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2008 article on deep geothermal power plant.[1] 2016 article on shutdown of plant.[2] "The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the tech

2008 article on deep geothermal power plant.[1] 2016 article on shutdown of plant.[2] "The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create." There's a group called DEEP which is trying to combine deep geothermal with fracking technology, to get better heat transfer. This creates small earthquakes as a side effect. They're working on that.[3] A startup called FERVO is still trying.[4] Shallow geothermal for building heat works fine, but it takes a lot of drilling just to get some heat. So far, nobody seems to have a profitable deep geothermal power operation. [1] https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep_geothermal_the_untapped_energy_source https://e360.yale.edu/features/deep_geothermal_the_untapped_... [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/geothermal-power-plant-closes-deemed-not-financially-viable/7798962 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-30/geothermal-power-plan... [3] http://deepgeothermal.org/home/ http://deepgeothermal.org/home/ [4] https://fervoenergy.com/ https://fervoenergy.com/

exabrial 2y ago
> deep geothermal with fracking technology.... this creates small earthquakes as a side effect. In typical HN form I'll say: "That's a bit of an oversimplication". Apologies, please don't hate me. Thanks for quoting all your sources though btw. The wrong geology absolutely will create minor earthquakes. This is because any fluids injected into certain rocks layers provide "lubrication" and things start slipping. Pretty crazy how much pushing is happening down there and things remain at equilibrium most of the time! However, all is not lost. Certain geologies absolutely can take external fluids no problem, because they previously contained fluids... yeah... I'm talking depleted oil wells. A bit ironic I guess. This happens all the time already in the midwest, depleted oil wells are turned into saltwater injection wells. The problem is most of the time, you can't just plunk a depleted well down anywhere that happens to have the right geology underneath it, which the geothermal guys were hoping for. Pushing high pressure water into previously dry formations will likely cause problems. No free lunch, but it is possible in certain areas. A lot of said areas aren't likely near population centers unfortunately.
citadel_melon 2y ago
Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Maybe you meant that geothermal has not achieved profitability in non-especially favorable environments. I think we should be subsidizing geothermal to make the technology cheaper and cheaper, like we had with solar and wind. Seems plausible that we could make the technology economically feasible in more geographic areas (similarly to solar) and mitigate duck curve inefficiencies other green energy technologies suffer from. Also to hedge my statement: solar is not economically feasible everywhere, but it is now economically feasible in many more environments (with sufficient sun coverage) than before.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Iceland doesn’t have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds and high latitude make solar complicated.)
  - stevage 2y ago
    They do have some solar PV. Looks pretty weird seeing panels at like 60°.
    - bergie 2y ago
      In the summer you can make tons of power with the almost 24/7 sunlight. Cruising in Finland and Sweden in summer we did more solar power than in the Canaries during the fall
- xcskier56 2y ago
  Iceland has boiling hot water at the surface and so doesn’t need to drill far to reach hot rocks do to all the volcanism there. This does not apply to the vast majority of the world
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    Are deepsea power cables from Iceland feasable or they'd have to store it as ie. hydrogen to send over?
mmooss 2y ago
If the full cost of carbon technologies was paid instead of so much being externalized, how competitive would these geothermal solutions be?
- ben_w 2y ago
  Probably still not competitive — given that PV and wind are in most places already the two cheapest electrical sources, the remaining part of the power equation that geothermal can still help with is then competing with one of either batteries or a global power grid. (I really should turn my notes on global power grid into an actual blog post, so I can link to it, given how much it comes up).
epistasis 2y ago
Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding in bringing the drilling advances used in fracking, along with other innovation to get through the harder rocks typically encountered when not drilling for fossil fuels, to deliver dispatchable and storable energy. It's actually much better quality of power plant than nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day economically, whereas nuclear becomes even more uneconomic if it is forced to match the needs of the grid, and the reactors typically require far different designs than what is usually built (France has done a bit with this). I would bet on geothermal over nuclear in a second for future electricity generation. Its so much more promising, has a tech curve, and has far more innovation and advanced tech adoption.
- Animats 2y ago
  > It's actually much better quality of power plant than nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day economically... It's not that nuclear reactors can't be built to vary their output. It's that nuclear power is almost all fixed cost. If the average power level over a year is 50%, the power cost doubles. Geothermal has similar economics.
  - caminante 2y ago
    Geothermal isn't cheap. Trimming those fixed costs means siting on fault lines/earthquakes and higher opex (insurance). Fervo/Google got dogged for announcing their plant in UT because they avoided disclosures about the capacity [0]. It's more of a very small scale pilot of a couple MWs, but they buried key facts about the project assumedly on purpose due to lack of significance. [0] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-fervo-geothermal-energy-partnership/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
    - micro2588 2y ago
      Fervo's initial demonstration project was next to an existing power plant in Nevada which previously failed to produce at it's stated capacity over time (Battle Mountain) so they were able to tie in extra MWt capacity to an existing ORC turbine. Fervo's technology has to be located somewhat near existing traditional hydrothermal geothermal resources because it's the convection along an exiting fault for hundreds of thousands of years that produces an above background thermal gradient near enough to the surface for it to be economical. That is true for their demonstration area in Utah which is located near the existing Blundel geothermal power plant in Milford Utah.
loeg 2y ago
https://www.quaise.energy/ https://www.quaise.energy/ is working on the drilling cost problem.
TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
> cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create." So, the same as nuclear, wind, solar, gas, and coal, all of which which largely don’t work without significant government support.
- BrawnyBadger53 2y ago
  Does nuclear need large amounts of government support? I was under the impression that it was much cheaper on the margin than other forms of electricity. I can easily imagine the needed support for the initial cost to build.
  - ruszki 2y ago
    Does storage of used fuel rods need government support too? Or are those calculated in the cost and the market can bear it?
simplysublime 2y ago
Man, it's so unfortunate that saving the planet just isn't profitable.
hammock 2y ago
> The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create. We said the same thing about solar and wind, also in 2008-2016. We found a way anyway
dylan604 2y ago
> There's a group called DEEP which is trying to combine deep geothermal with fracking technology, to get better heat transfer. This creates small earthquakes as a side effect. They're working on that. That hasn't stopped the fracking industry, so why would it be a bother for DEEP?
conradev 2y ago
Another one: https://x.com/joelhedwards/status/1886497604344943007 https://x.com/joelhedwards/status/1886497604344943007
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
But the lots of drilling gets way cheaper with the microwave evaporation method of the article? It goes from exponential to linear or at least thats the promise? And instead of fracking between two places, they want to just drill deeper and then have one pipe- with outside water inject and supercritical steam turbine lowered in on the inside .. alternative would be two parallel cheap drills - connected via fracking again and then perpetual geysir?
rapnie 2y ago
At Delft University in the Netherlands they started a geothermal research project [0] on-campus. > The campus geothermal well offers a unique full scale research infrastructure of global relevance. This project will be the first geothermal system built including an extensive research infrastructure in the low-enthalpy energy range. Low-enthalpy (direct-use) geothermal systems produce water <100°C that can be used directly for domestic and horticultural heating. Equipped with a broad range of advanced technologies for monitoring and data acquisition, it will deliver essential information on processes affecting deep geothermal energy provision in sedimentary basins and give valuable insight into an operating geothermal system. [0] https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/geoscience-engineering/research/geothermal/geothermal-science-and-engineering/research/campus-geothermal-project https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/geosci...
lenerdenator 2y ago
It'd be interesting to see if fossil fuels would be considered profitable if we took into account the entire cost-benefit analysis of using them.
- pjerem 2y ago
  In fact we already know they wouldn’t.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

