Petroleum Drilling Technology Is Now Making Carbon-Free Power (npr.org) 69
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: There's a valley in rural southwest Utah that's become a hub for renewable energy. Dozens of tall white wind turbines whoosh up in the sky. A sea of solar panels glistens in the distance. But the new kid on the block is mostly hidden underground. From the surface, Fervo Energy's Cape Station looks more or less like an oil derrick, with a thin metal tower rising above the sagebrush steppe. But this $2 billion geothermal project, which broke ground last year, is not drilling for gas. It's drilling for underground heat that CEO Tim Latimer believes holds the key to generating carbon-free power -- lots of it.
"Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity," he said. Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig's metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth's natural heat and generate electricity. This isn't the type of geothermal that's already active in volcanic hot spots like Iceland or The Geysers project in California. It's called an enhanced geothermal system. Cold water goes down into a well that curves like a hockey stick as it reaches more than 13,000 feet underground. Then the water squeezes through cracks in 400-degree rock. The water heats up and returns to the surface through a second well that runs parallel to the first. That creates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity, and the water gets sent back underground in a closed loop.
This horizontal well technique has been pioneered at a $300 million federal research project called Utah FORGE located in this same valley, which has paved the way for private companies to take the tech and run with it. Recent innovations like better drill bits -- made with synthetic diamonds to eat through hard subterranean granite -- have helped Fervo drill its latest well in a quarter of the time that it took just a couple of years ago. That efficiency has meant an 80% drop in drilling costs, Latimer said. Last year, Fervo's pilot project in Nevada used similar techniques to begin sending electricity to a Google data center. And the company's early tests at Cape Station in Utah show the new project can produce power at triple the rate of its Nevada pilot. "This is now a proven tech. That's not a statement you could have made two or three years ago," Latimer said. "Now, it just comes down to how do we get more of these megawatts on the grid so we have a bigger impact?" The report notes that Fervo signed a landmark deal with Southern California Edison, one of the country's largest electric utilities with 15 million customers. "It will send the first 70 megawatts of geothermal juice to the grid in 2026," reports NPR. "By the time the project is fully completed in 2028, this Utah plant will deliver 320 megawatts total -- enough to power 350,000 homes. The project's full output will be 400 megawatts."
"Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity," he said. Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig's metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth's natural heat and generate electricity. This isn't the type of geothermal that's already active in volcanic hot spots like Iceland or The Geysers project in California. It's called an enhanced geothermal system. Cold water goes down into a well that curves like a hockey stick as it reaches more than 13,000 feet underground. Then the water squeezes through cracks in 400-degree rock. The water heats up and returns to the surface through a second well that runs parallel to the first. That creates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity, and the water gets sent back underground in a closed loop.
This horizontal well technique has been pioneered at a $300 million federal research project called Utah FORGE located in this same valley, which has paved the way for private companies to take the tech and run with it. Recent innovations like better drill bits -- made with synthetic diamonds to eat through hard subterranean granite -- have helped Fervo drill its latest well in a quarter of the time that it took just a couple of years ago. That efficiency has meant an 80% drop in drilling costs, Latimer said. Last year, Fervo's pilot project in Nevada used similar techniques to begin sending electricity to a Google data center. And the company's early tests at Cape Station in Utah show the new project can produce power at triple the rate of its Nevada pilot. "This is now a proven tech. That's not a statement you could have made two or three years ago," Latimer said. "Now, it just comes down to how do we get more of these megawatts on the grid so we have a bigger impact?" The report notes that Fervo signed a landmark deal with Southern California Edison, one of the country's largest electric utilities with 15 million customers. "It will send the first 70 megawatts of geothermal juice to the grid in 2026," reports NPR. "By the time the project is fully completed in 2028, this Utah plant will deliver 320 megawatts total -- enough to power 350,000 homes. The project's full output will be 400 megawatts."
Oh the irony (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
Oil, coal, and natgas are the foundation of all green technology in one way or another.
Re:Oh the irony (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no. The foundation of solar is the semiconductor industry, which arose from computers, which was about defense and accounting. Wind (and its associate, hydraulic) is primordial, and likely evolved to mill grain among the first civilizations. And electric batteries were invented centuries ago, in clay jars. Their industrialization and scaling is mostly owed to portable electronics.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The semiconductor industry and the solar pv industry used massive amounts of fossil fuels to get where they are today.
Re:Oh the irony (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh the irony (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be like claiming the foundation of textile technology is slavery, or the basis of maritime shipping is spices in India. The relationship is circumstantial.
