First in a series of posts on ‘How to Short Circuit predator Capitalism’s Race to Oblivion’
from thefreeonline on 1st Oct 2023 by Loz Blain at New Atlas / and thefreeonline / Fervo Energy/ GA Drilling/ Quaise Energy
Introduction:
Fervo is using a cheap and clever variation on horizontal fracking techniques to get super heated water instead of gas or oil, without resorting to the new Deep Geothermal technologies now being developed. *see articles below.
Though fracking often poisons the aquifer Fervo’s fracking wells for electricity will hopefully be less toxic , long term, and in their hundreds, unlike the millions of often abandoned, leaking toxic gas and oil frack wells in the US.
Fervo has won the race with big companies like GA Drilling, Quaise and Nabors for the first easily copiable geothermal well and could spark a flood of endless clean CO2-free energy from the extensive US drilling industry..
Fervo CEO Tim Latimer, center, talks with Interior Department official Laura Daniel Davis, left, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox at the Cape Station site on September 25, 2023. (Fervo)
All these companies are however given to ‘Spin’ and boasting to boost their shares, until now we thought new technology was necessary to drill to at least 1o,000 meters and reach the hot dry rocks to super heat water.
So it remains to be confirmed whether Fervo’s brilliant innovations really result in water super heated enough to run power stations..
But it does show that Geothermal ANYWHERE is really arriving, and fast, and could partly undermine the whole basis of geopolitical war (unless they destroy civilization first in a nuclear exchange).
Semi redundant Coal, Oil and Gas Power Stations will probably be able to plug in to Deep Geo’s free and endless energy from wells drilled just next door- causing a mega sabotage of predator capitalism, meanwhile cheap Geo Energy from horizontal fracking has already begun.
discussion – Probable /Possible outcomes of ‘Geo-Energy Revolution‘
- Oil and gas are the lifeblood of Capitalist oppression and looting of the planet, receiving an incredible 7 Trillion $ in 2022 of various subsidies a year. Geothermal Anywhere means all countries and societies might hire the technology and in theory free themselves from debt blackmail slavery.
- CO2 releases could take a massive hit, leading to a possible cascade of financial and social changes that could even stall Climate Change and environmental collapse.
- Locally produced power might in theory be produced by citizens cooperatives and use only fraction of generation and transmission costs.
- Reality is likely to be different. Fervo comes from the Texas oil mafia, HQ in Houston. Already it has contracts to sell power from its upcoming Utah plant direct go Google.
- Fervo’s Geothermal energy from fracking, as opposed to ‘Deep Geo’, is not non-toxic, the water pumped in will hold the patented chemical fracking brew, that has contaminated the aquifer across the US, with over a million abandoned or leaking wells and tailings dams. Fervo says that frack wells will be fewer because semi permanent, and “much less lethal” for the aquifer , and that close monitoring will “avoid fracking earthquakes”.
- Electric vehicles, ships, planes,and all appliances might be enormously boosted, reducing air pollution as well as heat trapping gases.
- States like Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia etc which use oil and gas for revenue and bullying power politics might be forced to change their ways.
- Combined with other possibly imminent revolutions cheap Deep Geo energy might slow down life and revitalize local communities, economies and culture worldwide. (see following posts in this series.)
- But the opposite seems more likely- Unless a benevolent state like China should adopt Deep Geothermal Energy and distribute plants via its web to the developing world.- Led by the Texas fracking mafia the Geo-Revolution will , despite being more climate friendly, more likely be another ‘feeding frenzy’ of insane waste, decadence, over-consumption and ecocide, aimed only to make the US ‘great’ again.
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September 2023– Fervo Energy breaks ground on next-generation 4ooMW geothermal plant
The startup’s planned 400-megawatt facility in Beaver County, Utah will use “enhanced geothermal” technology to harness hard-to-reach heat sources.
In Beaver County, Utah, a 38-megawatt power plant surrounded by bubbling mud pools and hissing steam vents has generated electricity for nearly 40 years using underground hot-water reservoirs. Most of America’s existing geothermal plants operate in similar ways: by tapping into heat sources that lie relatively close to the surface.
