shocks took one life. As a side note, here in Reykjavík we get half a dozen or so quakes of that strength per year, and my reaction ranges from "Oh, what was THAT?" to "Heh, that was cool!", and then I continue on with my day. Buildings should NOT be collapsing from quakes of that strength.
It should be pointed out that EGS does not mean "fracking". Shame on this article for not even defining what EGS is. EGS = geothermal from hot, dry rock, which can be found everywhere on Earth, just at varying depths. Since there's no preexisting boiling water to recover from drilled wells, you have to find another way to capture the heat.
Fracking and then injecting water is one technique that one can use for EGS, but not the only one. Honestly, I have my fingers crossed for closed-loop EGS. One of EGS's problems is that in some strata, your injected water might stay where you put it, but in most places it's more likely just go bugger off somewhere else and you never see it again. But with closed loop EGS, you use horizontal drilling (after drilling down to the target depth), along with a thermally conductive grout, to basically create a heat exchanger inside the earth - water flows down inside your well, heats up, then flows back up through your well, never entering the surrounding strata. So there's zero water loss, zero fracking, etc. But thusfar it's not been demonstrated in a commercially viable manner.
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With all the gas fracking in North America, the total number of earthquakes from it that have actually led to damage is... ... zero.
You're being stupidly disingenuous. While in the USA it's not caused damage to the point of knocking down a building like what you typically read about on the news as earthquakes, to say that it hasn't led to damage is just ignorance or malice. There have been plenty of recorded earthquakes in the USA directly linked to fracking which have measured ~4 on the richter scale which is plenty enough to cause damage to buildings, though not foundational damage.
But great that you think the USA is the only place th
Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:4, Informative)
Simply cite one - just ONE - case where a fracking-induced earthquake in the US has caused damage. After a truly massive amount of fracking . Just one.
I'll be waiting.
Meanwhile, fracking has created hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits. Hundreds of billions versus ZERO. Want to talk human lives? The actuarial value of a human life in western countries is usually $1-10M (that is, if you allocate that sort of money towards any of any number of life-saving things, such as healthcare, building inspections, rescue services, etc, you'll average saving one extra life for every $1-10M you spend). 20% tax on the economic output of fracking is in the ballpark of ten thousand lives saved, just from a tax perspective. Versus ZERO damage. And from a non-tax perspective, the lower energy prices save US consumers about $13B per year, which again, translates into a huge amount of benefits in terms of health and quality of life. Again, vs. ZERO damage.
I don't know what case you're talking about for the UK. For the Netherlands, you're surely referring to Groningen, where the damage is caused by subsidence from conventional gas extraction. And the damage from subsidence has been vastly (by numerous orders of magnitude) lower than the value of the gas extracted, and indeed, most residents favour more gas extraction [nltimes.nl], despite the government phaseout.
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(For the record, the subsidence in Groningen is associated with "earthquakes", but the strongest on record was 3,6. I can barely even *feel* a 3,6, much less have it destroy a house)
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but I gather once the fractures occur they are permanent?
Yes, when you break a rock it doesn't heal. At least not on any sort of timeline you have in mind.
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Yes, when you break a rock it doesn't heal.
I was wondering if the pressure of the surrounding material would not exactly heal, but at least force shut the fractures far enough after some time the technique would have to be re-applied.
Maybe that would be on a geologic time scale, just wondering if there was an estimate.
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Yes, when you break a rock it doesn't heal. At least not on any sort of timeline you have in mind.
Depends on how much pressure it's under. At high enough pressures, rock acts more like a liquid. Consider metamorphic rocks like marble. It comes from limestone subjected to heat and pressure and it very obviously flows and cracks in the rock obviously do heal. There is that question of timeline. It does take a while, but not necessarily more than a few hundred years,
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Still I do think the bigger issue is what it does to groundwater. There's lots of videos of people near fracking sites lighting their drinking water on fire.
So what? Unlike fracking for oil, which only exists at special geologic formations, geothermal is literally everywhere. Instead of drilling near people's drinking water, they can locate their geothermal wells well away from everybody.
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There's lots of videos of people near fracking sites lighting their drinking water on fire. I'm no expert but I don't think that's supposed to happen.
Well, I would say it would be "supposed to happen" if you inject gas in the water well :)
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Oil is around 6000-10000' feet down.
This is around 12000 and lower.
Ground water is not be touched by this.
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Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:4, Informative)
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+1 informative
Thanks! (Score:1)
Thanks for the information, especially the last bit about the sand. I had read about that previously in regards to traditional fracking for oil/gas, but totally forgot that was a step!
