Geothermal Ahead of Schedule
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My interest in PDC bits and the advancements in drilling related to how much simpler it would be to add fiber to the metro area by drilling horizontally 500' below street level (essentially no obstructions). The missing link there is lining the drill tube dynamically and going horizontally through water (for example) is not straight forward.
I suppose once you decide to do something more than shallow trenching, then the marginal cost of additional vertical feet is fairly minor, but even in, say, NYC it seems like 500’ is way, way more buffer than you’d need in the worst case scenario (I have a vague recollection that the very deepest subway line is around 200’ underground, and that’s primarily due to a specific quirk of geography - a hill surrounded by two valleys).
http://www.classichistory.net/archives/nyc-bedrock (see graph. note; unit is meter)
I could certainly be wrong in my assumptions (hence my question!). But it still seems to me like it would be way more efficient to drill much shallower conduits in (what I assume is) the 99.999% of geography not covered by skyscrapers (and to either go deep or continue to go targeted in the remaining fraction).
These ones in fact:
https://www.google.com/maps/@56.4618615,-2.9545922,3a,75y,26...
Each pile was as about as high as the building. They pushed one in first and it went in like it was going through butter — literally seconds. They then stuck a second one directly on top which went in relatively easily. They then spent a thumping eternity putting a third one in on top of the other two. They repeated this process for days.
So, that little building is resting on piles around 2-3 times its height.
Ancedote: My neighborhood in Lousiana was a land-filled swamp. Building a single story house there required driving dozens of pylons in to keep the house from sinking into the dirt. When we put a pool into the backyard, it had to be partially filled with water while the concrete was still hardening because otherwise the surrounding water table (something like two feet below the surface) would have popped it out of the ground.
This is probably less of a concern on, say, the Colorado Plateau.
I think you probably just can't safely fully drain it.
Florida aquifer drills are >400' to reach 65° (year round) water. Temps get really static at that level.
This would definitely not be enough in, say, NYC. Grand Central Station is 150 feet below street level, for example. The Oculus is about 80 feet below street level. Things are deeper than they might first appear!
In many regions, the existing rock is hot enough but there isn’t enough permeability for fluid to flow through the hot rock. Through wells drilled deep underground, EGS injects fluid to create fractures, causing the permeability needed for electricity generation.
That raises a whole host of environmental concerns, particularly with regard to the high volume use of fresh water in places where it is scarce, and the impact of toxic high-pressure fracturing fluid on aquifers.
Both are issues that have plagued communities where oil and gas fracturing takes place.
This is correct.
> the high volume use of fresh water in places where it is scarce, and the impact of toxic high-pressure fracturing fluid on aquifers
Petrochemical fracking constantly creates new fractures to unlock new seams; extracted resources don't replenish.
Geothermal energy is different. You can stimulate once, then circulate and recapture; the heat one extracts renews itself. ("The produced fluid was pumped through a series of holding tanks to provide the residence time for the water to cool sufficiently and was ultimately recirculated for injection," though it was supplemented with "saline brine sourced from a nearby groundwater well.")
Fundamentally, it has the capacity to be almost endlessly cleaner than its oil and gas counterpart.
I guess I just would like to understand some of the externalities to this particular methodology. Especially since many of the parallels to oil and gas fracking are present, and the environmental track record there is poor.
I would too. Their white paper devotes an entire section to induced seismicity. There is less attention paid to steady-state water requirements. (Given it's just water and brine, and assuming natural prop pants, the threat to the water table seems de minimus, barring something nasty dissolving out of the rocks.)
Except twice as many wells, and less isolated geology.
Also, benefits of fracking is the generation of heat and positive pressure from the chemical reactions.
If they aren't netting the geothermal gains against the embedded energy in the injection chemicals, all we're seeing is energy accounting tricks, not a technical breakthrough.
[0] There are volcanic areas where the heat flux is substantially (~5-10x) higher, but they are few in number, generally far from population centers, and creating geologic instability in close proximity to a volcano carries its own risk. Viable in places like Iceland but not generally.