Three miles away, however, construction is underway on a new kind of geothermal plant — one that doesn’t require the presence of hot springs or geysers to deliver carbon-free energy to the grid. Instead, the project developed by Fervo Energy is using powerful drills to reach over a mile down and create horizontal fracked galleries with various drilled exit points to access a more abundant form of subterranean heat.
Fervo says it uses large heat exchangers so that (in principle) the steam from below ground transfers its heat before being pumped as water back into the wells to be heated again. This in principle avoids a major source of contamination and steam escape.
On Monday, the Houston-based startup held a groundbreaking ceremony for its “enhanced geothermal” project in western Utah, which is expected to create 400 megawatts of 24/7 electricity when it reaches full-scale production in 2028. Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) and officials from the U.S. Interior Department attended the event, where they called for accelerating production of the largely underutilized renewable resource.
Fervo Energy is developing Cape Station, a multi-phase geothermal project located in Beaver County, Utah,
Fervo began drilling in Beaver County in July and is now working on the third of what will become 100 geothermal fracking wells drilled on public lands for the Utah power plant. If completed as planned, the Cape Station project could become the world’s largest geothermal facility to use next-generation technologies.
comment… Fervo’s innovative use of horizontal fracking WORKS NOW but has drawbacks compared to the DEEP geothermal being developed by GA Drilling and Quaise. For example: temperatures reached are ‘only a fraction’, it’s not suitable for placing anywhere, many wells are needed, toxic chemicals and fracking can destroy the aquifer, earthquakes can be caused…
July 2023— Fervo heralds a revolution in geothermal power technology
In July 2023 Fervo’s first commercial pilot plant confirmed at 3.5 MW of production, setting new flow and power records for enhanced geothermal power.
Fervo’s “next-generation geothermal” technology proved itself in testing, becoming the most productive enhanced geothermal plant in history. The company hopes its approach will radically expand access to clean energy, like shale did for oil.
Already in October 2023 Fervo began work on a whole series of over 100 replica wells in Utah and aims to increase from 3,5MW to 400MW
There’s a near-unlimited amount of clean energy under our feet, in the form of hot rocks. You can generate clean electricity 24/7 – not intermittently, like solar and wind – if you can get water down into that rock and back to the surface to drive steam turbines. A reliable source like this would make the clean energy transition much smoother.
But as we’ve written many times before, there are only limited places where geothermal power currently makes economic sense – places like Iceland and New Zealand, for example, where the heat is close to the surface, easily accessible, and the site is close enough to a grid connection to make it worth exploiting.
This, and the fact that some 40% of all geothermal wells don’t end up working out, has put the brakes on hot rocks as a power source. According to IRENA, geothermal contributes about half of one percent of global renewable energy, and a vanishingly tiny slice of overall global energy production.
One very exciting way around this has been proposed by Quaise, which plans to re-power old coal-fired stations by drilling deeper into the Earth’s crust than ever before using technology from the nascent fusion industry. But this may take some time to come to fruition.
Fervo’s solution is a bit more down-to-Earth, as it were, and draws on much more established, high-volume machinery and techniques from oil and gas production. Essentially, Fervo aims to do for geothermal what shale oil and fracking did for hydrocarbons, radically improving access to resources and unlocking energy where previously it was too expensive to get to.
A typical geothermal plant attempts to identify areas of highly fractured, highly permeable and high-temperature rocks, then sinks a vertical water injection bore on one side of this area, and a steam recovery bore on the other, hoping that the water will go through the hot rocks, then be picked up on the other side as steam.
But since this often fails to produce a useful flow of steam, Fervo has developed a technique to take all the guesswork out. It uses horizontal drilling techniques to create long, horizontal channels through the rock, then injects pressurized fluid to fracture the rock, creating large areas of high permeability. This “enhanced geothermal” approach, it says, delivers much more reliable results.
So instead of a vertically drilled geothermal resource with only a small point of contact at either end, Fervo creates long, custom-fractured resources, with water pumped in at many points along a pipe that might extend thousands of feet across, and recovered at just as many points via one or more long, horizontal steam recovery pipes.
