Past efforts to coax geothermal energy from hot dry rock deep underground have faltered—but new techniques could crack the problem.
The day started inauspiciously for John McLennan, as he tried to break the curse haunting a 45-year quest to coax abundant energy from deep within Earth.
There’s plenty of it. By one recent estimate, more than 5000 gigawatts of electricity could be extracted from heat in rock beneath the United States alone. That’s nearly five times the total currently generated by all U.S. power plants. Geothermal energy is also attractive because it doesn’t burn fossil fuels, isn’t imported, and can run around the clock, unlike solar panels and wind turbines.
In some places, EGS projects had more dramatic failures, as high-pressure water injected for fracking caused existing faults to slip, setting off earthquakes. In 2006, engineers shuttered a project beneath Basel, Switzerland, after earthquakes caused minor damage. Eleven years later, a magnitude 5.5 quake struck Pohang, South Korea, killing one person, injuring dozens, and causing more than $75 million in damage.
Even as EGS projects have struggled, however, new techniques have emerged from the oil and gas industry. Engineers learned to drill horizontally instead of just vertically. Today they can create wells that can resemble rollercoaster routes, curving and doubling back on themselves. Sophisticated steering systems allow drillers to target their fracking to release oil and gas from veins of rock as narrow as 5 meters. The advances have prompted investors and governments to take a fresh look at EGS.
West of what is known as the Opal Mound fault, the groundwater is blocked by an underground wall of solid granite that reaches temperatures of 235°C—truly hot, dry rock. FORGE’s drilling rig perches above that granite, its metal skeleton dwarfing the trucks and one-story buildings clustered around it.
That piecemeal approach could help EGS projects avoid fracking in seismically sensitive areas that could trigger nearby faults, says William Ellsworth, a Stanford University geophysicist who has studied drilling-induced tremors, including the Pohang quakes. But he cautions that spotting problem faults in hard basement rock is “an exceedingly difficult imaging problem.”
Voices crackled over radios. Beside him, Kevin England, a veteran petroleum engineer, issued short bursts of commands. Over the next half hour, the signals continued to be encouraging. For the first time in days, McLennan appeared at ease. “This is beautiful,” he said. “It fractures, it stops, then it propagates again.”
Others are watching FORGE closely for lessons. Meier is leading plans for an EGS project in Switzerland. He hopes FORGE’s technique of executing smaller, segmented fracks will point the way to reducing the risk that EGS will cause damaging earthquakes, like those that shut down his company’s previous work in Basel.
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