[1] Eventually of course you would wind up fracking the same total area, but it would take centuries to millenia, by which point you've probably either switched to a better power source or learned to deal with the issues of fracking.
There are some concerns about micro earthquakes and other disturbances if it's done near towns.
It seems like not using fracking, and just making several vertical lined bore holes might be better anyway though. In the best case you don't need any active pumps to drive the loop, so it can be much simpler.
I'm interested in learning more about this. Could you share the source from which you learned this?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity_in_Basel
I'd rate those as valid informed decisions.
The stress on 'informed' is because it many countries it's rare for industry to be open (or forced to be open) with the wider public and rare for the wider public to have an effective say in such decisions.
The team believes they can increase "the power capacity up to 8 MW of electric power per production well" and unlock economies of scale "because multiple wells can be drilled from a single pad location," which gains from "minimizing in-field rig moves, reducing drilling risk by drilling closely spaced vertical well sections, co-locating surface facilities infrastructure, and minimizing pipeline costs."
Notably, "the rate and pressure responses between Injection Well 34A-22 and Production Well 34-22 were strongly correlated, with changes in one well causing a rapid response in the offset well typically on the order of minutes to tens of minutes." That means dispatchable generation.
>An average marginal oil well in the United States produces about 2 barrels/day. Approximately 80 percent of all American oil wells are marginal wells, but they provide about 10-20 percent of American oil production. Approximately two-thirds of all American natural gas wells are marginal wells, averaging about 22 mcfd and providing 12 percent of American natural gas production
https://www.ipaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/IPAAComments...
Uranium and Thorium decomposes into Radium, which themselves are found at 450m but the gas then rises through the Earths crust as it moves. I could see this kind of constant agitation releasing significantly more at least within a radius.
In particular because there's no actual competition between geothermal power and the petrochemical industry: oil is far and away a transportation fuel (and a bunch of other vital things), whereas stationary power is coal-generation.
If they can take drilling expertise and turn it into a geothermal power concern cost efficiently, then they'll do that.
at best, egs and other geothermal is free fuel to power a heat engine, but even if the drilling and fracking and whatnot costs zero dollars it is difficult for thermal energy to reach parity with current pv
plausibly, future developments in manufacturing could do it, which is appealing because the geothermal resource is orders of magnitude larger than the terrestrial solar resource, but those developments can also make pv cheaper
also, of course, pv is much less competitive in places like antarctica, england, or germany due to low capacity factor and long outages
right now, though, new thermal power projects are relatively scarce
And in many parts of the world, it would not be competing with PV at all during many days of winter, when cloud cover and incidence angle are so bad PV goes into single digit percentage of its peak output. Because then even batteries won't save PV.
It sounds like they are doing injection, which is similar to what Bottle Rock is doing in the Calistoga mountains.
The real benefit I am hoping for is being able to revitalize the hot springs industry with soaking opportunities becoming more prevalent where they were not previously viable.
I know secrecy like this is par for the course in fracking, but it would certainly help them escape the stigma of fracking if they broke the taboo and started talking clearly about what crap they are pumping down into the ground. I think if they said, "we put this much of this stuff down the hole", it would help to understand what the risks are.
For more information about what might be in their fracking liquid, see: https://petrowiki.spe.org/Fracturing_fluids_and_additives#Fr...
The friction reducers are often "anionic copolymers".
For more information about how the friction reducer polymer degrades in the environment, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-018-0016-8/#Sec5
I would like to know more about this. Is an expert can chime in with better references than these, I'd be grateful to read them.
It's closer to closed than open.
"The produced fluid was pumped through a series of holding tanks to provide the residence time for the water to cool sufficiently and was ultimately recirculated for injection" [1]. They did add "saline brine sourced from a nearby groundwater well," but presumably the system stabilizes at some point.
