Out on the northern Nevada high desert, a little-known Houston company is developing an energy source that could revolutionize what has been long on promise but short on delivery–turning the intense heat deep below our feet into useful terrestrial heat and electricity. Geothermal energy, carbon dioxide free, 24/7. MIT Technology Review has called it “like a giant underground battery.”
Adapting technology that revolutionized the U.S. oil and gas industry 15 years ago — horizontal, directional drilling — Fervo Energy last year ran a successful pilot project at its Nevada site.
Last week (Feb. 29), Oklahoma-based oil and gas independent Devon Energy led a $224 million funding consortium to invest in Fervo as it moves toward commercial operation. The Devon funding group includes Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. At the same time, the Department of Energy awarded Fervo $25 million.
Fervo explains, “We employ precision directional drilling technology to drill horizontally in geothermal reservoirs. This enables us to drill multiple wells from a single location, dramatically lowering our surface footprint and reducing drilling risks. Horizontal drilling also facilitates greater access to geologies that were previously challenging to reach, increasing the total resource potential for geothermal energy.”
After drilling into the earth’s hot rocks, Fervo then injects water into the wells and lets it sit and get hotter, generate tremendous pressure. When plant operators release the valve holding the water back, it surges out for hours on end.
MIT’s technology review wrote that Fervo’s approach suggests “Fervo can create flexible geothermal power plants, capable of ramping electricity output up or down as needed. Potentially more important, the system can store up energy for hours or even days and deliver it back over similar periods, effectively acting as a giant and very long-lasting battery. That means the plants could shut down production when solar and wind farms are cranking, and provide a rich stream of clean electricity when those sources flag.”
Former oil industry executive and Fervo founder Tim Latimer said, “We know that just generating and selling traditional geothermal is incredibly valuable to the grid, But as time goes on, our ability to be responsive, and ramp up and down and do energy storage, is going to increase in value even more.”
As Fervo moves forward, a Massachusetts startup, Quaise Energy, has landed $40 million in venture capital for demonstration of a deep drilling technology based directly on MIT research. The technology is unconventional, based more on the physics of the so far feckless fusion search rather than Fervo’s adaptation of oil field mechanics.
The Quaise technology using a focused, extremely high-temperature beam, could allow drill bits to dig some 12 miles deep into the earth where temperatures are the greatest. That’s miles, not feet. Superdeep, superhot. According to a Quaise news release, “At these depths, geothermal energy is power-dense, virtually unlimited, and available everywhere on the planet.”
While unconventional in the world of geothermal energy, the basis of Quaise’s deep dive into the earth of is a device used for decades in manufacturing and research, a focused microwave emitter called as “gyrotron.”
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