Re: (Score:2)
That didn't literally require fossil fuels. Wood and muscle would have sufficed. It probably wouldn't have happened, but it could have.
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Reading the headline made me think that too. But they aren't at old oil drill sites. Quite the opposite, the ground underneath will be devoid of hydrocarbons. It's an all new source of geothermal power - presumably in known hot spots.
Terrible headline really.
Re:Oh the irony (Score:4, Informative)
Terrible headline really.
The headline correctly says that drilling technology is being repurposed.
It does not say that wells are being repurposed.
Re: (Score:3)
The whole thing is mind boggling to me. I've been following EGS for ages. Like, I think I had a Google alert set up something like two decades ago. The results were always, with every company, cost-ineffective. But then now it seems it's been achieved, and the secret was.... doing everything normally. It looks like the past EGS companies were pursuing their own theories about trying to reopen existing fractures rather than the we-know-it-works use of hydraulic fracturing and proppant injection.
Did we re
Re: Oh the irony (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How funny would it be if the solution to clean energy were a technical side effect of the shale oil revolution that pioneered horizontal drilling
The fracking revolution has already made a huge contribution to reducing CO2 by shutting down the coal industry.
Shale gas emits half the CO2 per kwh as coal.
I'm glad Ms. Harris abandoned her misguided opposition to fracking.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How funny would it be if the solution to clean energy were a technical side effect of the shale oil revolution that pioneered horizontal drilling
The fracking revolution has already made a huge contribution to reducing CO2 by shutting down the coal industry.
Shale gas emits half the CO2 per kwh as coal.
I'm glad Ms. Harris abandoned her misguided opposition to fracking.
Are you sure about that? "Natural gas can rival coal's climate-warming potential when leaks are counted": https://www.npr.org/2023/07/14... [npr.org]
Re: (Score:3)
That's been a pet peeve of mine for awhile. Why has it taken Dems so long to do any goddamn thing about the leaks? It's been going on for over a decade, it's a known problem, and they've been flat out ignoring it and spending all their time trying to block new pipeline construction (which is typically badly needed in the areas where it's proposed) and generally trying
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The fossil fuels industry could make millions from small investments in preventing leaks & capturing released gases but they don't & won't. After decades, it's become painfully obvious that as long as they're making profits & taking in huge government subsidies they're fine & they're not gonna fix anything.
Re:Oh the irony (Score:5, Informative)
The fracking revolution has already made a huge contribution to reducing CO2 by shutting down the coal industry.
And has increased water [ehn.org] and land pollution [npr.org]. It also wastes a ton of the natural gas it's supposed to be removing.
“What I see is the issue of polluted water supplies, of people being impacted by the air pollution around these facilities, people looking out their bedroom windows and 500 feet [away] is a flare shooting 25 feet up in the air, burning off excess natural gas,” said Hess. “All those issues are still there.”
And this doesn't take into consideration the medical issues [spotlightpa.org] for those living near fracking sites.
In August 2023, research by the University of Pittsburgh, also part of the new compendium, showed that children living within a mile of a natural gas production well were seven times as likely to suffer from lymphoma, a rare kind of childhood cancer, than those who had no such wells within five miles of their homes.
Overall, the studies in the new compilation found evidence that people who live near unconventional oil and gas production and distribution sites, such as well pads and compressor stations, are exposed to toxic airborne pollutants such as benzene and formaldehyde, diesel exhaust, fine particles, and nitrous oxides, leading to respiratory and skin problems, nervous system complaints, and heart issues at higher rates than in other sectors of the population.
So yeah, fracking's a good thing if you don't drink the water, breathe the air, or live anywhere near a site.
Re: Oh the irony (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Clueless is better than wrong.
Smallish (Score:3)
Re:Smallish (Score:4, Informative)
It's a prototype. Output is on a par with protoptypes of other technologies, e.g. SMR nuclear.
Larger wind turbines are in excess of 15 MW peak output. There's a bit of friendly rivalry between Europe and China going on. Shame the US doesn't seem to be getting involved.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe we could discover/invent a way to recycle spent blades.
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Late to the party, am afraid. The work on new chemistries that make it easier to break the blades down to their monomers is advanced and in testing. As is the work on chemistries that break up older compounds. It is likely that this will be a solved problem within a few years.
Re: (Score:2)
Companies have already announced they're recycling the fiberglass blades. The main issue is that it's expensive enough to do that few do it.
