Cheap drilling would be a large boon for geothermal, considering the cost of surveying/exploring/drilling is > 50% of the cost of the development of a geothermal site.
I don't understand the articles goal of 300C target, though. While some types of geothermal plants do require temperatures that high, binary cycle power plants can use lower temperatures (130C) [1], which seems to open up more area for geothermal development since we expect most gradients between the surface and bottom of the crust to be ~2.5-3.1C / 100M. A lower temperature requirement would in turn allow you to drill less deep, which could consequently also decrease drilling costs.
Another thing the article doesn't mention: another interesting approach (aside from improving the technology, like drill bits) is with financing innovation. There have been / are government programs to de-risk the exploration/drilling cost by reimbursing the costs of drilling (80% for failed wells, for example) which also likely adds well data that could better characterize the underlying geothermal resources in regions (which would allow more accurate future development).
Really glad to see a deeper dive on geothermal though; its non-intermittency is a valuable characteristic separating it from other renewables that we're currently favoring (solar/wind). Because we generally break down energy generation to LCOE, it omits advantages like uptime of the renewable resource.
The big breakthrough seems to be making drill bits out of a composite material formed from diamond and tungsten carbide.[1] One of their bits lasted through 25km of drilling. (Not one hole, re-used for multiple shallow holes.) That's encouraging. The geothermal people only need to go down 10km. Being able to do much of the job without backing out the drill string, one pipe section at a time, to change the bit is what seems to yield the cost estimates in the original article.
The next problem is to get everything at the down-hole end up to that level of reliability. Which is why the author talks about seal problems in mud-powered drilling motors. For the geothermal application, they just want to drill straight down, so they don't need all the fancy stuff used for slant and horizontal drilling.
So there remain some grungy, hard, and important problems to solve, like a seal material that will work better at high temperatures. Such things exist.[2]
This is encouraging.
The article points out that this isn't like hunting for oil and gas pockets; if you have roughly the correct overall geology, there will be hot rock down there anywhere you drill. This upsets some financial models, where drilling the first well in a new area is more like a VC-funded high-risk high return project. You're really drilling for the valuable info that oil or gas is there, not for the oil or gas from the exploration well.
Deep geothermal is going to be dull, boring (literally), usually successful, and profitable over a long period but not in the short term. Great for regulated utilities.
The 300 degrees is needed to get enough steam pressure to drive a turbine. You need the temperature gradient basically to get that. It's all about efficiencies. A lower efficiency basically means you need to pump more water through, which means more drilling, which raises the cost.
Heat exchange pumps work with much lower temperature gradients which is great for heating a building or some water since you don't need to drill that deep. But it's not very efficient for generating electricity. There actually are some companies that can use heated water in your boiler as a battery and generate electricity from it but that is more from the point of view of using the energy you are storing anyway instead of letting it cool down. So a lower efficiency is acceptable for that.
The open question mark for geothermal is if the cost of drilling will ever be low enough to compete with solar and wind + batteries. Solar and wind are a lot cheaper per kwh but of course intermittent. There are various ways of fixing that that basically involve using some form of battery. You can think of geothermal as a battery where the fully charged battery simply is our planet. Nice if you can get to it but not necessarily cheap enough compared to other ways to store energy. Getting to it involves expensive drilling projects and operating a lot of plumbing to get energy out of it.
An example of a battery that is pretty cheap is a thermal mass based batteries. It is basically the same material (i.e. rocks) plus some insulator. Given enough mass, you can store quite large amounts of energy for very long and there are some companies starting to do exactly that. Several companies are working on those. It's all going to boil down to cost per kwh in the end. wind and solar converging on about a cent per kwh. Batteries tend to be more expensive but still cheaper than burning gas/coal. Geothermal sits somewhere in between. It could be cheaper in some places long term. But then batteries are also getting cheaper.
My old University powers, heats, and cools itself with Geothermal wells that are at 195F, not sure about the 300C either. (and clears snow/ice from sidewalks and outdoor staaircases) The college also sells extra power to the hospital next door. (it makes around 2MW with a binary cycle plant) https://urbanecologycmu.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/geothermal-...
I think the 300C target is to support the article's assertion that geothermal could replace e.g. nuclear plants. Geothermal for heating can work well with a lower approach temp, but industrial processes/power generation needs a higher differential.
Are ground-source heatpumps considered 'geothermal'?
Its much less sexy than a giant plant connected to a magma stream, but if we made these routine for all new suburban constructions, alongside passivhaus standards, we could eliminate residential fossil fuel connections for huge sections of the Western world.