The result, says the company, is that you get more steam, more power, and a much better chance of striking hot rock gold than with traditional approaches. And that should make geothermal economically viable in a ton more locations – potentially, just about anywhere.
Fervo’s first full-scale commercial pilot, Project Red in Nevada, is the first time a geothermal project has ever drilled a horizontal pair of bores, extending some 3,250 ft (990 m) laterally. It has now completed a 30-day well test, producing a flow rate of 63 liters per second, at temperatures up to 191 °C (376 °F). It produces 3.4 megawatts of power, or about enough to power 500 US homes.
“By applying drilling technology from the oil and gas industry, we have proven that we can produce 24/7 carbon-free energy resources in new geographies across the world,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy CEO and Co-Founder, in a press release. “The incredible results we share today are the product of many years of dedicated work and commitment from Fervo employees and industry partners, especially Google.”
The company’s next project will produce twice as much energy, but the end goal here is to get geothermal into the realm of mass manufacturing, where sheer volume can drive down costs on one side and rapid learning can improve results at every stage of the process to drive things down even further.
In a 2020 lecture to students at the Energy Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Latimer spelled out a three-stage commercialization plan, starting out with expanding production at existing geothermal plants to the tune of ~200 megawatts, then graduating to deeper resources adjacent to those existing plants, which could unlock as much as 2 gigawatts of production.
We live on a bit that fell off the sun. Just 20kms down the rocks are at 500 C. With ‘deep-geo’ we could drill down, pump in water and use superheated steam for free electricity lasting millions of years.
Finally, with some runs on the board, the company believes it’ll have driven costs down low enough to explore completely new resources at depths as low as 4.5 km (2.8 miles) below the surface. That could get this tech into the hundreds of gigawatts, and a significant contribution to firming up renewables-based power grids.
The company is well-funded, with some $187 million raised according to Crunchbase. So it’s certainly got an opportunity to make a difference. We look forward to learning more about Fervo’s progress.
Source: Fervo EnergyView gallery – 3 images
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July 2023 – Geothermal Anywhere Update: ‘Walking’ Anchor and Plasma Drill bring cheap, green ‘Deep-Geo’ energy closer
from thefreeonline on 1st Oct 2023 by Loz Blain at New Atlas first published June 07, 2023
GA Drilling has demonstrated its Anchorbit technology, a walking anchor system designed to stabilize and accelerate super-deep drilling
Slovakia’s GA Drilling has demonstrated a pair of new technologies it says could unlock geothermal power generation more or less anywhere on the planet. Anchorbit and Plasmabit promise much faster and cheaper drilling into hot rock 10 km (6 miles) underground.
The intense heat under the Earth’s surface represents a virtually inexhaustible source of reliable clean energy that would be available 24/7 from anywhere on Earth – you could pull it up as steam to run generator turbines, or pipe it directly into district heating systems.
That’s if we could get to it. Earth’s most easily accessible geothermal energy is located wherever it’s closest to the surface – typically, geologically unstable areas near volcanos and lots of seismic activity, representing only about 3% of the Earth’s surface. Otherwise, you can’t get to that heat without drilling down through mile upon mile of super-hard rock.
The temperatures and pressures involved in super-deep drilling destroy even the highest-quality drill bits in short order. Changing a bit out means you have to haul the drill head back up from miles underground, put a new one on, then get it right back down the bore before you can start again. This process wastes a lot of time, and time is money when you’re hiring these kinds of rigs.
As a result, geothermal energy really only makes a significant contribution to the power grid in places like Iceland, El Salvador, New Zealand and other areas where it’s available at shallower depths. Globally, geothermal contributes very little to the 166.7 million-odd GWh global electricity supply.
Slovakian company GA Drilling was formerly known as Geothermal Anywhere – and that’s a perfect encapsulation of the company’s goal: to make geothermal heat much cheaper, quicker and easier to access wherever it’s needed.
GA has developed two key technologies that work in with existing drilling infrastructure and equipment. The first is a walking anchor system it calls Anchorbit.