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How funny would it be if the solution to clean energy were a technical side effect of the shale oil revolution that pioneered horizontal drilling
Except it's not. Most of these thermal drilling projects rely on depth not horizontally drilling. They are more a side effect of deep-oil drilling. We've gotten really good at making very very deep holes.
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The enhanced geothermal the article is talking about isn't just a single bore hole. It goes down, then horizontal for a good distance to pick up a lot of heat, then up a different bore hole. So there's an injection well and one or more extraction wells. See images [energy.gov]. Some systems are like a giant U shape, some are just vertical bores. But most have the injection and extraction wells running parallel to each other, with sig
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Some do some don't. Most of the ones to date are U shaped. The shale oil boom innovated not in going horizontal between bores, but rather going out like a spiderweb from a single hole. Point is a significant level of horizontal drilling well and truly predates the innovations from shale oil, and again, shale is shallow, these holes are rather deep with horizontal drilling only improving efficiency rather than being a core component of the technology.
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(That first well which I did - we had an oil leg of about 30ft
reasonably cost efficient (Score:3, Interesting)
100MW sounds like a lot but if it's a $2B project that is $20/W which is somewhat expensive.
However at 400MW that's $5/W which seems reasonable especially for the capability of 24/7 generation.
It becomes particularly attractive for the small footprint. Solar panels to generate 400MW would take up a lot of space.
I believe that modern wind turbines are on the order of 1-2MW per install, so that's 200 wind turbines that do not work 24/7.
This seems very cool.
I'm unclear on why it needs to go 13,000 feet down. You would think a couple of thousand feet would be good enough to get you some boiling water.
Also aren't pipes 13,000 feet long really likely to break or have problems ?
Re:reasonably cost efficient (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Watts are a unit of power, not energy. If the facility lasts 10 years, it still produces the same 100MW for the $2B.
The cost per unit of *energy* drops for all power plants over time since their construction costs get amortized over more output (more steeply for renewable plants that have no fuel cost). However, the construction cost per watt essentially remains constant over time.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
A year is 8,800 hours.
If it runs 24/7, that is 8,800 * 100 MW = 880 million kilowatt-hours per year.
The wholesale electricity price in Utah is 6 cents/kwh.
880 million * 0.06 = $52M in revenue.
The project costs $2B, so if you assume no running costs, no downtime, and no equipment deterioration (all bad assumptions), that's a 2.6% ROI.
That's crap.
The money would be far better spent on wind or solar.
Re:reasonably cost efficient (Score:5, Insightful)
The money would be far better spent on wind or solar.
- This is 24/7 power generation suitable for baseload generation.
- Solar and wind cannot be used for baseload generation using current storage technologies.
- This is greenfield technology that has high initial development costs that should decrease as methods and technologies improve with time.
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They've reduced cost 80% in 3 years.
If they can do another 80% it's going to start looking pretty good I'd think.
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A year is 8,800 hours.
If it runs 24/7, that is 8,800 * 100 MW = 880 million kilowatt-hours per year.
The wholesale electricity price in Utah is 6 cents/kwh.
880 million * 0.06 = $52M in revenue.
The project costs $2B, so if you assume no running costs, no downtime, and no equipment deterioration (all bad assumptions), that's a 2.6% ROI.
That's crap.
The money would be far better spent on wind or solar.
You're using bad numbers. Just because you saw "2 billion" and "100 MW" in the summary does not mean those are the numbers you need for your calculation. You actually have to READ and understand the context to accurately calculate the ROI.
FTFA:
So the project will cost $2 billion and the project's full output will be 400 MW. Your ROI numbers are off by a factor of 4, I hope you're not an accountant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:reasonably cost efficient (Score:4, Interesting)
That math is just for the first year, imaging if it last TWO years, now your cost per W is half, imagine if it lasts 10 years... Yea I know there will be ongoing maintenance costs, but thats nothing compared to the initial outlay - unlike nuclear which we need but is the money pit that keeps on sucking.
There have always been 2 issues with geothermal:
-Its extremely site specific. If you look at a map of the US most of the potential is around Nevada/California, where the geology is better. If you maxed out geothermal production in the US you'd only supply something like 10% of current power need, which isn't nothing but it's not a miracle solution.
-The wells only last 10ish years, and they're the main expense of the facility.