Sources in French:
https://farside.link/https://twitter.com/TimMLatimer/status/...
to use a random (functional) Nitter instance. Helps spread traffic around a little more evenly.
The real prize is deep geothermal (20km+), giving 500C+ temps. That can operate almost anywhere, and be much more efficient to run.
"At $5B ITER is a good idea. At $25B+ ITER is a bad idea. The huge cost increases from ITER’s initial to present value are leading to a savaging of the base fusion program which puts the US on the fast track to disaster for the future of fusion research. More important, even if ITER works as expected, but does indeed cost $25B, this is essentially a proof of principle that tokamak fusion will never be an economical source of electricity." -- Jeff Freidberg, KEPCO Professor Emeritus, MIT, Nuclear Science and Engineering
While I do not disagree that it will be a ways off, never is a very long time. And the last century has seen so many things turn profitable, with scientific advances, presumption about the future seems inadvisable.
I mean I can envisage solar being as cheap as dirt, roof shingles that are basically as cheap as slates. I can envisage geothermal getting cheap, it's just a hole in the ground. I can envisage fission getting cheap, eg the traveling-wave reactor is basically an enclosed lump of uranium.
But rings of superconducting magnets and their controllers, along with radioactive lithium blankets that have to be renewed and reprocessed regularly, or gigajoule banks of lasers and little ultra-precision gold-wrapped fuel pellets? None of this stuff is ever going to be cheap, compared to the alternatives.
It might find niche military, and of course, research use etc. And we might have a breakthrough in low-energy fusion or whatever, but the current crop are either scams or are simply never going to be viable.
Are you familiar with how computer chips are made? There are hundreds of steps involving plasmas, ultra-high vacuums, ultraviolet lithography systems, and robotic handling throughout. And yet you can get a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W for $15.
That much processing power would have cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in the early 90s, when I imagine someone might naively have said something similar about the prospects of it ever costing $15.
Or suppose suggesting after Kitty Hawk in 1903 that one day an international plane ticket could be had for (the equivalent of today's) ~$1000: preposterous, if they can even get it to work!
Of course, nobody really knows how this will shake out. You could ultimately be correct that fusion won't ever be cost-competitive with other sources of energy. But "that sounds complicated" is absolutely not a reliable heuristic for price, because over time complicated things become mundane, and whence mundane, cheap.
You have to do the actual engineering before you'll know whether or not a thing is viable, and you're likely to find some surprises - i.e. a lot of advanced capability these days has become possible due to things like cheap, fast computing power or ubiquitous high-accuracy GPS systems (differential GPS can get ridiculously accurate).
In contrast there are myriad other ways of making electricity that will be much cheaper than fusion ever will. IMHO.
I get what you're saying, never say never, etc, and fusion research is still worthwhile, as research, but there is just no economic case to spend billions to develop these current technologies for mainstream power generation.
If there's some major breakthrough in LENR, or muon-catalysed reactions, or whatever, that might be different.
Many technologies are only enabled as spin-offs from other tech, and there are plenty of examples of technologies that seem possible/plausible etc, but get cut off in development when it's clear the economics can't work or the unique capabilities are not compelling enough.
https://observatorial.com/news/economy/89010/fortum-exits-ot...
Turned out that water really did not pass well from one hole to next one at those depths. Which was requirement to get operative temperatures.
So things seems more complicated than expected. And the time taken to drill is rather long.
One way being researched is to use microwaves: https://www.quaise.energy/
It's probably a better use of 'fusion technology' than actual fusion.
How does one throttle a geothermal plant? Are these geothermal plants operating turbines, and thus are throttled by redirecting steam away from the turbines?
It’s the exact same URL.
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On the costs front, in 2022, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced the Enhanced Geothermal Shot, a target to reduce the cost of EGS by 90% to $45 per megawatt hour by 2035. Fervo’s costs for the Nevada project are “significantly higher” than that target, Latimer said, in part because it’s a first-of-a-kind project, but he said he expects next year’s EGS cost forecast to “decline rapidly.”
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