The Anchorbit system places two collar sections behind the drill bit, each with extendable pistons capable of pushing out and gripping onto the bore shaft. When the upper collar grips the bore, the lower one extends downward closer to the drill bit, and then it pops out its gripping pistons to allow the upper collar to let go, and slide down to meet it. The process is illustrated in this video:
ANCHORBIT®
These anchor collars stabilize the drill bit, preventing the kinds of vibrations you get when operating rotating drill equipment at the end of many miles of cable. They also allow extra weight to be pressed down on the bit. GA says it expects the Anchorbit system should not only double the rate of penetration through tough rock, it’ll also double the lifespan of existing drill bits, allowing operators to drill faster for longer, with fewer costly bit changes required.
Anchorbit will accelerate the first 6-odd kilometers (3.7 miles) of drilling, but GA’s target depth for geothermal heat is more like 10 km (6.2 miles) underground. To reach this level, the company’s second key technology, Plasmabit, will be brought out.
The Plasmabit system can again be connected to a standard drilling rig. But this time, it’s a pulse plasma drilling system, which uses a rotating electric arc torch to blast rock with ionized gas at 6,000 °C (10,800 °F) to crack and weaken it, while also blasting it with high-pressure water to mechanically remove chips of rock and send them back up the rotating pipe to the surface.
It’s basically a long-distance version of the kind of plasma torch tunneling being done closer to the surface by companies like Petra and Earthgrid. https://www.youtube.com/embed/9QhyTpubz8Q?enablejsapi=1
Neulogy Ventures Presents GA Drilling Cut
Since it’s a no-contact drill bit, there should basically never be a need to pull up and replace the bit.
GA says it’ll make relatively easy progress though the hard granite down to the 10-km mark, going significantly deeper and cheaper than a normal rig, and cauterizing the bore as it goes.
At that depth, you can expect temperatures over 350 °C (662 °F) in most areas, making your bore relevant as a geothermal power plant.
If you want to go much deeper than that, some far more exotic technology is required. MIT spinoff Quaise is attempting to drill to twice that depth using gyrotrons that were originally developed to superheat plasmas in fusion experiments.
Getting to 20 km (12.4 miles) deep, says Quaise, would give you temperatures over 500 °C (932 °F), well past the point at which water becomes a supercritical fluid – and power plants using supercritically heated water should be able to extract up to 10 times as much energy from a given volume.
Quaise plans to do this right underneath old coal and gas-fired power stations as they’re retired, replacing fossil-fueled heat with clean geothermal, but taking advantage of the existing turbines, grid connections and other infrastructure that would otherwise be stranded when the plants close down.
Meanwhile, GA has just conducted the first “public demonstration” of its Anchorbit system at a Nabors technology center in Houston. We’re not sure how public a demonstration of a super-deep drill system can really be, and indeed GA isn’t commenting at this point on exactly how deep it went in this demo, or whether it did what it says on the tin in terms of penetration rate and bit lifespan.
“For several years, our team worked relentlessly to enable clean, baseload geothermal power in any place of the world,” says GA Drilling CEO and founder Igor Kocis in a press release. “We are thrilled that today we demonstrated in a real well a significant achievement: the successful use of our first Anchorbit tool, applicable to today’s geothermal projects. It will improve their returns, reduce the risk, and help the current industry to expand projects into new territories. We are starting a new era for our company and for the whole geothermal sector to become a decisive player in the energy mix. With this breakthrough, we have made another big step toward delivering our promise of ‘Geothermal Anywhere.'”
These are some neat technologies, but we’re looking forward to seeing how they work in the real world. If GA’s drilling advances can truly put cost-competitive geothermal power plants more or less anywhere you want one, this tech could make a huge contribution to global energy production and the race to zero carbon emissions by 2050. And if Quaise hits its targets, the results could be even more significant.
Source: GA Drilling
Loz has been one of our most versatile contributors since 2007, and has since proven himself as a photographer, videographer, presenter, producer and podcast engineer, as well as a senior features writer. Joining the team as a motorcycle specialist, he’s covered just about everything for New Atlas, concentrating lately on eVTOLs, hydrogen, energy, aviation, audiovisual, weird stuff and things that go fast.
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