Fervo Energy hits milestone using oil drilling tech to tap geothermal

geothermal start thermal energy A key technological milestone was announced Tuesday, paving the way for geothermal energy to play a bigger role in the transition to clean energy.

Fervo drills deep wells and pumps water into them. The water is warmed by the heat of the earth, then Fervo pumps it back to the surface, where turbines convert the heat into electricity.

Fervo successfully completed the 30-day testA commercial pilot plant in northern Nevada, considered the industry standard for geothermal, The company said in a statement. In the test, Fervo drilled down to 7,700 feet, then turned horizontal and drilled another 3,250 feet, with internal temperatures reaching about 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

The company said tests at its pilot plant met the conditions to generate 3.5 megawatts.A megawatt of electricity is roughly enough Simultaneously meet the needs of 750 households.

Fervo has just started construction on a 400-megawatt project that is expected to come online in 2028 and power some 300,000 homes.

“Fervo’s successful commercial pilot brings next-generation geothermal technology from the model realm into the real world, putting us on the path to unlocking the full potential of geothermal,” jesse jenkinsa macro energy systems engineer and professor at Princeton University, said in a written statement.

Now, Most geothermal energy resources are located in Near tectonic plate boundaries, magma approaches the Earth’s surface, heating water on the nearby Earth’s surface. In the U.S, Geothermal energy currently supplies only 0.4% of electricity.

Fervo does not rely on natural conditions, but uses drilling techniques and hydraulic fracturing techniques developed by the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs in rock deep underground.

“By applying drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry, we have demonstrated that we can produce 24/7 carbon-free energy resources in new regions around the world,” Tim LatimerCEO of Fervo Energy said in a written statement.

When Latimer first came up with the idea of ​​harnessing advances in oil and gas drilling to exploit geothermal energy, he ran into a lot of resistance. What he found interesting was the geothermal program at Stanford University, where he was a graduate student, Co-authored and published a paper on the topic in 2017.This paper was the basis for Latimer’s launch of Fervo Energy in 2017 jack nobeckalso from the Stanford Geothermal Project.

“The past six years have been a long journey. I never anticipated how much skepticism and resistance we would receive for ideas we thought were obvious,” Latimer said in his Twitter thread. “So we set out to systematically Proving that this is a truly revolutionary and viable way to harness geothermal heat.”

They did find believers, though, and have raised more than $200 million in investment, Latimer said on Twitter.

Google is committed to using 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. “Tackling climate change is humanity’s next big moonshot”. Google GEO Sundar Pichai said.

To meet its goal of using carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030, Google must buy large amounts of renewable energy to power all of its energy-consuming computing processes.

2021, Google Partnership with Fervo to develop geothermal power projects.

Unlike intermittent wind and solar power, geothermal energy is an “always on” carbon-free resource that can reduce our hourly dependence on fossil fuels. By Michael Terrell, Senior Director of Energy and Climate at Google, in 2021 When the partnership was first announced.

“Achieving our goal of using 24/7 carbon-free energy will require new stable, clean sources of energy to complement variable renewables such as wind and solar,” In a statement released Tuesday, Terrell. “We partnered with Fervo in 2021 because we saw the enormous potential for their geothermal technology to unlock a critical source of 24/7 carbon-free energy at scale.”

As part of the partnership, Google is developing artificial intelligence and machine learning systems to improve the efficiency of Fervo, which is adding clean energy to Nevada’s grid, and Google is a large clean energy customer in the state.

The US Department of Energy has also launched what it calls the Enhanced Geothermal Energy Project, which aims to reduce the cost of enhanced geothermal energy by 90 percent to $45 per megawatt-hour by 2035. The Energy Department says it wants to boost the cost of geothermal energy.Geothermal systems have the potential to provide clean energy 65 million American households.

Fervo has a long way to go from building a pilot plant to commercializing geothermal energy on a large scale, but wilson rickswho works in the Jenkins lab at Princeton University Co-authored a paper on the role of geothermal energy in a future decarbonized energy systemindicating that Fervo’s technological milestone is a real one.

“This is a very important milestone in the development of enhanced geothermal systems. It is the first time that advanced drilling and stimulation techniques developed during the shale oil and gas boom have been applied to geothermal and demonstrates that these techniques can be used to create artificial geothermal reservoirs that provide high flow rates,” said Rick S told CNBC. “More work remains to be done on the path to large-scale and cost-competitive commercial systems, but the importance of this achievement should not be underestimated.”

Ricks told CNBC that such enhanced geothermal energy systems, like the one being developed by Fervo, “could play a dual role as a form of long-term energy storage, enhancing its ability to supplement wind and solar in a decarbonized grid.” “.