On the twelfth of April twenty-twenty three, an independent energy industry
think tank called Ember published this in-depth analysis of the global energy
market. The study found that the amount of fossil fuel used around the world will be
lower this year than it was last year. That’s a very simple sentence for me to say, but it
carries huge significance. It’s the first time, outside of a worldwide recession or a pandemic,
that global fossil fuel use has ever reduced year on year, and the study’s authors suggest
it could mark a genuine tipping point in the transition to renewable energy.
Solar and wind, plus nuclear and hydropower produced thirty-nine percent of global electricity
in twenty-twenty two, making last year the cleanest energy production year on record.
But thirty-nine percent isn’t a hundred percent is it. It’s generally agreed that nuclear
and hydropower are both extremely limited for various socioeconomic and geographical reasons,
and of course wind and solar are intermittent, as our friends in the fossil fuel industry are
keen to remind us at every opportunity. If only mother nature had provided us with
an alternative natural source of energy that was a bit more...you know…constant. Well of course,
nature has provided us with that energy source. It's right beneath our feet in every part of
the planet. And no, it's not fossil fuels. It's the effectively infinite supply of heat in the
earth’s crust that we call geothermal energy. The problem is we’re just not very good at getting at
it. Current technologies are only economically viable in areas of high volcanic activity or
where there are breaches in the earth’s tectonic plates, like Iceland. As a result, geothermal
energy currently only accounts for about one percent of total global electricity generation.
But buckle up people! Because all that could be about to change!
Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think, It’s reckoned that heat contained in the first ten
kilometres of our crust contains fifty thousand times more energy than all of the world’s natural
gas and oil resources combined. The challenge so far has been how to get at it in any kind
of economically viable way. There are currently two main ways of extracting thermal energy. The
first is to locate an underground aquifer full of hot water and devise a way to bring that hot water
back up to the surface, just like we do with oil and gas. The trouble is, as I mentioned earlier,
the geological conditions for this kind of simple extraction just don’t exist in many parts of the
world, so the whole thing is extremely limited in its scalability. Enhanced Geothermal Systems or
EGS are a way of reaching less accessible pockets of water by opening up natural rock fractures to
create underground reservoirs of water in a process that is not all that dissimilar
to fracking. But there’s no guarantee that the costly drilling operations will succeed. When
the pressurized fluid is pumped in, it might not open enough decent fractures to make the project
economically viable. Plus, the fluid can be contaminated by minerals like quartz and limestone
in the rock formation, causing scaling and fouling that can lead to failures in components like pumps
and heat exchangers. That, in turn, can lead to expensive delays that can make a project unviable.
The alternative is to forget about finding naturally occurring pockets of water and
instead drill boreholes deep into rock formations anywhere on the planet, send your own fluid down a
network of closed pipes, and allow heat from the rocks to radiate into that fluid before
bringing it back up to the surface again. It’s a technology currently being commercialised by
a Canadian company called Eavor, and I caught up with their Chief Technology Officer, Matt Toews
via Zoom recently to get a better understanding of how it all works. Our system operates on a natural
thermal syphon, and its driven basically just by the density difference between cold water in
the inlet well and hot water in the outlet well. That drives a pressure difference.
And that exists in all forms of geothermal, but in our system because we just have a
network of pipes, we’re not forcing water to squeeze through cracks and porosity in rock.
It’s just a network of pipes. Its more than enough to circulate at our required flow rates for the
whole life of the project. And so that removes some of the classical challenges in traditional
geothermal approach, like the cost of installing the pump, maintaining the pump and the parasitic
power demand to run the pump. Those are some of the highest operating costs and account for a huge
portion of the levelised costs over a lifetime of regular geothermal, which are simply eliminated
in our design. So rather than relying on… some systems rely on passing through hot water and
getting the heat from the hot water and shoving that back up to the surface, you’re actually,
effectively radiating heat into your tubes and then that heat gets sent back up to the surface.
Correct, yeah. So, we just circulate water through a network of closed well bores, and
it’s a radial conductive heat transfer. So, the heat is being extracted slowly from the rock
over time in this kind of radial fashion away from each well bore. So, in your thermodynamics video
it says “there is a well- defined predictable thermal gradient in the rock that enables an Eavor
Loop system to operate for thirty years.” So am I right in interpreting that that after 30 years
that thermal gradient has diminished somewhat so that that particular installation isn’t going to
be as effective as it was at the start? Our system has all these multilateral wells and what happens
is you extract heat via conduction and there’s an expanding radius where you’ve taken heat out
of. And eventually those radii interfere, or they ‘meet’ the adjacent well bores. And we
designed that so that happens after 30 years. It doesn’t mean that the system just stops
producing but you get an increased decline in the energy output of about 0.2% per year.
So, the system will still produce energy for a hundred years, two hundred years, maybe longer.
So, one of the virtues of your system I guess is that it could potentially
provide what we hear a lot about in the news today, which is this need for baseload power,
or some people call it dispatchable baseload power can you just talk to
that need for dispatchable baseload power and how your system addresses that need?
Our system has basically two markets, or solves two problems. One of them is heat, which is,
you know fifty percent of energy used in Northern Europe and fifty percent of CO2 emissions.
