As we reported President Biden and the European Union today announced
plans to enable Europe to become less dependent on Russian oil and
gas. But those efforts will take a lot more money and time to execute.
For now, the Russian invasion has raised much larger questions over
our dependence on fossil fuels.
And the need to develop cleaner renewable energy science correspondent
Miles. O Brien reports on why geothermal energy is attracting new
interest.
Yeah, There's a lot of heat beneath our feet. And that's pretty obvious
here near the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley, and these
are really world renowned mud pots.
That occurred naturally
hot water and carbon dioxide create mini volcanos at the Davis shrimp
mud pots. He's going to come up in different areas. They'll go dormant
and come up somewhere else. They sit right in the middle of one of
the largest geothermal generation fields in the world.
It's renewable, sustainable and carbon free. So exploring new ways
to tap into this resource is now a very hot field. What do we see
in here? So here? We're looking at some of our production wells for
the region. One facility. Billy Thomas is a senior geoscientist at
Berkshire Hathaway's CalEnergy project.
He shall be some of the 25 Wells and 10 power plants, which together
generate 345 megawatts, enough to power more than 300,000 homes.
But he says there are only scratching the subsurface. This field
is a perfect example of field that has a lot of potential. There's
about, you know, 5000 gallons per minute flowing through here. Geothermal
heat comes from the molten core of our planet, which had more than
10,000 degrees Fahrenheit is as hot as the surface of the sun.
As heat radiates up, it gradually cools here. They drilled wells
between 2000 ft and two miles deep, where the temperature is only
about 600 degrees Fahrenheit.
Very salty, very hot water called brine, along with steam race upward,
the steam spins, turbines producing electricity, and the brine is
injected back into the ground where it is reheated by the earth.
Replenishing the reservoir is this
Kind of managed. Well, more or less infinitely sustainable. Yes.
So we've we've had the benefit here of actually operating for you
know some of these fields up to 40 years.
And we really have a very robust reservoir where we don't see a lot
of the decline. So we really have a good system set in place right
now to really make this a sustainable renewable base load energy.
Base load, meaning 24 73 65 steady production that wind and solar
cannot provide.
Geothermal is an emerging dark horse in the race to a stable zero
carbon electrical grid. The last couple decades have seen about a
25% growth worldwide. Geologist Amanda Coker is program manager for
geothermal technologies at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
in Golden, Colorado. That the technology that we're using today
Really hasn't changed substantially. There have been little incremental
kind of optimization improvements. It's a really exciting time because
we are getting a lot more. I think innovative ideas in the geothermal
sector then we have for
Decades, so this area is highly fractured underneath. One of the
surprising innovations. Geothermal wells can also be a great source
of minerals, So we just drilled two wells. Jim Turner is chief operating
officer of the U. S Division of Australia based controlled thermal
resources.
He walked me through the 50 megawatt geothermal power plants The
company is building in the Imperial Valley. The salty brine rising
from the wells contains almost the entire periodic table of elements.
And Turner says the rocketing demand for electric cars has made it
profitable to extract and cell lithium. Do you have any projections
and how much lithium you might be able to produce will produce about
20,000 metric tons a year of lithium product.
That would be about 8% of the global production four times more than
the US provides today. That's a nice bonus, isn't it? It is. It is
a very good bonus In the past. It just didn't have enough value.
To warrant the cost of money to develop, build a plant and operate
it
to be able to sell the lithium compounds. The rock beneath is naturally
fractured and permeable. This is the end of the famous San Andreas
fault.
The types of resources that you need to produce power or not available
everywhere within drill a ble depths.
At this stage, not economic to produce steam from extremely deep
wells. But that could be changing at the forge project in Utah. Here,
the Department of Energy is piloting a technique called Enhanced
geothermal Systems, or E. G s.
The plan is to drill too deep wells into low permeable hot rock,
fracture the rock in between the wells to create a reservoir and
then pump water into the cracks. It returns to the surface piping
hot.
The notion is making for some strange bedfellows. Oil and gas industry
veterans are now drilling for hot rock instead of black gold. What
we want to prove is a single, well. E G s system. Petroleum engineer
Cindy Taf is a 35 year veteran of the oil business.
Now she is chief operating officer of Houston based Sage Geosystems.
The company is hoping to reduce the cost of E. G s.
Near McAllen, Texas. They're testing a single well alternative for
harvesting heat from hot, dry rock.
They drilled down and then horizontally from here, fracturing the
sedimentary rock in between.
Cold water is pumped down through the cracks. Now hot enough to generate
power. The water heads up to the turbine in a concentric pipe in
the very same well.
The oil and gas industry has fracked sedimentary rock for years,
and we know how to mitigate induced seismicity. And quite frankly,
the rock is so soft, you usually don't get to do seismicity and sedimentary
rock. Still, the well is ringed by seismic monitoring sites.
Geothermal fracking has triggered earthquakes in the past this one
in South Korea in 2017 made news, causing 135 injuries.
We don't need stimulation for most geothermal where we do do stimulation.
I think we can, you know, be smart about avoiding zones of seismic
risk.
The sale. Fracking boom has driven a lot of innovation in the drilling
business. In Houston, a small company called particle Drilling is
partnering with a big player and ov
To help push drilling technology into a geothermal era
bit. They're developing fires, 12 million ball bearings a minute
out of four nozzles.
Jim Schiller is CEO of Particle.
Little obliterates Iraq. What you get out is very fine cuttings and
everyone wanted a bigger piece. What we envisioned was always at
3 to 5 Times improvement.
As we've combined our bits between interview and particle overseeing
that Tony Pink is chief technology officer of N O. V. He says it
costs about $100,000 a day to run a typical drilling rig.
We're at that tipping point. And so if we can take the particle drilling
technology or drill bit technology and make that jump from 60 ft
an hour to 8200. Then we moved that economic needle that you get
geothermal anywhere.
Geothermal anywhere. It's an enticing prospect.
The path to zero carbon may well take us on a journey toward the
center of the Earth.