Re:Hmm, it's fracking! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Changes nothing, as there are already many Green activist groups who believe current geothermal plants cause earthquakes and should be banned.
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Thanks for that info. In the past, geothermal has been limited to areas where magma is near the surface. For the new technology, the question is whether the cost of the drilling makes the derived power economically feasible.
There's two major issues with geothermal (Score:1)
2. Most geothermal fields sit on top of volcanic or seismic zones and power companies are hesitant to invest in a multimillion dollar plant there.
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I'll just leave this here:
https://www.energy.gov/eere/ar... [energy.gov].
Re:There's two major issues with geothermal (Score:4, Informative)
How does geothermal energy compare to nuclear fission energy?
One complaint of nuclear power, and this applies to any large steam power plant, is that they perform poorly in load following. It can be done, and the French have done it, but it is expensive to do. One potential resolution to this is using some kind of large scale battery to manage the load following. Presumably this geothermal power plant is going to have this same load following problem, and if not then whatever method they use to mitigate the problem can almost certainly be used on a nuclear power plant.
One kind of energy storage system that is showing promise is molten salt thermal energy storage. Concentrated solar thermal power plants and most any nuclear fission power plant operate at something like 300 to 450 C, hot enough to melt a number of salts that have been well tested in thermal energy storage systems. This geothermal power plant operates at 190 C. There's almost certainly a thermal energy storage system suitable for operating at this temperature but with higher temperatures there's greater efficiency. There's been some promising demonstrations of fast acting turbines that can use heat from molten salt, as fast acting to changing loads as the natural gas turbines they are derived from. There's an option to use turbines that can run off heat from molten salt or some kind of liquid or gaseous fuel pumped into them. One proposed application for this is solar thermal power as it can run on sunlight when it is available but can use heat from burning fuel to produce power and keep the salt hot should the sun not shine enough to meet electrical demand. This sounds great as backup power for a nuclear power plant, or a means to get more bang to buck out of a geothermal power plant.
Here's an idea, pair geothermal with nuclear fission at the same power plant. Perhaps use the Earth as the thermal energy storage, pump heat in to the rock from nuclear fission when demand is low and then pump it out later when demand rises again.
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As user galabar enlighten us with, apparently, Earth's core energy is fission energy in a considerable proportion. Here is the link he provided:
https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
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Presumably this geothermal power plant is going to have this same load following problem
No one is proposing building these for load following.
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Terrapower's natrium is already adding thermal salts to their system so that the reactor will handle 350 MWe, but the plant can produce 500 MWe for a short term by storing some of the heat from slow period and using during high periods.
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nah. Put nuclear where geothermal is not available.
Where would that be? I know, ships.
https://www.wired.com/story/nu... [wired.com]
I thought the point of this enhanced geothermal system was that it was viable most anywhere on Earth. That's likely an exaggeration on the part of the advocates or a misunderstanding on my part. I'd still like to see a comparison done between geothermal and nuclear fission. Geothermal power is likely available everywhere, it's only a matter of drilling deep enough. Drilling that hole costs money, and presumably there's going to be plac
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One complaint of nuclear power, and this applies to any large steam power plant, is that they perform poorly in load following. It can be done, and the French have done it, but it is expensive to do. One potential resolution to this is using some kind of large scale battery to manage the load following. Presumably this geothermal power plant is going to have this same load following problem, and if not then whatever method they use to mitigate the problem can almost certainly be used on a nuclear power plant.
Almost all power plants are steam turbine plants. Nuclear, natural gas, coal, all use steam turbines and work fine for load following.
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Sure but it's kind of pointless to talk about it in general.
If running the plant is profitable, you want to do it 24/7 at 100% of course. So how economical it is would depend on the specific project's cost and electricity prices
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With Geothermal you can just adjust the rate of flow of the water. With nuclear, you have to slowly ramp down the heat output of the reactor, or it melts.
That's the essential problem with nuclear. If you can't keep cooling it, the reactor melts down. With geothermal, if you can't keep cycling the water then nothing bad happens. The water in the ground won't rise in temperature to the point where it causes the system to literally melt, and even if it did catastrophically fail it's not throwing radioactive ma
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How does geothermal energy compare to nuclear fission energy?
Who cares? This thread is about a successful US geothermal energy project that looks like it'll go into production on an industrial scale. That's something to celebrate rather than immediately dive into comparisons & whataboutisms. Geothermal energy's been great for Iceland for decades; they even export electricity to mainland Europe via undersea cables. Sounds pretty good to me. You don't want the USA to fall behind in geothermal energy technology, do you?