If you can cut the cost of drilling a well in half, geothermal makes some sense. It's still going to be (probably significantly) more expensive than most alternatives, but having energy sources with decoupled failure modes is extremely valuable for grid reliability. This is why grid reliability modeling scores asset portfolios that are predominantly wind and solar extremely poorly: they're not just intermittent, the same weather events that challenge one can also challenge the other. The windless polar vortex that covers an entire continent, causing heating demand to be very high while solar incidence is very low, is a backbreaking event for a grid that's just wind and solar. Batteries don't solve the issue because they're fundamentally coupled to the reliability of the assets powering them, and the amount (and cost) of batteries you'd have to build to limp all the way through an edge case event is exponentially higher the longer the event duration.
This is why virtually every grid expert will tell you there has to be SOMETHING else on the grid, even if you believe wind/solar/batteries are the cheapest way to generate power (they aren't, but assume the hypothetical). Most experts assume nuclear power will fill that role, since it's an existing technology that scales well and can be built anywhere. This is the space that things like geothermal or tidal energy are competing in, and depending on their cost they could be a solution in areas that are conducive to them and if the local population has an aversion to nuclear power. The third option is keep some fossil facilities operational in a standby mode only for emergencies, but it's hard to cost justify long term. Short term this is exactly what's happening, as we see utilities increasingly operating legacy fossil assets seasonally rather than year round.
With the big money flowing into nuclear from tech companies this year some of these SMR companies may get over the hump finally. Lack of utility-scale funding and utility backing was the hurdle these technologies were struggling to clear, as the entire premise of SMRs is cost and build time reductions at scale. If you're building bespoke SMRs then obviously the costs and build times will be outrageous, it'd be like building a single Tesla and claiming the costs were too high to justify EV technology. It'll be fascinating to watch, SMR as a category covers radically different types of reactors. And with some of the exciting developments in metal fabrication this year the cost estimates for these things at scale could come down radically. The Brits electron welded an entire reactor vessel to nuclear spec in a day using a moving vacuum system, which previously would have taken a year and orders of magnitude more money. Its exciting stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
V interesting. Two qs, if that’s OK: why would this kind of geothermal well only last 10 years, if it’s a closed loop? Materials failure? And - any links to an article about the electron welding? Sounds v exciting. Cheers!
Re: (Score:2)
V interesting. Two qs, if that’s OK: why would this kind of geothermal well only last 10 years, if it’s a closed loop? Materials failure?
My lay understanding is that the fractures plug, even in closed loops. The water you're sending into the fractures naturally picks up minerals, which get re-deposited. I'm sure the rate is highly site chemistry dependent, but I've seen that 10 year number thrown around as kind of a mean time to failure.
And - any links to an article about the electron welding? Sounds v exciting. Cheers!
Here's a couple quick blurbs:
https://camvaceng.com/ground-b... [camvaceng.com]
https://newatlas.com/energy/nu... [newatlas.com].
It's an exciting technology purely from a fabrication standpoint, not just for nuclear purposes. I could see the
Re: (Score:1)
Solar panels to generate 400MW would take up a lot of space
Depends on the definition of "a lot of space". Using 20% efficient panels, you'd need about 2,692 acres of panels.. Death Valley, CA (a desert) is 3.4 million acres of mostly inhospitable land that receives a LOT of sunlight..
Re:reasonably cost efficient (Score:5, Informative)
Your figures for wind turbines are a bit out of date. Onshore turbines are now often 3MW per turbine, and offshore are often 15MW. So the numbers needed would be lower.
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I don't know for sure but it's almost certainly due to speed of heat conduction in rock.
You have to go deep enough that the heat can be replaced as fast as you're extracting it. I'd guess that means you have to be close enough to the mantle to allow convection rather than just conduction in solid rock to come in to play. Obviously your bore isn't down to the mantle
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I'm unclear on why it needs to go 13,000 feet down. You would think a couple of thousand feet would be good enough to get you some boiling water.
Heat rises and due to the square-inverse function, they lose a LOT of it if they don't drill deep enough. A little back of the napkin math shows that their break-even point is somewhere between 4000 - 6000 feet. But once they get past 6K, they can start drilling WIDER (picture a reverse funnel) which mostly undoes the loss. They could probably stop at 10K, but I can see why they'd want an additional 3000ft as a "buffer"
Re:reasonably cost efficient (Score:4, Informative)
I'm unclear on why it needs to go 13,000 feet down. You would think a couple of thousand feet would be good enough to get you some boiling water.
Do you remember Carnot efficiency from your high school physics class?
e = 1 - (T-cold / T-hot)
For boiling water, T-hot = 373K. At room temperature, T-cold = 293k.
So, the maximum theoretical efficiency is (1 - 293/373) = 21%.
It will be much worse in practice since there are inefficiencies and no good working fluid for that temperature range.
