Drill, Baby, Drill’ Is the Future

Typically, the temperature rises about 25 degrees Celsius for every kilometer, or 75 degrees Fahrenheit for each mile, and more the deeper you go. The steam wafting out of hot springs in Yellowstone National Park or Iceland, places where the Earth’s crust is thin, shows how much heat the mantle gives off.

The trick is to get a large enough surface area to do the heat exchange. A typical vertical oil well might have 1,000 to 10,000 square feet of surface area. But it turns out that the same thing that’s been perfected over the past 30 years to make America energy independent can also increase that surface area—horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

I called one of the industry pioneers, University of Texas engineer Mukul Sharma, who is sometimes called the Frack King (get it?) and has a startup named Geothermix that develops enhanced geothermal systems.

Mr. Sharma thinks we’ll have several commercially viable deep geothermal systems operating in the next five years, maybe costing $10 million to $15 million each

So why are so few talking about deep geothermal? Eco-warriors seem to pine only for solar panels, carbon sinks and bird-slicing wind turbines. Maybe because anything having to do with drilling is considered dirty, even if deep geothermal is carbon-free. The knock on enhanced geothermal systems is the same as for fracking: Critics go on about the risk of seismic activity. But according to Mr. Sharma, that’s a canard. He says seismic activity from fracking wells is “fairly uncommon” and would be even less so with deep geothermal, because the wells are much deeper and you’re merely “circulating fluids” after the initial drilling to create the underground hot reservoir.

Thanks for posting the archive link so I could read the entire WSJ arrival. I am clunky with the archive stuff. LOL…

I started to post in some detail but fortunately, a comment by Stever at the article summed it up nicely, Sloppy research and writing. WSJ should pull the article rather than have such inaccurate info on their pages.

All that said, I do like geothermal energy at commercial and residential scales. These two applications are at opposite ends of the complexity scale.

I haves only had first hand exposure to commercial geothermal one time and this was at a geothermal power plant in the Salton Sea area of California. On paper, the unit operations are pretty much the same as a natural gas or coal generating plant except the geothermal plant does not have boilers. That plant “mined” hot brine under pressure then flashed it to steam to drive turbines. Devil is in the details. The inorganic contaminants in the brine are corrosive and scale surfaces heavily so expensive scale and corrosion inhibitor additives are required along with very expensive metallurgy.

For residential use, things are simpler. Trench the backyard to lay in a racetrack pattern of polypropylene pipe that is a closed loop to a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger replaces the fan and coils on the home's heat pump. One of the commenters at the WSJ article said he has a 30yo system using pumped water from the lake at his backyard - This would work fine as well if you have a lake in the back yard.

I’ve been involved in various medium to large scale geothermal plants over the years. Down to the last one of them have corrosion and mineral problems. Most of the issues negate the draw of the project. Without incentives and tax breaks i wonder if any are economically viable. It would have to be creative accounting.

For residential, it makes sense, the initial cost of the system is expensive.

Government doesn’t want homes to be energy efficient. If they were, then they wouldn’t be tied to the grid for utilities, and that make people independent. Big brother doesn’t want that to happen.

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