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It's a valid question: the earth's geothermal heat flux is 100mW per square meter so the first-order renewable component is pretty negligible. Anything more than that and you are cooling rocks.
Rock has a heat capacity of around 2MJ per degree per cubic meter, suggesting that a cubic km of rock gives you 2E15 J of energy per degree, meaning that cooling it by 1.5 degree per year would provide 100MW of heat as opposed to the 100KW of natural heat flux.
Hopefully what happens then is that the lower temperature
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The heat produced by an ICE will escape anyway but it escapes faster with a radiator. Anyway, they say the amount of heat is almost infinite but OP still has a point. Your answer is kind of simplistic IMHO.
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The heat is caused by fission within the earth.
No, it is not from fission. It is from radioactive decay. With the Earth being as large as it is there's likely some heat from fission but that is tiny compared to the heat from radioactive decay.
Re:There's two major issues with geothermal (Score:5, Informative)
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That article equates fission with decay, but the journalist is being imprecise.
Radioactive decay is a spontaneous process and occurs by itself.
Nuclear fission does not occur by itself - it's the result of neutrons hitting a heavy nucleus.
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Re: There's two major issues with geothermal (Score:2)
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The core? The core starts about 2,900 km down. This is around 2.5 - 3.5 km down. I'm not sure what the convection rate is of heat from the core making it up thru 2,900 km of basically rock is, but I'd guess the sun entering its Red Giant phase is a bigger issue.
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You know I was curious from this from a purely hypothetical stance so I asked some AI:
The Earth's core contains an estimated 44.2 ± 1.0 × 1012 W of energy. We use an estimated 580 million terajoules of energy per year. To calculate how many years the Earth's core energy can last us, we can use the following formula:
years of energy = total energy / energy used per year
Plugging in the numbers, we get:
years of energy = (44.2 ± 1.0 × 1012 J) / (580 × 106 J / year)
= 7.6 ± 0.1 ×
Re:There's two major issues with geothermal (Score:5, Informative)
The Earth's core contains an estimated 44.2 ± 1.0 × 10^12 W of energy
Well this isn't right to begin with. That's the energy flux [wikipedia.org], how much energy the Earth radiates at a given moment, not how much it contains in total. This is why it's expressed in Watts (i.e. 1 joule per second).
years of energy = (44.2 ± 1.0 × 10^12 J) / (580 × 10^6 J / year)
Your AI quietly substituted joules for watts anyway, i.e one second's worth of energy - and worse, used 580 million joules for global consumption, rather than terajoules. So the answer is doubly wrong, and by many orders of magnitude.
annual radiated energy = 44.2 TJ/s × 3600s * 24 * 365.25 = 1394.8 million terajoules
1394.8 million TJ / 580 million TJ = 2.4
So, the Earth supplies over twice as much energy each year as we currently consume, and will continue to do so until its radioactive core decays significantly.
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Deep dive I was hoping for the ol stack exchange adage of "if you want an answer dont ask a question, post the wrong answer"
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Good bet on Slashdot too. Doesn't really answer the original question though; geothermal wells can certainly get depleted locally, though how quickly would be different for each well. When that eventually happens, you could probably just drill down deeper, and repeat.
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xactly, i was just curious in the sense of in a world where geothermal became the dominant energy source for humanity would there be unforseen negative consequences of "using up" the heat energy of the earth which doesn't really get replenished but then also I think about how much of that energy does and has been just radiating out to space and it must pale in comparison to what even modern humanity is capable of drawing out currently.
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However, the smart thing is still to have an energy matrix of all clean energy : nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, geothermal, hydro, wind, PV, tidal, and wave.
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Don't want to build on top? That's when the Burns Slant Drilling Co. gets called in.
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Uh oh (Score:2)
carbon-free power from the ground
Senator Joe Manchin ("D" - WV) is going to be so pissed.
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Senator Joe Manchin ("D" - WV) is going to be so pissed.
I doubt anyone would be all that "pissed" over this revelation. The technology used to drill for the geothermal heat is highly similar to that used for getting petroleum and natural gas. The power plants are still largely based on boiling water for producing electricity. This means people in the fossil fuel business can find work in renewable energy with little additional training.
What would also offer a transition away from fossil fuels and keeping people in the fossil fuel industry employed is nuclear
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This is huge (Score:2)
Geothermal competes head-on with all of these. It is not only one of the cheapest, BUT, also determinate.