exabrial 2y ago

> deep geothermal with fracking technology.... this creates small earthquakes as a side effect. In typical HN form I'll say: "That's a bit of an oversimplication". Apologies, please don't hate me. Thanks for quoting all your sources though btw. The wrong geology absolutely will create minor earthquakes. This is because any fluids injected into certain rocks layers provide "lubrication" and things start slipping. Pretty crazy how much pushing is happening down there and things remain at equilibrium most of the time! However, all is not lost. Certain geologies absolutely can take external fluids no problem, because they previously contained fluids... yeah... I'm talking depleted oil wells. A bit ironic I guess. This happens all the time already in the midwest, depleted oil wells are turned into saltwater injection wells. The problem is most of the time, you can't just plunk a depleted well down anywhere that happens to have the right geology underneath it, which the geothermal guys were hoping for. Pushing high pressure water into previously dry formations will likely cause problems. No free lunch, but it is possible in certain areas. A lot of said areas aren't likely near population centers unfortunately.

citadel_melon 2y ago

Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Maybe you meant that geothermal has not achieved profitability in non-especially favorable environments. I think we should be subsidizing geothermal to make the technology cheaper and cheaper, like we had with solar and wind. Seems plausible that we could make the technology economically feasible in more geographic areas (similarly to solar) and mitigate duck curve inefficiencies other green energy technologies suffer from. Also to hedge my statement: solar is not economically feasible everywhere, but it is now economically feasible in many more environments (with sufficient sun coverage) than before.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Iceland has profitable geothermal, no? Iceland doesn’t have natural gas. (I also imagine the winds and high latitude make solar complicated.)
- stevage 2y ago
  They do have some solar PV. Looks pretty weird seeing panels at like 60°.
  - bergie 2y ago
    In the summer you can make tons of power with the almost 24/7 sunlight. Cruising in Finland and Sweden in summer we did more solar power than in the Canaries during the fall
xcskier56 2y ago
Iceland has boiling hot water at the surface and so doesn’t need to drill far to reach hot rocks do to all the volcanism there. This does not apply to the vast majority of the world
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  Are deepsea power cables from Iceland feasable or they'd have to store it as ie. hydrogen to send over?