But if you go down to 13,000 feet, the temperature will be much higher, and the efficiency will be high enough that it might make sense.
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Compare it to SMRs and it looks cheap. It's only a prototype anyway, once the technology has been developed the cost should fall, like has done with most other sources of electricity (the major exception being nuclear).
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I think this is the idea behind going deeper and horizontal. There is a much larger volume of rock from which you can recover heat.
Re: (Score:2)
You do know that the Earth is slowly cooling down since it formed? Even the event that created the moon only lead to "localized" heating.
But if you do the sums, you'll discover that the Earth is cooling down too slowly.
So you use a bit of critical thought, there are two options,1. Someone has put a blanket around the Earth to keep it warm or 2. Something is warming up the Earth.
Now we know 1 isn
Re: (Score:2)
Heterogenous power mix is best (Score:3)
This is great. There is more resilience in the power system if there are a mix of different types of power source. If this can truly scale to be a significant portion of the power mix (the EGS link suggests power for 65m people, ie about 20% of the US population) then that would be a pretty meaningful chunk of genuine baseload power. Given it's also genuinely dispatchable (you can bypass the power plant or throttle the wellhead), it truly offers a very low carbon alternative to gas peakers and helps solve for intermittency. More like this please!
I wonder if it will work in other geographies. Shale drilling doesn't work very well in the UK due to local geology. Hopefully this could work better.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Americans.... (Score:1)
Englishman Humphry Davy, who named the element, spelled aluminum
In short, you are an idiot
Re: Americans.... (Score:2)
"Englishman Humphry Davy, who named the element, spelled aluminum ... "aluminum."
This is outright false. He wanted to call it alumium. Then he started calling it aluminum. Then IUPAC wanted it to be aluminium to make it sound more poncy.
Re: (Score:2)
Then IUPAC wanted it to be aluminium to make it sound more poncy.
Given the IUPAC was founded in 1919 and that whole debate started playing out 100 years earlier, I expect you have an axe to grind against the IUPAC. Anyway here's someone referring to Davey calling it Aluminium a year before he settled on Aluminum, 98 years before the IUPAC was founded.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/c... [hathitrust.org]
There's actual history. No need to make shit up.
Re: (Score:1)
Basic logic clearly isn't your strong suit.
Re: (Score:2)
Whoops! I got triggered there. 99.99% of people get wrong what he said, and they usually do it here on Slashdot.
I'm a little distracted, found out I have to move pretty soon, it's taking up too much of my brain.
Re: (Score:2)
see how its called Petroleum, or Petrol...
not some made up shit like 'gas' or Aluminum
Gas is short for gasoline, which is derived from gasolene which originated in... wait for it.... Britain! In 1863 where it was first marketed under that name. So like Aluminum, football, and many others, it's Britain's fault for changing their damn nouns whilly nilly and more importantly after they started being used in the US, where we couldn't be bothered to care about your flighty whims with names and just stuck with what came over here first.
This sounds like good news to me (Score:1)
"Hot Dry Rock" rebooted? (Score:4, Interesting)
Trying to harness geothermal heat by injecting water has been a dream for 50 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Maybe this time it will work. Maybe this time there won't be any issues with mineralisation of the plumbing. Maybe there won't be any water loss. Maybe this time it will run reliably for decades.
I'd love for this technology to work, but look how far solar and wind have come in the same 50 years. Maybe instead of pumping the water underground, they could use pumped hydro to store solar/wind energy for the dark/calm periods.
Petrol has always been a renewable resource. (Score:3)
Re: Petrol has always been a renewable resource. (Score:3)
Math ? (Score:2)
"Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity," he said. Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig's metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth's natural heat and generate electricity. [...] The project's full output will be 400 megawatts."
Help me out here. If 3 wells = 100 megawatts, why do 24 wells = 400 megawatts?
Are they planning for redundancy? or does it scale really badly? are they cannibalizing their own output?
Re: (Score:1)
maybe a "well pad" is 2 wells
3 well pads is 6 wells for 100
x4
12 well pads is 24 wells for 400
Disclaimer: complete guess, didn't read anything.
Any chance we're speeding the core reversal? (Score:2)
Thought I saw something about the Earth's inner metal core slowing down and about to reverse. Seems like that might cause the magnetic pole reversal people were worried about. That it might impact how electronics work, or impact our protection from radiation? I don't pretend to understand all the details for either situation.
Seems like removing heat from the core, even if a tiny relative amount, might make the core slow down or stop earlier than it would otherwise.