But site selection was a serious issue before. Like hydro, most of the easy geothermal required special requirements.
With EGS, it can go in most places. This will replace a lot of storage and work nicely with wind/PV.
3.5 mega watts for 750 homes? (Score:1)
My calculator says that 3500000 / 750 = 4667 watts per home.
That won't run my air-conditioner. I'd like to know what kind of house runs on less than 5 kilowatts.
And, at that rate, the 300,000 homes would be 1.4 gigawatts. Which is supposed to be one quarter of the homes in Nevada.
I think that they are beyond way off here. I don't think that you can run a house on 5 kilowatts. I think that all of the homes in Nevada combined draw a lot more than 5.6 gigawatts. I don't think that you can pull 1.4 gigawat
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Most homes, actually. The U.S. average household electricity consumption is a bit over 10,000 kWh/yr [eia.gov], which averages out to 1.14 kW. Peak power will be a lot higher than that, but no one is running at peak power all the time. If a home needed 5 kW continuously, they'd be burning through 120 kWh/day, or 3.6 MWh/month! I'd hate to see that du
Re: 3.5 mega watts for 750 homes? (Score:1)
Furthermore.... (Score:1)
"flowrate of 63 liters per second at high temperature that enables 3.5 megawatts of electric production."
So 55,555 watts per liter? That must have been at a tremendously high temperature and pressure.
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The latent heat of vaporization for water is 2257 kJ/kg (1 L water == 1 kg). This means that to change 1 L of liquid water at 100C into steam in just one second would require 2257 kJ/s = 2257 kW. So, yes, 55 kW/L is not that big a deal.
Yeah... no (Score:1)
Water (Score:3)
I did RTFA and also the company website, but I could not see if this is a closed loop thing or not. If it's not closed loop, they will have issues with water availability in many areas. "The Geysers" in Norcal is a naturally occurring area of geothermal activity, and it's been tapped for electricity generation. But decades ago they began running out of water to feed the process, since their system has the water escaping as steam into the atmosphere after it's passed the turbine stage.
Novel solution was to pipe in wastewater from nearby towns. https://geysers.com/water# [geysers.com]
No idea of the complications involved with this firms proposal, but capturing, condensing and reusing as much water as possible would be an important consideration in places like Nevada and the rest of the Western US.
Water is crazy (Score:1)
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Re: Okay but how many homeless were used (Score:2)
Nah that will just lower real estate cost and make more people homeowners
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The quickest way to get more homeless people is to simply elect democrats. Just look at California, Oregon, Washington, etc for example...
They have to go some place after republicans make them homeless. After all, if republicans were actually job creators, homeless people would go to red states for employment. If you think democrats are causing homelessness, same point, why don't homeless people migrate to red states?
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That's the stereotype but it doesn't really match reality. But picking on the poor is always a good political stance. Ie, "welfare queens", which were a tiny sliver of welfare recipients but tarnishing everyone with that brush scored big political wins.
So there are the "bums", so to speak, who just beg for handouts. But there are the homeless who also have jobs, they just can't make ends meet to own or rent a home. The people who are bums have always been out there. The newer wave of homeless in the last
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The quickest way to get more homeless people is to simply elect democrats. Just look at California, Oregon, Washington, etc for example...
They have to go some place after republicans make them homeless. After all, if republicans were actually job creators, homeless people would go to red states for employment. If you think democrats are causing homelessness, same point, why don't homeless people migrate to red states?
Leftist fantasy: the above
Inconvenient facts: 90% of California's homeless are locally-made [wikipedia.org]
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Newsflash: California isn't left-wing. It's hardcore neoliberal capitalist. They're just slightly less extremist than some other states on certain knee-jerk, polarising personal interest issues. If you want to see kind of sort of left wing governments, come to western Europe.
LOL, yes, and it's Texas that stuff like "math is racist" come from.
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Just look at California, Oregon, Washington, etc for example...
Yes, it is true that blue states have far higher rates of homelessness [statista.com] than red states, but that seems to be driven mostly by high housing prices.
Blue state policies make it easier for NIMBYs to block the construction of low-income housing, and blue states have tighter restrictions on ad hoc housing. Want to put a trailer in your backyard for your brother-in-law to live in? No problem in Mississippi. Illegal in California.
if republicans were actually job creators, homeless people would go to red states for employment.
You are combining two myths about the homeless into one sentence.
First, homeless peopl
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