mmooss 2y ago

If the full cost of carbon technologies was paid instead of so much being externalized, how competitive would these geothermal solutions be?

ben_w 2y ago
Probably still not competitive — given that PV and wind are in most places already the two cheapest electrical sources, the remaining part of the power equation that geothermal can still help with is then competing with one of either batteries or a global power grid. (I really should turn my notes on global power grid into an actual blog post, so I can link to it, given how much it comes up).

epistasis 2y ago

Fervo isn't just trying, they are succeeding in bringing the drilling advances used in fracking, along with other innovation to get through the harder rocks typically encountered when not drilling for fossil fuels, to deliver dispatchable and storable energy. It's actually much better quality of power plant than nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day economically, whereas nuclear becomes even more uneconomic if it is forced to match the needs of the grid, and the reactors typically require far different designs than what is usually built (France has done a bit with this). I would bet on geothermal over nuclear in a second for future electricity generation. Its so much more promising, has a tech curve, and has far more innovation and advanced tech adoption.

Animats 2y ago
> It's actually much better quality of power plant than nuclear because it can be scaled up and down throughout the day economically... It's not that nuclear reactors can't be built to vary their output. It's that nuclear power is almost all fixed cost. If the average power level over a year is 50%, the power cost doubles. Geothermal has similar economics.
- caminante 2y ago
  Geothermal isn't cheap. Trimming those fixed costs means siting on fault lines/earthquakes and higher opex (insurance). Fervo/Google got dogged for announcing their plant in UT because they avoided disclosures about the capacity [0]. It's more of a very small scale pilot of a couple MWs, but they buried key facts about the project assumedly on purpose due to lack of significance. [0] https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-fervo-geothermal-energy-partnership/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
  - micro2588 2y ago
    Fervo's initial demonstration project was next to an existing power plant in Nevada which previously failed to produce at it's stated capacity over time (Battle Mountain) so they were able to tie in extra MWt capacity to an existing ORC turbine. Fervo's technology has to be located somewhat near existing traditional hydrothermal geothermal resources because it's the convection along an exiting fault for hundreds of thousands of years that produces an above background thermal gradient near enough to the surface for it to be economical. That is true for their demonstration area in Utah which is located near the existing Blundel geothermal power plant in Milford Utah.

loeg 2y ago

https://www.quaise.energy/ https://www.quaise.energy/ is working on the drilling cost problem.

TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago

> cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create." So, the same as nuclear, wind, solar, gas, and coal, all of which which largely don’t work without significant government support.

BrawnyBadger53 2y ago
Does nuclear need large amounts of government support? I was under the impression that it was much cheaper on the margin than other forms of electricity. I can easily imagine the needed support for the initial cost to build.
- ruszki 2y ago
  Does storage of used fuel rods need government support too? Or are those calculated in the cost and the market can bear it?

simplysublime 2y ago

Man, it's so unfortunate that saving the planet just isn't profitable.

hammock 2y ago

> The technology worked but unfortunately the cost of implementing the technology and also the cost of delivering the electricity that was produced to a market was just greater than the revenue stream that we could create. We said the same thing about solar and wind, also in 2008-2016. We found a way anyway

dylan604 2y ago

> There's a group called DEEP which is trying to combine deep geothermal with fracking technology, to get better heat transfer. This creates small earthquakes as a side effect. They're working on that. That hasn't stopped the fracking industry, so why would it be a bother for DEEP?

conradev 2y ago

Another one: https://x.com/joelhedwards/status/1886497604344943007 https://x.com/joelhedwards/status/1886497604344943007

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

But the lots of drilling gets way cheaper with the microwave evaporation method of the article? It goes from exponential to linear or at least thats the promise? And instead of fracking between two places, they want to just drill deeper and then have one pipe- with outside water inject and supercritical steam turbine lowered in on the inside .. alternative would be two parallel cheap drills - connected via fracking again and then perpetual geysir?

rapnie 2y ago

At Delft University in the Netherlands they started a geothermal research project [0] on-campus. > The campus geothermal well offers a unique full scale research infrastructure of global relevance. This project will be the first geothermal system built including an extensive research infrastructure in the low-enthalpy energy range. Low-enthalpy (direct-use) geothermal systems produce water <100°C that can be used directly for domestic and horticultural heating. Equipped with a broad range of advanced technologies for monitoring and data acquisition, it will deliver essential information on processes affecting deep geothermal energy provision in sedimentary basins and give valuable insight into an operating geothermal system. [0] https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/geoscience-engineering/research/geothermal/geothermal-science-and-engineering/research/campus-geothermal-project https://www.tudelft.nl/citg/over-faculteit/afdelingen/geosci...

lenerdenator 2y ago

It'd be interesting to see if fossil fuels would be considered profitable if we took into account the entire cost-benefit analysis of using them.

pjerem 2y ago
In fact we already know they wouldn’t.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]