Thank You, Exxon. Finally Some Drilling We Can Get Behind
When you do something a lot, you get better at it. 20 years of advanced drilling practice has made Oil majors pretty good at doing just that. Maybe they are good for something.
A new class of start-ups is investing in the industry, as is the U.S. Energy Department, which estimatesthere’s enough energy in the rocks below the surface to power the entire country five times over. And much of the research and development needed for the new geothermal technologies is already done, thanks in large part to recent advances by the oil and gas industry — including fracking.
How’s that for irony? At the end of the day, it might be techniques developed by Big Oil that ultimately help make fossil fuels obsolete.
Drilling, but not for oil
Over the past 20 years, fossil fuel companies have gotten very, very good at drilling.
“It’s something that climate people never like to talk about,” Brad told me. “But the cost of drilling has gone down. The oil and gas industry has drilled thousands and thousands of wells and every time they get a little better.”
By using new techniques like horizontal drilling, fiber-optics and magnetic sensing, some experts think it might be possible to tap into geothermal energy almost anywhere on earth.
“The thing that made me think that this could be real is the fact that the major costs of these geothermal projects often is drilling,” Brad said. “And drilling is not something we have to learn to do from scratch. Drilling is something the United States has just gotten incredibly good at.”
In his article, Brad spoke with Tim Latimer, the co-founder of Fervo Energy, which is using an old oil rig from North Dakota and fracking techniques — similar to those used for oil and gas — to crack open dry, hot rock and inject water into the fractures, creating artificial geothermal reservoirs.
“There’s a virtually unlimited resource down there if we can get at it,” Latimer said. “Geothermal doesn’t use much land, it doesn’t produce emissions, it can complement wind and solar power. Everyone who looks into it gets obsessed with it.”
Obstacles ahead
The industry is facing plenty of challenges.
Investors are still cautious about putting too much money into an industry that has not proven the ability to scale. Permitting for the projects is difficult. Underground geology is complicated. Federal support for the industry pales in comparison to its support for fossil fuels and other sources of clean energy. Drilling for geothermal energy can create some of the same problems as drilling for gas: sucking up water and causing earthquakes.
Still, the urgent need to find new sources of clean energy combined with the advances in drilling are creating a moment for geothermal. Fervo said last month that it had achieved a key milestone at a pilot plant, and it is building a large-scale facility that would power 300,000 homes. Another geothermal start-up, Eavor, is now drilling wells for its first commercial plant in Germany to provide heat and power for the country, which is trying to sharply reduce its reliance on gas.
“The fact that people are building things makes me feel like this is a little less pie in the sky than other technologies,” Brad told me. “But there’s still a long way to go from demonstrating that this is possible to actually making it a widespread reality.”