Like another commenter mentioned, we could even have communal systems for individual streets, drilled beneath roads, to service townhouses and apartment blocks.
You can run the ground-source for heating and cooling, alongside a single wall-mounted air conditioner for dehumidification in the summer.
This is already being done in some countries (e.g., the Netherlands), but it is just a (necessary) part of the puzzle.
The existing housing stock needs solutions too, and installing heat pumps in older terrace housing is far from ideal due to noise pollution, cost, lack of space, and a limit to what can be done in terms of insulation. Geothermal plants can be used to provide district heating, which is a much better fit for certain types of houses.
No, this is totally irrelevant to anything in the article, except in the sense that both pertain to thermal energy and the earth. They have nothing else in common. The difference is not just a matter of sexiness; you can't run a factory, a computer, or a car off a ground-source heat pump, because heat pumps consume energy; they don't produce it.
Yes, in much the same way that passive or thermal (e.g., hot-water) solar designs are a form of solar power.
The principle difference, as others have pointed out, is that when converting heat to mechanical energy, or for electrical generation (mechanical + a generator), efficiency greatly increases as the temperature gradient between the hot and cold ends of the process increases.
There's still a lot of utility from lower-grade heat, for space heating (to about 24C/75F), water (about 60C/140F), and cooking (175C/350F). Even a partial boost can assist with other heating methods.
But for large-scale electrical generation, high temperatures, well above boiling point, are what are needed.
Community thermal energy storage is a thing. That can use either geological formations or specially-constructed insulated structures. Thermal potential may be stored as a hot or cold medium, for heating or cooling.
Geothermal heat pumps are very common in the Nordics. It’s a one day operation, they come in, drill a 150M hole and run a brine loop hooked up to a heat pump. Sorts the heating and hot water for a 180 m2 house above the attic circle with less than 7000 kWh per year.
Geothermal power is based on a heat engine: a machine which produces usable energy (e.g. electricity) out of the transfer of heat from a high-temperature heat source to a low-temperature heat sink (a process which would happen naturally, given a transfer process).
A ground-source heat pump is a heat pump: a machine which consumes usable energy in order to move heat from a LOW-temperature heat source to a HIGH-temperature heat sink (a process which would not occur naturally without energy input due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
Not really. A ground-source heat pump uses the thermally stable ground below a house to heat in the winter and cool in the summer, while a geothermal power plant pumps cool water down a well and then gets hot steam out another connected well to drive turbines.
I'd be more interested in residential heat pumps if there were also heat engines that were feasible at that scale. Seems like it needs to scale up by at least an order of magnitude though, before electricity can be generated efficiently.
I live in Ithaca, and Cornell is about to start drilling a test borehole in the coming year. Once the borehole is completed and some tests made, they'll drill a pair of production boreholes about 10,000ft deep.
The goal is to pump water down one, and extract it from the other borehole and then use a heat exchanger to pull the anticipated 160F to 180F temperature to provide heat to the entirety of the campus.
It's similar to the University's Lake Source Cooling system, which they use the naturally cold water temperature of the local Cayuga lake. At the 250' depth they draw the water in, it's a constant 39F year-round. The cooling system is used to provide chilled water to all the buildings, and a few thousand homes, removing the need for standard air conditioners.
The Lake Source Cooling system has saved the university 20 million Kwh a year, an 85% reduction in power usage, since it was made in 2000. It's hoped that the Earth Source Heat project will have the same kind of impact on the energy necessary for heating.
There are a lot of unknowns. Nobody has drilled a borehole so deep in this area before because there hasn't been a reason to do it before.
Drilling cost is usually estimated for drilling in sedimentary rock with assumptions about how casing is run ;)
It is possible that drilling 30,000' of granite has conditions that make the estimation model irrelevant. 5 km isn't really deep enough, anyway. My next post will cover the thermo. It is pretty dang hard to get down to anything approaching $50/MWh. Definitely need more than cheap drilling.
From the article: Traditional geothermal wells target rare hydrothermal resources
Florida geothermal systems pull cool water from the aquifer, use it for A/C and return it via a 2nd well. They're about the only wells that water management districts will rubberstamp.
Geothermal cooling (in FL) becomes cost efficient above 15k-20k sq ft (based on my 2010s exp). That led me to an idea that neighborhoods could be cooled by small geothermal utilities. I wonder about increased heat energy down the line but I've seen a doz+ chillers work efficiently, from one 4" well. On a larger scale, downstream heat buildup might be mitigated via a more distributed water system.
