DOE to invest up to $165M to advance domestic geothermal energy
energy.gov
energy.gov
His geothermal patent can be seen here [0] - it's a novel approach to vary the extent of power extracted from a geothermal well, while preventing the necessity to acquire both water rights AND mineral rights (commonly one of the biggest hurdles in "residential" geothermal deployments). The root of the patent is a novel means of "sealing" a geothermal well, providing bidirectional flow to and from the well.
His background is pretty interesting - he was a construction engineer by trade, but initially made his first fortune by speculating and purchasing land use options on corn-fields in Iowa. Turned out his guess was right, and DOE purchased some of his land to grow corn for ethanol production.
[0] - https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/20/12/43/9c15aaf...
But nowadays, anything that needs a steam turbine is going to be more costly to operate than wind or solar + cheap storage, because steam turbines need expensive periodic maintenance.
(Geothermal heating, or for extra credit heating and cooling, remains viable.)
If you want to rescue geothermal power generation, you need to put in the engineering work to make a viable alternative to the steam turbine, one that needs a lot less, or anyway a lot cheaper, maintenance. Presumably it is still a turbine, but designed for a different working fluid. Some have suggested supercritical CO2 for this role.
It seems to me the costs would be high because doing anything deep underground is expensive.
https://www.science.org/content/article/thermal-batteries-co...
UPDATE: Papers about geothermal source temperatures refer to tempratures up to 180°C. The thermal battery article above refer to TPV setups that use 1400°C source and efforts are being made to push temps to 2400°C for higher efficiency.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/geothermal-...
Since the climate there swings between extremes, this significantly lessened their electric/gas bills to the point of being laughably small...essentially a heat pump connected to the water tubes, if I remember.
Unfortunately, they require either a very large area to dig very shallow, or they require drilling down very deep, or they require a pond.
I got quotes for the drilling once, and it was prohibitively expensive.
But, I share the concerns about corporate welfare and capture.
Apparently too many have forgotten that these companies knew well in advance where there product was taking us. They intentionally over years if not decades hid that from us. We know this. And yet we still trust them? And even want to reward them?
But if might as well be Since we are fools...
A summary of this publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03601-4
Seems like the perfect candidate for $165 million in DOE research funding.
>The Geothermal Energy from Oil and Gas Demonstrated Engineering (GEODE) initiative will provide $10 million to form a consortium of experts to develop a roadmap for addressing technology and knowledge gaps in geothermal energy, based on best practices used within the oil and gas industry. DOE will then use that roadmap to fund up to an additional $155 million in research to address those gaps. This funding opportunity supports President Biden’s priorities to deploy clean energy sources to combat climate change, strengthen our energy independence, and create good-paying jobs.
Recently, I heard about this relatively new company named Quaise: https://newatlas.com/energy/quaise-deep-geothermal-millimete...
And I thought that the technology seemed quite interesting, so I hope the development of it can pan out since it seemed like it would enable greater usage of geothermal energy around the world, which seems to be mostly untapped at this time, and also seemed like it might be able to address the seismic issue/concern, although I'm not an expert on the topic so I could be wrong there.
Geothermal is mainly a topic of interest for myself since there are a few local plants in my own region but I hadn't really realized that it is an underutilized power generation option until I read the article on Quaise recently above.