Petroleum Drilling Technology Is Now Making Carbon-Free Power (npr.org) 42
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:4, 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:4, 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.
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The semiconductor industry and the solar pv industry used massive amounts of fossil fuels to get where they are today.
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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.
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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.
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Terrible headline really.
The headline correctly says that drilling technology is being repurposed.
It does not say that wells are being repurposed.
Re: Oh the irony (Score:2)
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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
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.
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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
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]
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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)
Smallish (Score:3)
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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.
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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.
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:4, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
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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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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:4, 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"
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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.
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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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
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Heterogenous power mix is best (Score:2)
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 f
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.
"Hot Dry Rock" rebooted? (Score:3)
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:2)
Re: Petrol has always been a renewable resource. (Score:2)