How fracking technology could fuel a clean energy boom

From our partner Life on Earth: public radio environmental news magazinePaloma Beltran’s interview with Jamie Beard, founder of the InnerSpace project, which aims to launch geothermal energy production.

The Earth’s crust contains abundant reserves of heat, which can be converted into electricity using geothermal technologies.

Until now, geothermal energy production has been largely limited to volcanic areas such as Iceland, where this heat is readily available. However, advances in deep drilling technology have revolutionized the field worldwide.

In 2006, research conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for National Laboratories pointed to the enormous potential for harnessing this deep-sea geothermal energy as a permanent renewable energy source that some say could be a game-changer for the climate. And the Interior Department recently gave the green light to a massive Fervo Energy project in Utah that would produce up to 2 gigawatts, enough to power more than 2 million homes.

Jamie Beard is the founder of the InnerSpace project, which aims to jump-start the development of geothermal energy using oil and gas drilling expertise. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PALOMA BELTRAN: How would you describe the current state of geothermal energy in the United States?

JAMIE BIRD: The current state is really impressive. Geothermal energy has been pretty sleepy in the United States and frankly around the world because geothermal energy is geographically limited in where you can use it in a hydrothermal sense, but also simply because there wasn’t a lot of understanding about geothermal energy and the possibilities it represents. Because of this, there hasn’t been much investment in this space. There weren’t many interested parties willing to take on the projects.

The situation is changing rapidly in the United States, where there are now many stakeholders interested in developing geothermal projects. Technology companies are pursuing geothermal energy, wanting to produce geothermal energy to power data centers, and there is now a lot of interest from the oil and gas industry in geothermal energy. We have entered a period of geothermal energy renaissance in the United States and around the world.

BELTRAN: Where do you see the potential for geothermal energy in our energy landscape, especially when it comes to the idea of ​​baseload power?

BEARD: Most people know that when it comes to solar and wind activity, they are fickle. They are not always on.

BELTRAN: To be clear, this is not geothermal energy from your mother’s backyard used to heat and cool the house. How deep are we talking about next generation geothermal energy here?

BEARD: If you’re familiar with geothermal energy, you’re probably very familiar with geothermal heating and cooling for homes, and it’s already known. Many people have what are called small-scale or direct-use geothermal heating and cooling systems, and they are great. We should definitely expand this space too. But that’s not what we’re talking about when we talk about next-generation geothermal energy.

We’re talking about drilling for geothermal energy at depths at least as deep as we drill for oil and gas today, namely 10,000 and 30,000 feet. Ultimately, if we want to continue to develop, geothermal energy will have to penetrate very deep and very hot resources. But at the depths we’re accustomed to drilling in the oil and gas industry, there is a huge amount of geothermal energy that can be developed. So let’s take them first; these are the low hanging fruits we need to strive for.

BELTRAN: Since this system involves deep drilling similar to that used in oil and gas extraction, what opportunities do you see for involving the fossil fuel industry in the clean energy transition?

BIRD: The biggest opportunity we have right now in geothermal is to leverage the capabilities, technology and workforce of the oil and gas industry. And also the global scale of the oil and gas industry.

As we strive to find climate solutions quickly and produce clean energy quickly, the oil and gas industry may well be the golden ticket to this because they already have a highly skilled and trained workforce that knows how to drill. It’s just a matter of devoting most of the manpower, energy and technology that comes from the oil and gas industry to drilling for heat rather than extracting oil and gas. So, huge opportunities; Frankly, it’s maddening.

Geothermal energy currently accounts for 1% of global energy demand. But if the oil and gas industry got involved in geothermal energy and really got into it, and we started drilling geothermal wells at the same rate that we’re drilling oil and gas wells now, that would now be about 70,000 oil and gas wells worldwide . If we did the same with geothermal energy by, say, 2050, geothermal energy could supply almost 80% of the world’s electricity demand and more than 100% of the world’s heat demand. It’s huge. This is a huge potential impact, but it depends 100% on how much the oil and gas industry actually helps grow and scale technology in the coming decades.

BELTRAN: For people who are not familiar with geothermal technology, is it related to fossil fuels?

BEARD: With any energy technology, when you drill or build a power plant or produce, you will use energy to build that power plant or implement that energy project. So unless we electrify everything, geothermal will probably produce some carbon emissions because we’ll have to build power plants.

But geothermal energy, once developed and producing electricity, will use the Earth’s heat to produce clean electricity and clean heat. Thus, it is a virtually carbon-free, clean energy source.

Now, some next-generation geothermal concepts actually borrow hydraulic fracturing, or hydraulic fracturing, technology from the oil and gas industry. This is a technique where you apply pressure to the hole to create more space in the rock. You split rocks to open up pore space in them. And if you take that technology from the oil and gas industry and bring it to geothermal, you leave the oil and gas part behind and just use that technology to help the geothermal system perform better.

BELTRAN: What gives you confidence that we can scale this technology?

BIRD: My answer is the shale boom. If people remember 15 or so years ago, when… the natural gas boom – what the oil and gas industry calls “unconventional technologies” – hadn’t happened yet, and people were talking about how we had reached peak oil and gas, everything was going downhill . Here.

And then suddenly, within a decade, there was what we colloquially call the shale boom—a massive explosion of technological development, massive advances in oil fields and natural gas technologies. We’ve gone from talking about peak oil and gas production to the US becoming the world’s leading producer of natural gas and oil. This happened within a decade.

If we look at this transformation – the massive geopolitical transformation in the energy landscape over the course of a decade – and we look at the ability of the oil and gas industry to translate all of this energy and speed into geothermal energy, it’s a really exciting prospect. We talk about the next shale boom, but it’s not gas or oil, it’s geothermal energy. We’ve done this before. We can do this again.