I'm reminded of this video talking about cooling the London Underground. Since it's running through clay, it's very well insulated and the ground around it is warming year over year.
This is totally irrelevant to anything in the article, except in the sense that both pertain to thermal energy and the earth. They have nothing else in common. You can't run a factory, a computer, or a car off a ground-source heat pump, because heat pumps consume energy; they don't produce it. A seasonal thermal store like what you're talking about is only slightly less irrelevant, because while in theory it could be an energy source, the energy available is orders of magnitude too small.
I am always a bit bearish on geothermal, because the energy flow through the earths crust is just so damn low. Per surface area, it is about 3 orders of magnitude less than solar irradiation, which means that the circumstances in which it really makes sense to exploit geothermal are those where you can effectively harvest flows from a much larger area, most likely due to convection of water or magma. My understanding is that it will never make sense for e.g. every house in a suburban setting to have their own heat probe and pull energy from that, they will be competing with their neighbors and effective energy gained will be negligible.
It’s often less about the heat flow than simply the amount of heat contained in that volume of rock.
For your example: A 1/2 acre home is 2023 m2, 1kg of rock is ~2000j/degrees Celsius, 1 cubic meter of rock is ~2500 kg, down 1k = ~2000 j * 2500 * 2023 * 1000 / 60 / 60 / 1000 ~= 2,800,000 kWh per degC. If you’re talking 1kw of heat on average from that rock you only drop 1 degree after 300 years.
Of course 1km is a fairly deep, but if you’re using a heat pump chances are you’re averaging much less than 1kw over the entire year.
The great thing about geothermal is that it's 24/7 dispatchable without expensive added storage. That would make it a great companion to solar and wind energy in place of natural gas. Even 5-10% of total power on an absolute basis from geothermal could be more valuable than it appears by adding stability to the grid without fossil fuels. Drilling into geothermal would make sense if it were cheaper than adding grid-scale battery storage for nighttime use.
The energy flow from the Earth's core is small in a percentage sense, but keep in mind that humanity's energy use is actually tiny when measured on planetary or cosmic scales. Here's the total solar surface area we'd need, for scale:
Yeah, per-house is probably never going to make sense, but larger scale operations where they can use hydraulic fracturing techniques to expand the surface area could be the solution. They call these Enhanced Geothermal Systems, and basically they frack the rock between two well bores to try to maximize connectivity and surface area.
Technology aside, rollout of such technology in Europe would be sabotated by russkies in the same way shale gas/oil was (sadly successfully). This must be accounted and planned for. Fossil wholesaler of the Siberia does not want you to be gass/oil independant.
Could there be a completely novel way of digging ? Maybe with Laser ? maybe a chemical process ? or a high pressure water cutter ? what if you could cut small block of stone in the hole without using so much energy reducing it to sand ?
I imagine part of the challenge would be undercutting the resulting cylindrical rock (still attached to bedrock at the bottom). Also there's the significant issue of removing the cut rock from 10k feet below ground. This is much easier to do with sand which gets picked up in a mud slurry.
They've tried a lot of these things, if not all of them. A colleague of mine in grad school was working on optimally using flame jets to crack the rock ("thermal spallation drilling").
Anecdotally, I looked into this when building our house, and can confirm - the bulk of costs was drilling, and it was expensive. When I did the math at the time, the cost of ground source heat pump over air source heat pump was several times more. Energy bills would be much less, but the payoff was around 20 years, assuming the unit lasted that long.
This is totally irrelevant to anything in the article, except in the sense that both pertain to thermal energy and the earth. They have nothing else in common. You can't run a factory, a computer, or a car off a ground-source heat pump, because heat pumps consume energy; they don't produce it.
I wonder if Elon Musk would be interested in getting into this area. Granted SpaceX is more exciting -- this would be, comparatively, the boring company.
[+] [-] cdeonier|4 years ago|reply
I don't understand the articles goal of 300C target, though. While some types of geothermal plants do require temperatures that high, binary cycle power plants can use lower temperatures (130C) [1], which seems to open up more area for geothermal development since we expect most gradients between the surface and bottom of the crust to be ~2.5-3.1C / 100M. A lower temperature requirement would in turn allow you to drill less deep, which could consequently also decrease drilling costs.
