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“Geothermal is really ready for prime time,” says founder and CEO Tim Latimer. EGS initialization fervo.

The appeal of geothermal is all about consistency: while electricity production from wind and solar power plants varies with the weather and time of day, geothermal power is always on and provides a stable supply of electricity.

“It’s really the only baseload that’s renewable,” says Jody Robins, a geothermal engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Nuclear power (which is carbon-free but not renewable) can serve a similar role, although cost, waste-related issues, and public perception have limited its use.

Modern geothermal power plants have been operating in the USA since the 1970s. These facilities usually pump hot water or steam from underground to the surface to drive a turbine and generate electricity. The water is then pumped back to maintain pressure underground so the process can continue.

Prime geothermal fields share certain characteristics: heat, cracked rock and water, all close together and several miles from the surface. But so far the most accessible geothermal resources (in the US, they are concentrated largely in the west) have been used. It’s hard to find where they are, although researchers think there are many potential places yet to be found. And in most of the eastern US and many other parts of the world, the rock underground isn’t the right kind for traditional plants to work, or the water isn’t there.

Some researchers and startups are trying to spread geothermal to new places. With EGS, they’re trying to engineer what’s underground by pumping liquid into impermeable rocks to force cracks to open. This creates a space where the water can move freely and heat up, producing the steam needed for power. The process has the potential to trigger earthquakes, as with early projects. South Korea and Switzerland seen. That said, Robins says EGS is similar to fracking prevalent across the US and the risks are manageable in most locations.

This approach could extend geothermal to places that do not have the groundwater or rock types required for traditional plants.

However, accessing these resources will not be easy. Commercial drilling usually goes no deeper than seven kilometers (four miles) – often even less than that for cost reasons – and many places that could benefit from geothermal are not hot enough to reach 150°C at that depth. necessary to economically generate electricity. Reaching adequate temperatures may mean going deeper, requiring new techniques and technologies that can withstand high heat and pressure.

Fervo is working on some of these details in his own projects. announced earlier this year with Google to install geothermal capacity near the company’s data centers in Nevada. He was also recently involved in a DOE project in central Utah. TATTOO (Front Observatory for Geothermal Energy Research).

Academic and industry researchers at FORGE are trying to find best practices for deploying EGS, including drilling and reservoir maintenance. It was chosen because the area’s geology well represents places in the US where other EGS facilities could be established, said Lauren Boyd, EGS Program Manager in DOE’s Office of Geothermal Technologies.

With the new funding from the infrastructure bill, DOE will fund four additional showrooms. This will broaden researchers’ understanding of setting up EGS facilities as they can work in different locations and with different types of rocks. At least one plant will be built in the eastern US, where geothermal is less common.

But Susan Hamm, director of the DOE’s Office of Geothermal Technologies, says technological barriers aren’t the only things slowing the progress of geothermal energy. Building a geothermal power plant can take up to ten years due to all the permits involved. Streamlining this paperwork could almost halve that time and double the projected geothermal capacity by 2050.