Above, more from my interview with Princeton Engineer Wilson Ricks, recorded prior to the new announcement.
File this in the bulging folder marked “Clean Energy Technology Makes Rapid Strides, beating Predictions”.
Drilling operations at Fervo’s Cape Station show 70% year-over-year reduction in drilling times and pave the way for rapid geothermal deployment
Today at the Stanford Geothermal Workshop, Fervo Energy (“Fervo”) published early drilling results from its Cape Station project that exceed the Department of Energy’s (DOE) expectations for enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). These results substantiate the rapid learning underway in the geothermal industry and signal readiness for continued commercialization.
Fervo began its drilling campaign at Cape Station, its 400 MW project in southwest Utah, in June 2023 and over the last six months has successfully drilled one vertical and six horizontal wells there, rapidly reducing drilling times from well to well as learnings have accelerated. These advancements build on Fervo’s pioneering Project Red, commissioned in 2023, where Fervo drilled one vertical and two horizontal wells.
Fervo has consistently reduced drilling times and costs in horizontal, high-temperature, deep granite drilling. Though Cape wells are hotter and over 2,100 feet deeper than Project Red wells, Fervo drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022. This increase in drilling efficiency has translated into significant cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.
“Since its inception, Fervo has looked to bring a manufacturing mentality to enhanced geothermal development, building a highly repeatable drilling process that allows for continuous improvement and, as a result, lower costs,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy CEO and Co-Founder. “In just six months, we have proven that our technology solutions have led to a dramatic acceleration in forecasted drilling performance. ”
Fervo’s drilling performance to date fits an expected learning rate of 35% for drilling time improvement, portending far more significant advances in performance and cost. This is the latest example that private sector work like Fervo’s Project Cape and pioneering research like DOE-sponsored Utah FORGE are rapidly moving the world of geothermal deployment forward.
“Fervo’s drilling improvements are like the early days of the shale revolution,” said Trey Lowe, Chief Technology Officer of Devon Energy. “When you operate continually and understand the resource, you dramatically streamline operations. That’s the unique value of Fervo’s approach to enhanced geothermal.”
Fervo achieved its results by increasing both the rate of penetration (ROP) and life of drill bits. On the fourth horizontal well drilled at Cape, for example, Fervo sustained an average ROP of 70 feet/hour, already outpacing NREL’s 2035 projections for moderate technology improvement.
Modern oil and gas drilling equipment enabled this performance. Fervo used polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) drill bits typically deployed in shale basins to cut through hard, abrasive granite, while mud coolers counteracted high subsurface temperatures that have historically derailed geothermal exploration. These results underscore the applicability of oil and gas technology to enhanced geothermal.
“We now have the best drilling technology from the petroleum drilling industry. What encourages me now is that we’re starting to learn how to use it in ways that specifically maximize performance,” said Fred Dupriest, Professor of Engineering Practice at Texas A&M University and Former Chief Drilling Engineer at ExxonMobil. “Performance isn’t just what you use, but how you use it. We’re not just achieving technology transfer, but an impressive rate of knowledge transfer in how to use it.”
A little background. While the world has been drilling wells for centuries, and oil and gas drilling performance has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years, geothermal drilling is at higher temperatures, harder rock (granite) and faces many more challenges than O&G.
Because of the harder, hotter drilling conditions, Fervo has faced skeptics for years that O&G drilling tech breakthroughs could move the needle in geothermal. General consensus was that drilling 400F+, deeper, granite wells just wasn’t possible, or would be crazy expensive.
But the prize for ubiquitous, carbon free, reliable geothermal from better drilling is massive, so ARPA-E, the moonshot division of DOE, for example, has funded advanced drilling technology for years.
Given how challenging the environment is, it made big news over the last year as Fervo, as well as research projects like Utah FORGE, began to execute complex, high temperature drilling in granite. “Shattered expectations…62 days ahead of schedule.”
At the 2023 Stanford Geothermal Workshop, Fervo was thrilled to publish our own results, showing successful drilling of a pair of 350F+ temperature, granite, horizontal geothermal wells, and an 18% improvement in drilling times from 71 to 58 days.
Just one year later, at this year’s Stanford Geothermal Workshop, Fervo is excited to announce we aren’t standing still after being a breakthrough of the year last year. We’ve already dropped drilling times 70%, and did it in hotter, deeper wells. This is big.
The cumulative result has led to a 3-5X improvement in performance in just one year across many factors, like lateral granite drilling performance seen here. We’ve increased average bit life 5X and have now demonstrated 70 ft/hr granite drilling over 2,800 feet.
The results of Project Red led us to apply a learning curve of 18% to our drilling times. We received endless skepticism from that claim from the “experts”. But after the first two wells at Cape, we updated it to 25%. Turns out even that is even too conservative…
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