Another thing the article doesn't mention: another interesting approach (aside from improving the technology, like drill bits) is with financing innovation. There have been / are government programs to de-risk the exploration/drilling cost by reimbursing the costs of drilling (80% for failed wells, for example) which also likely adds well data that could better characterize the underlying geothermal resources in regions (which would allow more accurate future development).
Really glad to see a deeper dive on geothermal though; its non-intermittency is a valuable characteristic separating it from other renewables that we're currently favoring (solar/wind). Because we generally break down energy generation to LCOE, it omits advantages like uptime of the renewable resource.
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/geothermal/electricity-generatio...
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
The big breakthrough seems to be making drill bits out of a composite material formed from diamond and tungsten carbide.[1] One of their bits lasted through 25km of drilling. (Not one hole, re-used for multiple shallow holes.) That's encouraging. The geothermal people only need to go down 10km. Being able to do much of the job without backing out the drill string, one pipe section at a time, to change the bit is what seems to yield the cost estimates in the original article.
The next problem is to get everything at the down-hole end up to that level of reliability. Which is why the author talks about seal problems in mud-powered drilling motors. For the geothermal application, they just want to drill straight down, so they don't need all the fancy stuff used for slant and horizontal drilling.
So there remain some grungy, hard, and important problems to solve, like a seal material that will work better at high temperatures. Such things exist.[2]
This is encouraging.
The article points out that this isn't like hunting for oil and gas pockets; if you have roughly the correct overall geology, there will be hot rock down there anywhere you drill. This upsets some financial models, where drilling the first well in a new area is more like a VC-funded high-risk high return project. You're really drilling for the valuable info that oil or gas is there, not for the oil or gas from the exploration well. Deep geothermal is going to be dull, boring (literally), usually successful, and profitable over a long period but not in the short term. Great for regulated utilities.
[1] https://palmerbit.com/
[2] https://allsealsinc.com/HighTemperatureGaskets.html
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
Heat exchange pumps work with much lower temperature gradients which is great for heating a building or some water since you don't need to drill that deep. But it's not very efficient for generating electricity. There actually are some companies that can use heated water in your boiler as a battery and generate electricity from it but that is more from the point of view of using the energy you are storing anyway instead of letting it cool down. So a lower efficiency is acceptable for that.
The open question mark for geothermal is if the cost of drilling will ever be low enough to compete with solar and wind + batteries. Solar and wind are a lot cheaper per kwh but of course intermittent. There are various ways of fixing that that basically involve using some form of battery. You can think of geothermal as a battery where the fully charged battery simply is our planet. Nice if you can get to it but not necessarily cheap enough compared to other ways to store energy. Getting to it involves expensive drilling projects and operating a lot of plumbing to get energy out of it.
An example of a battery that is pretty cheap is a thermal mass based batteries. It is basically the same material (i.e. rocks) plus some insulator. Given enough mass, you can store quite large amounts of energy for very long and there are some companies starting to do exactly that. Several companies are working on those. It's all going to boil down to cost per kwh in the end. wind and solar converging on about a cent per kwh. Batteries tend to be more expensive but still cheaper than burning gas/coal. Geothermal sits somewhere in between. It could be cheaper in some places long term. But then batteries are also getting cheaper.
[+] [-] briffle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Accujack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Factorium|4 years ago|reply
Its much less sexy than a giant plant connected to a magma stream, but if we made these routine for all new suburban constructions, alongside passivhaus standards, we could eliminate residential fossil fuel connections for huge sections of the Western world.
Like another commenter mentioned, we could even have communal systems for individual streets, drilled beneath roads, to service townhouses and apartment blocks.
You can run the ground-source for heating and cooling, alongside a single wall-mounted air conditioner for dehumidification in the summer.
[+] [-] uuddlrlr|4 years ago|reply
https://www.dlsc.ca/borehole.htm
It gets up to nearly 80C, but took a few years of operation to get there.
The website covers it really well and I'd recommend checking it out.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|4 years ago|reply
The existing housing stock needs solutions too, and installing heat pumps in older terrace housing is far from ideal due to noise pollution, cost, lack of space, and a limit to what can be done in terms of insulation. Geothermal plants can be used to provide district heating, which is a much better fit for certain types of houses.
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
The principle difference, as others have pointed out, is that when converting heat to mechanical energy, or for electrical generation (mechanical + a generator), efficiency greatly increases as the temperature gradient between the hot and cold ends of the process increases.
There's still a lot of utility from lower-grade heat, for space heating (to about 24C/75F), water (about 60C/140F), and cooking (175C/350F). Even a partial boost can assist with other heating methods.