And then the other one is, as you put it dispatchable… we call it flexible… or
baseload power. So flexible means that our system can actually ramp up and down. And that’s actually
a very needed feature in energy systems now rather than just baseload. So, baseload, meaning
flat continuous operation, that’s kind of dead in the market. The markets don’t need that. What you
need is to be able to pair with intermittent renewables and be able to ramp up and down
as required, which is what our system allows. And you‘ve got a couple of demonstration projects up
and running, is that right? We designed and built successfully two demonstrations one of them – we
call it Eavor-Lite. It’s in Western Alberta. And that is proof of concept. It’s a loop with two
multilateral heat exchange passes. And to put that into context, our commercial designs have twelve,
so it’s a scaled down version of our commercial design. And it was designed
and built to demonstrate three things – That we can drill and intersect the well bores
down a hole; that we can seal them with a chemical sealant without using a casing; and that we can
validate the thermodynamics, you know, that we can predict the thermal output of this, which is the
revenue side of course, and that we can predict that reliably and accurately for a long time. And
we checked all those boxes. And that was built in 2019 and it’s been operating exactly as predicted
ever since. Then we did another demonstration last year in 2022, and that was to test some drilling
technology associated with our ambitions to go deeper and hotter and place these heat exchangers,
these loops, deeper and hotter over time in hard, basement, granitic type rock. And that
was also successful in checking off the technical boxes we wanted to check for the drilling side.
And then the plan is to go out to the commercial world and find sites by definition there are far
fewer limitations to where these things can be situated? Our whole business plan relies on
two features of the system. One is that we’re not searching for a resource, we’re not searching
for an aquifer. We’re not creating a reservoir down there with stimulation technologies, we’re
just … so we can go onto pretty much any rock type and any geography. It’s very geographically
scalable. And the other feature of it is that it’s very predictable and reliable both on a day by day
and annual basis. And so, our commercialisation strategy is to start in the two markets,
which are basically the district heating market in Europe and the power market in the west of the US.
In Europe there’s a lot of existing district heating networks that are
fed by fossil fuels and so we just have to replace that centralised boiler, essentially.
And a single one of our loops can heat 16,000 to 20,000 homes. And then in terms of just getting
the finance up and running and the contracts in place for these systems, I mean we need...it would
be lovely to think we could have thousands and thousands of these all over the world. I did hear
recently John Redfern the company’s CEO talking about a little bit of a frustration with getting
institutional finance in place in the US and actually the company’s ended up with a couple
of the investors being BP and Chevron which, to the layman’s ear, is a little bit ironic. Whereas
in Europe I think there’s ninety-one million Euros coming from the European Union to get you started.
So, is that something that you’re seeing as a difference in attitude between Europe and the
States, or North America and Europe, and has the IRA made a difference to that in North America?
Yeah, absolutely I think the IRA…until the advent of the IRA there wasn’t a lot of large-scale
commercialisation capital available from government in North America. Whereas in Europe,
I mean we received the ninety-one-million Euro award from the European Commission,
and they’re putting out billions of dollars annually, specifically for
this stage of the development process, this commercialisation and demonstration, you know,
first commercial projects. That’s the hardest one to finance. After that it’s easy to finance.
But that’s the hardest one to finance and that’s where I think the EU has really taken the lead.
You know, we’re at a really exciting stage now. We’ve de-risked all the technology, we’re
building our first commercial project, funded partly as you mentioned by the European Union.
And then after that project is up and running, which will be next year, then
we expand massively into our two markets. We have a huge project pipeline. We have over
two hundred projects in our project pipeline, and about eight of those are at an advanced or
more advanced stage that we’re doing engineering and contract work on, and so we’ll be expanding
through that. We want to sell this technology and that’s the only way to scale it up very
quickly so, we’re looking to partner with all different manner of energy firms, utilities and
oil and gas companies as they face the energy transition. Our technology allows them to use
their skillsets and what they’re best at in a new avenue. All of them are looking at geothermal and
it is a needed requirement in the universe of policies and technologies for energy transition.
There is a need for geothermal and it can scale up massively, and I think the time is now.
I’ve said many times on this channel that while politicians and lobbying groups waste valuable
time squabbling about the climate emergency, scientists and engineers all over the world
are quietly getting on with the job of developing technologies that can actually solve the problems
that are facing us in the twenty-first century. The Eavor Loop design is arguably a prime example,
and if it's implemented to its full potential then this system could become a lynch pin in
the green transition. The question is – do you share my optimism, or do you
foresee challenges that we haven’t addressed in today’s video? Either way, the place to leave
your thoughts is in the comments section below, and I’ll be very interested to hear your views.
That’s it for this week though. Don’t forget to book your tickets for the Fully Charged LIVE
events in Farnborough from the 28th April and Harrogate from the 19th May. I’ll be having a
one to one fireside chat with Robert Lewellyn on Saturday the 129th April and I’ll be appearing
on discussion panels at both events. And you can get twenty percent off the cost of tickets with
this special discount voucher exclusively for views of the Just Have a Think channel.
Hopefully see you there. Thanks, as always to our amazing supporters over at Patreon
who allow me to keep the channel free of ads and sponsorship messages. You can join them,
and have your say on channel content in monthly polls by visiting patreon.com/justhaveathink.
And of course you can hugely support the channel absolutely for free by subscribing and hitting
that like button. Thanks to everyone who hit the subscribe button after last week’s video by
the way. We’re getting ever closer to that half million subscriber mark, so we really need your
help to get us there. It doesn’t cost you a penny and it’s dead easy to do. If you’re watching on a
PC, tablet or smartphone, then you just need to click down there or on that icon there,
and you will have my eternal gratitude! As always, thanks very much for watching,
have a great week, and remember to just have a think. See you next week