FRACKING BY ANY OTHER NAME
The Rise of Geothermal Power Networks
- Governments worldwide are increasingly interested in geothermal energy as a clean, renewable source of heating and electricity.
- The UK and US have significant untapped geothermal resources that could be developed to power communities and support decarbonization efforts.
- Geothermal power networks, which distribute heat from underground reservoirs, are emerging as a promising solution for sustainable energy.
As governments rapidly search for ways to accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels to renewable alternatives, there could be huge potential for developing natural geothermal resources underground. Investing in networked geothermal power could provide abundant clean heating and electricity for millions of households and businesses worldwide. Although countries with abundant geothermal resources have been tapping into the natural power source for thousands of years, governments have only recently funded greater research into the use of advanced geothermal systems aimed at expanding the use of the energy source.
Geothermal energy is a type of renewable energy that comes from the Earth’s core. Energy can be extracted from the thermal sources stored in rocks and fluids several miles below the Earth’s surface. Underground geothermal reservoirs of steam and hot water can be used for electricity generation and other heating and cooling applications in rich geothermal regions. Accessing geothermal energy requires the drilling of a borehole at a depth of between two and three miles underground, flowing cold water at low pressures through hot rocks, and transporting the warm water to the Earth’s surface through a second borehole for use as heating or for electricity generation.
In the U.K., a 2023 report suggested there is significant potential for the development of the country’s geothermal resources to provide clean heating and electricity. The report highlights several regions of untapped geothermal energy in the U.K., which could be developed to provide networked geothermal power. Many of these areas happen to coincide with towns and cities included in the government’s Levelling Up White Paper, which lists several deprived parts of the U.K. that require greater attention and investment. These areas include Redcar and Cleveland, Middlesbrough, East Lindsey, Hartlepool, Northumberland and Bassetlaw. Other areas of potential for geothermal energy production include Newcastle upon Tyne, Northeast Derbyshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire and Nottingham.
The MP Kieran Mullan, who managed the production of the report, said there was a “strong overlap” between areas where investment is required and the best geothermal locations, which could encourage greater support for renewable energy development in these areas. Mullan stated of the potential to tap into the U.K.’s geothermal resources, “Unlike wind or solar this technology provides baseload – it is there constantly. And our expertise in drilling in the North Sea means we are well placed to motor ahead.”
The U.K. has vast amounts of untapped geothermal power, with enough geothermal energy underground to heat every home for a hundred years, according to estimates. However, Mullen emphasised that there is “catching up to do because across Europe there has been much stronger government intervention to support nascent deep geothermal industries in those countries.”
The U.S. is also looking to tap into the natural energy stored underground through investment in new technologies to tap into geothermal resources and distribute the power. Earlier this year, Eversource Energy commissioned the first networked geothermal neighbourhood in the U.S. to be run by a utility, in Framingham, Massachusetts. There is great optimism around the potential for project expansion, as much of the equipment needed to tap into geothermal sources is already in place. Utilities can use gas line equipment to deploy networked geothermal power, circulating fluid rather than gas., with the potential to set up networks anywhere.
Audrey Schulman, the executive director of the nonprofit climate-solutions incubator HEETlabs, stated, “In the end, what we would like is if the gas utilities become thermal utilities.” Eversource is using a geothermal loop in Framingham, which could ultimately be connected to an adjacent neighbourhood and another, to expand the network. Schulman explained, “Each individual, shared loop can be interconnected, like Lego blocks, to grow bigger and bigger.”
While a shift to geothermal power may have seemed impossible just a few years ago, there is growing pressure from the White House for utilities to decarbonise. Last year, New York became the first state to ban natural gas hookups in most new buildings. This ban is expected to be rolled out in several other states in the coming years, including California, Vermont and Colorado. This gives utilities little choice other than to look for clean heating alternatives. There is also a wide range of incentives, provided by the Inflation Reduction Act and other climate policies, to invest in renewable energy and clean technologies. Eversource Energy and two dozen other utilities, which together represent 47 percent of the country’s natural gas customers, are joining forces to establish an information-sharing coalition, known as the Utility Networked Geothermal Collaborative, which is expected to encourage more geothermal power networking projects across the U.S.
