Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Certainly a welcome development. Let's hope this pilot can be repeated and scaled.
    by thinkcontext
  • I admit I don't know enough, but does it negatively affect the underground water a negative way? I read a while back that geothermal plants (can) use fracking like technique to heat up the water but it has negative effects on the local geology and underground water. But not sure if that's true hencey question here.
    by LikeBeans
  • It is a nice field they have.

    It happens to be right next to the DOE sponsored Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE [1]) site that established the temperature and ability to create permeability at depth using EGS.

    [1] https://utahforge.com/

    by fghorow
  • If the coffin needed any more nails, this puts the final kibosh on that cancelled SMR project out there that centered on Utah and Idaho, the one involving NuScale. Geothermal makes much more sense for them now.

    There's a geothermal project at the Newberry Volcano in Oregon that also looks interesting (different people doing that).

    by pfdietz
  • 23 months to build is impressive, but the number that matters for EGS is thermal drawdown. If the fractured rock cools faster than modeled they have to keep drilling new wells, so I'd like to see Cape's output a few years in.
    by andruschakartem
  • Does "enhanced geothermal" have a definition beyond "drilling deeper", or "whatever anyone does that's different than what what was done before"?
    by jp57
  • They tried to drill for one in Switzerland twice. One in Basel and one in St. Gallen but both times causes earthquakes significant enough that the whole project was scraped.
    by sschueller
  • The real news here is that Fervo has made progress in deep drilling. Deep geothermal has been known for decades but almost nobody can get down there. Fervo got down to 15,000 feet in 16 drilling days last year with a test well in Texas. 500F heat. That's where it gets useful.

    This new one is apparently not as deep but fans out with horizontal drilling. Next step is presumably deep and horizontal fan-out, but the hype and TechCrunch are too vague to tell.

    Big, cheap synthetic diamonds help. The classic Hughes drill bit, the thing which looks like a set of bevel gears, is not really a cutter at all. It's a rock-crusher. The weight of the drill string on those pointy rotating teeth crushes rock into dust. Modern diamond drill bits are brutally simple things that claw through rock.[2] Fervo says they got 3200 feet on one drill before they had to pull it out. The less often that has to be done, the cheaper deep drilling becomes.

    There's probably a really good description of what Fervo is doing in some publication for oil drillers. TechCrunch isn't it.

    [1] https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-pushes-envelope/

    [2] https://fervoenergy.com/how-modern-drill-bits-are-accelerati...

    by Animats

Explore Birbla archives