But for large-scale electrical generation, high temperatures, well above boiling point, are what are needed.
Community thermal energy storage is a thing. That can use either geological formations or specially-constructed insulated structures. Thermal potential may be stored as a hot or cold medium, for heating or cooling.
[+] [-] brtkdotse|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HPsquared|4 years ago|reply
A ground-source heat pump is a heat pump: a machine which consumes usable energy in order to move heat from a LOW-temperature heat source to a HIGH-temperature heat sink (a process which would not occur naturally without energy input due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics).
[+] [-] goldenshale|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] generalizations|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turtlebits|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that you need to a dig up a large area of possible natural vegetation to do it.
[+] [-] deftnerd|4 years ago|reply
The goal is to pump water down one, and extract it from the other borehole and then use a heat exchanger to pull the anticipated 160F to 180F temperature to provide heat to the entirety of the campus.
It's similar to the University's Lake Source Cooling system, which they use the naturally cold water temperature of the local Cayuga lake. At the 250' depth they draw the water in, it's a constant 39F year-round. The cooling system is used to provide chilled water to all the buildings, and a few thousand homes, removing the need for standard air conditioners.
The Lake Source Cooling system has saved the university 20 million Kwh a year, an 85% reduction in power usage, since it was made in 2000. It's hoped that the Earth Source Heat project will have the same kind of impact on the energy necessary for heating.
There are a lot of unknowns. Nobody has drilled a borehole so deep in this area before because there hasn't been a reason to do it before.
[1] https://earthsourceheat.cornell.edu [2] https://fcs.cornell.edu/departments/energy-sustainability/ut... [3] https://fcs.cornell.edu/departments/energy-sustainability/ut...
[+] [-] chris_va|4 years ago|reply
So, a 1km geothermal well? Break even, and you are limited to only a few places in the world.
A 5km geothermal well (needed for broad power availability)? 25x the cost...
So, sure, if you can get a 25x cost reduction in an already cutthroat industry, all power to you (no pun intended).
[+] [-] avernon|4 years ago|reply
It is possible that drilling 30,000' of granite has conditions that make the estimation model irrelevant. 5 km isn't really deep enough, anyway. My next post will cover the thermo. It is pretty dang hard to get down to anything approaching $50/MWh. Definitely need more than cheap drilling.
[+] [-] animal_spirits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago|reply
Florida geothermal systems pull cool water from the aquifer, use it for A/C and return it via a 2nd well. They're about the only wells that water management districts will rubberstamp.
Geothermal cooling (in FL) becomes cost efficient above 15k-20k sq ft (based on my 2010s exp). That led me to an idea that neighborhoods could be cooled by small geothermal utilities. I wonder about increased heat energy down the line but I've seen a doz+ chillers work efficiently, from one 4" well. On a larger scale, downstream heat buildup might be mitigated via a more distributed water system.
[+] [-] goda90|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQo6_GkITe0
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
Do Floridians at least install heat-pump pool heater systems indoors so the cold goes indoors?
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phreeza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|4 years ago|reply
For your example: A 1/2 acre home is 2023 m2, 1kg of rock is ~2000j/degrees Celsius, 1 cubic meter of rock is ~2500 kg, down 1k = ~2000 j * 2500 * 2023 * 1000 / 60 / 60 / 1000 ~= 2,800,000 kWh per degC. If you’re talking 1kw of heat on average from that rock you only drop 1 degree after 300 years.
Of course 1km is a fairly deep, but if you’re using a heat pump chances are you’re averaging much less than 1kw over the entire year.
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
The energy flow from the Earth's core is small in a percentage sense, but keep in mind that humanity's energy use is actually tiny when measured on planetary or cosmic scales. Here's the total solar surface area we'd need, for scale:
https://www.axionpower.com/knowledge/power-world-with-solar/
Cover much of New Mexico with solar PV and you could power all of global industrial civilization (ignoring storage).
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
Though usually you’re pumping more heat out of the ground than in. There must be a perfect place for these systems where it’s well balanced.
[+] [-] goldenshale|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stretchwithme|4 years ago|reply
Here's a few answers:
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/2302/can-th...
[+] [-] fouc|4 years ago|reply
i.e. "Is Geothermal Really Going to be a Thing?" https://austinvernon.site/blog/geothermal.html
[+] [-] batushka3|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienfr112|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mNovak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] comicjk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shireboy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new_realist|4 years ago|reply
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