Following several decades of stagnation in the geothermal energy sector, governments are once again looking to the abundant renewable energy source to provide heating and power in place of natural gas. Greater investment in the sector could support the development of large networks of geothermal power, offering millions of households clean heating. Some countries, such as Iceland, are already well acquainted with geothermal power, with countries such as the U.K. and U.S. expected to soon follow.
By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com
The DOE Is Betting Big On A Geothermal Game-Changer In Utah
- Geothermal energy is currently limited to geographical hotspots, but enhanced geothermal seeks to produce energy from deep drilling anywhere.
- Enhanced geothermal offers a continuous baseload power source, overcoming the intermittency challenges of solar and wind energy.
- Despite its potential benefits, enhanced geothermal's high upfront costs pose challenges, but its low operational costs and vast potential could make it a significant player in the clean energy sector.
A huge experiment to produce electricity using enhanced geothermal energy is taking place underground in Utah. The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is funding an experimental pilot project drilling well over a mile deep into the Earth’s crust to access a continuous heat source for clean energy production. While the technology is in its infancy and there are questions about whether enhanced geothermal could ever be cost-competitive with other forms of clean energy production, the DOE is convinced that it’s a good enough idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on.
Today, geothermal energy makes up a tiny fraction of energy production on a global scale. All told, it makes up less than 1% of the world’s primary energy supply. This is because currently, geothermal is only produced in geologically anomalous places where water carrying the residual heat of the Earth’s core has cracked through to the surface via hot water vents like hot springs or geysers. “Iceland, straddling two diverging tectonic plates, hits a geological jackpot and produces about a quarter of its electricity that way; in Kenya, volcanism in the Great Rift Valley helps push that figure to more than 40 percent,” Wired recently reported. “In the US, it’s just 0.4 percent, almost all of it coming from California and Nevada.”
The idea behind enhanced geothermal energy is that if you drill down deep enough, geothermal energy can be produced anywhere – not just the places where heat happens to be more accessible closer to the surface. Until recently, the idea was a bit more science fiction than fact, but drilling technologies have improved immensely thanks to the fracking boom of the last few decades. Whereas deep drilling and cracking through rock used to be a headache with little guarantee of success, it’s now a much more exact science.
What’s more, geothermal offers some extremely enticing benefits that other clean energies do not. First and most importantly, it’s a potential baseload power source, meaning that it produces steadily and continuously. This is a huge advantage over more popular renewable energies like wind and solar power, which are variable, as they depend on weather, seasons, and the time of day for production. And peaks of production rarely line up neatly with peaks of demand. This creates a huge challenge for the nascent energy storage sector, as well as our aging power grids, which were not designed with variable energy in mind. As such, a baseload clean energy source solves a number of the clean energy revolution’s most wicked problems – if it can be effectively scaled up and out.
Second, enhanced geothermal energy takes up much less surface area than other forms of renewable energy production. Land use is currently one of the biggest hurdles for clean energy expansion as disputes and competition for land tie up industrial-scale solar and wind farms around the country and around the world. Late last year, global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company released an analytic report naming land shortages as one of three key challenges facing the renewable revolution, along with long permitting processes and gravely under-prepared power grids. “Utility-scale solar and wind farms require at least ten times as much space per unit of power as coal- or natural gas–fired power plants, including the land used to produce and transport the fossil fuels,” McKinsey reports, adding that “wind turbines are often placed half a mile apart, while large solar farms span thousands of acres.” Since enhanced geothermal’s reach is down into the earth, and not across landscapes, it could be a key workaround for such issues.
While geothermal presents some key advantages and circumvents some of the biggest pitfalls of the renewable revolution, however, enhanced geothermal is still wickedly expensive, and by no means easy. While the up-front costs are considerable, however, the operational costs are relatively low. And once the heat source is tapped, it’s a gift that keeps on giving, forever. “The question is whether [enhanced geothermal systems] will be more or less practical than building a nuclear plant or a dam or installing carbon capture at a natural gas plant,” says journalist Gregory Barber, who has written about geothermal energy for Wired. “There are good reasons to think it will be—especially if you factor in safety and ecological concerns presented by the alternatives—but it's early.”
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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