Fervo Energy hits milestone using oil drilling tech to tap geothermal

Geothermal energy start up Fervo Energy announced a major technical milestone on Tuesday, paving the way for geothermal energy to play a larger role in the transition to clean energy.

Fervo drills deep wells and pumps water into them. The water grows hot from the Earth’s heat, then Fervo pumps it back to the surface, where a turbine converts that heat into electricity.

Fervo has successfully completed a 30-day testconsidered an industry standard for geothermal energy, at its pilot commercial plant in northern Nevada, The company said in a statement. In testing, Fervo drilled down to 7,700 feet and then turned around to drill another 3,250 feet horizontally, reaching internal temperatures of nearly 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

The company said testing at its pilot plant achieved conditions that would generate 3.5 megawatts of electricity. One megawatt is almost enough for electricity Meeting the demand of 750 homes at once.

Fervo has just begun construction of a 400-megawatt project it expects to be online by 2028, which should power about 300,000 homes.

“Fervo’s successful commercial pilot takes the next generation of geothermal technology from the prototype world into the real world and starts us on a path to unlocking the full potential of geothermal energy,” Jesse Jenkinsa large-scale energy systems engineer and professor at Princeton University, said in a written statement.

currently, Most of the geothermal resources are located Near tectonic plate boundaries where magma approaches the Earth’s surface, heating water trapped in the Earth’s near surface. in the United States of America, Geothermal energy supplies only 0.4% of the electricity at present.

Instead of relying on naturally occurring conditions, Fervo uses drilling technology developed by the oil and gas industry with hydraulic fracturing to create reservoirs in rock deep underground.

“By applying drilling technology from the oil and gas industry, we have proven that we can produce carbon-neutral energy resources 24/7 in new geographies around the world.” Tim LatimerFervo Energy CEO, said in a written statement.

When Latimer had the idea of ​​using developments in oil and gas exploration to take advantage of geothermal energy, he encountered great resistance. The only place he found an interested ear was in the geothermal program at Stanford University, where he went to graduate school and In 2017 he co-wrote and published a paper on the subject. That paper was the basis for Fervo Energy, which Latimer launched in 2017 with Jack Norbeckalso from the Stanford University Geothermal Program.

“The past six years have been an amazing journey,” Latimer said on his Twitter thread. “I never expected the amount of uncertainty and trauma we would face over what we thought was such an obvious idea.” “So we set out to systematically prove that this is a truly revolutionary and viable method of producing geothermal energy.”

They’ve already found believers and have raised more than $200 million in investments since then, Latimer said on Twitter.

Google has been a leader in its commitment to running on carbon-neutral energy 24 hours to 7 days by 2030. “Solving climate change is humanity’s next goal,” Google GEO Sundar Pichai said.

To achieve its goal of running on carbon-neutral energy 24 to 7 by 2030, Google had to buy a lot of renewable energy to power all of its power-hungry computing.

in 2021, Google Partnership with Fervo to develop a geothermal project.

Unlike wind and solar power, which are intermittent, geothermal energy is an “always-on” carbon-neutral resource that can reduce our hourly dependence on fossil fuels.” Michael Tyrrell, senior director of energy and climate at Google, wrote in 2021 when the partnership was first announced.

“Achieving our goal of running 24/7 on zero-carbon energy will require new sources of stable clean energy to complement variable renewables such as wind and solar,” he said. Terrell in a statement published Tuesday. “We partnered with Fervo in 2021 because we see great potential for its geothermal technology to unlock a significant 24/7 carbon-free energy source at scale.”

As part of the partnership, Google is developing AI and machine learning systems to improve Fervo’s efficiency, and Fervo is adding clean energy to the grid in Nevada, where Google is a big clean energy customer.

The U.S. Department of Energy has also launched what it calls the Enhanced Geothermal Shot, an effort to reduce the cost of enhanced geothermal energy by 90% to $45 per MWh by 2035. The DOE says it hopes to boost geothermal systems can provide Clean energy to 65 million American homes.

Fervo still has a long way to go from building a pilot plant to mass commercializing geothermal energy, however Wilson Rexwho works in the Jenkins Laboratory at Princeton W Co-author of a paper on the role of geothermal energy in future zero-carbon energy systemsFervo’s technical milestone, he says, is a real milestone.

“This is a very important achievement in the development of improved geothermal energy systems. It is the first application of advanced drilling and well stimulation technologies developed in the shale oil and gas boom to geothermal energy, and has proven that it can be used to create artificial geothermal reservoirs,” Ricks told CNN. NBC said streaming rates are high.”There is still more development to be done on the path to large-scale, cost-competitive commercial systems, but this achievement should not be underestimated.”

This type of improved geothermal systems, like the one Fervo is developing, “can do double duty as a form of long-term energy storage, enhancing their ability to complement wind and solar power in a carbon-neutral grid,” Ricks told CNBC.