Drill Deeper and Deeper

By Dave Trecker

The thirst for energy is driving discovery everywhere. From very small nuclear reactors to very large gas-fired powerplants. You see it in Florida with sweeping solar fields in Babcock Ranch and in Rhode Island with massive wind turbines in Block Island waters.

Climate change is taking a back seat to artificial intelligence and its insatiable appetite for energy. Data centers are popping up everywhere and those data centers don’t care where the energy comes from. Fossil fuels? They’re okay. Green energy sources? They’re okay too. In fact, all types of energy will be needed to provide enough power for AI.

The average ChatGPT query uses 0.34 watt-hours of energy, or so says the Wall Street Journal. That’s nothing compared with a 6 second video that takes between 20 and 110 watt hours. And that’s today, just the start of what will be a steep climb. The future demand will be mind-boggling.

Many experts feel a home run will be needed – an energy breakthrough that meets the staggering needs in the years ahead. And that break-through may well have to come from the earth itself.

Everyone knows the earth’s core is pretty hot, even molten. In some places, like Iceland, the magma is very close to the surface and can be readily tapped. But in most locales, you have to fight Mother Earth and go deep enough to make drilling cost effective.

Geothermal heat in some form has been around for a long time, and shallow drilling is old hat. My wife and I lived in a high rise in Naples for a number of years where modest drilling brought up enough recovered warm water to heat a swimming pool.

But the big prize isn’t to tap into shallow water. The big prize is deep drilling, often through solid granite, to reach very large, very hot formations.

And it’s starting to happen.

With start-up money from the likes of Bill Gates to supplement years of Department of Energy funding, companies are now testing new technologies that have astonishing promise. And, wonder of wonders, it’s apolitical. Both parties support it. Biden era tax incentives for deep-well drilling have been extended to 2036 by the Trump administration.

What are we talking about here? Writing in the WSJ, Christopher Mims chronicles the development of technology that will someday provide plentiful energy that’s far cleaner than anything produced by fossil fuels and far cheaper than the most economical of green fuels.

Here’s what’s happening.

Using fracking technology, Fervo Energy is piloting systems in Utah that blast open fissures through which water is pumped and heated by hot rock. The hot water, upon returning to the surface, transfers the heat to lower-boiling fluids that generate steam which, in turn, spins turbines to generate electricity.

It’s old school fracking times two – geothermal on steroids.

Projected costs, several years down the road, are claimed to competewith $3,000 per kilowatt costs now encountered in gas fired power plants.

To be sure, there are plenty of naysayers. Some say heat variations down deep will render any long-range planning impossible.

Others point to never-ending changes in drilling strata. Still others recall earthquakes triggered by deep drilling in South Korea in 2017.

But most feel the prize is worth the risks.

In fact, even more radical approaches are being explored. At a granite quarry in Texas, Quaise Energy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, is looking to go deeper and hotter. Using a gyrotron to create microwaves (like those from the oven in your kitchen), Quaise is trying to tap rocks that are so hot they turn water into something that flows like steam and produces 10 times more energy.

This is Buck Rogers stuff. But experts say it’s coming. Just think about it. If mankind can economically drill 6 miles deep, we can free enough energy to double all the electricity now used in the world.

And if that doesn’t boggle your mind, nothing will.

Dr. Trecker is a chemist and retired Pfizer executive living in Naples.