Geothermal power |
new investors, DCVC, CPP Investments, Liberty Energy, Macquarie, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Impact Science Ventures, and Prelude Ventures, as well as strong participation from existing investors such as Capricorn’s Technology Impact Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, 3X5 Partners, Helmerich & Payne, and Elemental Excelerator.
In July 2023, Fervo announced that it had successfully completed the “well test” at its full- scale commercial pilot, Project Red, in northern Nevada.
The 30-day well test, standard for geothermal projects, achieved a flowrate of 63 litres per second at high temperature, enabling 3.5 MW of power production (as anticipated). With Project Red, Fervo said it became the first company to successfully drill a horizontal well pair for commercial geothermal production, achieving lateral lengths of 3250 feet, reaching a temperature of 191°C, and proving controlled flow through rigorous tracer testing.
Fervo also implemented an induced seismicity mitigation protocol following best practices established by the US DOE and completed the project without incident.
In November 2023 it was announced by Google that the Project Red geothermal facility was operational and “carbon-free electricity has started flowing onto the local grid that serves our datacenters in Nevada.”
This is the culmination of the groundbreaking agreement signed in 2021 by Fervo and Google, the goal of the partnership stated as being “to power Google’s Cloud region in Las Vegas with an “always-on,” carbon-free resource that will reduce the company’s hourly reliance on fossil fuels.” “Achieving our goal of operating on 24/7 carbon-free energy will require new sources of firm, clean power to complement variable renewables like wind and solar,” said Michael Terrell, Senior Director for Energy and Climate, Google. “We partnered with Fervo in 2021 because we see significant potential for their geothermal technology to unlock a critical source
of 24/7 carbon-free energy at scale, and we are thrilled to see Fervo reach this important technical milestone.”
Fervo says its results from Project Red “support the findings of the DOE Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot and show that geothermal energy could supply over 20% of US power needs and complement wind and solar to reach a fully decarbonised grid.” Fervo’s drilling and well test results “pave the way for the US to meet this goal ahead of schedule” and “no technological barriers to geothermal deployment remain.” Also supportive of the EGS Earthshot is a pilot project that Fervo is carrying out within the Milford Renewable Energy Corridor in Utah, adjacent to the DOE’s Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) field laboratory.
Funded via President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the pilot aims to produce at least 8 MW of power from each of three wells at a site with no existing commercial geothermal power production.
Drilling down into Fervo experience at Cape Station
In February 2024 at the Stanford Geothermal Workshop, Fervo Energy presented early drilling results from its Cape Station project, and these exceeded US Department of Energy’s (DOE) expectations for “enhanced geothermal systems.” These results substantiate the rapid learning underway in the geothermal industry and signal readiness for continued commercialisation, says Fervo. Fervo began its drilling campaign at Cape Station, its 400 MW
project in south west Utah, in June 2023 and in the subsequent six months successfully drilled one vertical and six horizontal wells there, rapidly reducing drilling times from well to well as learnings accelerated. Fervo says these advancements build on its pioneering Project Red, commissioned in 2023, where Fervo drilled one vertical and two horizontal wells. Fervo reports consistently reduced drilling times and costs in horizontal, high-temperature, deep granite drilling. Though Cape wells are hotter and over 2100 feet deeper than Project Red wells, Fervo drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022. This increase in drilling efficiency has translated into significant cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well. “Since its inception, Fervo has looked to bring a manufacturing mentality to enhanced geothermal development, building a highly repeatable drilling process that allows continuous improvement and, as a result, lower costs,” said Tim Latimer, Fervo Energy CEO and Co-Founder. “In just six months, we have proven that our technology solutions have led to a dramatic acceleration in forecasted drilling performance.” Fervo’s drilling performance to date fits an expected learning rate of
35% for drilling time improvement, portending far more significant advances in performance and cost. This is the latest example that private sector work like Fervo’s Project Cape and pioneering research like DOE-sponsored Utah FORGE (Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy) are rapidly moving the world of geothermal deployment forward, Fervo maintains. “Fervo’s drilling improvements are like the early days of the
shale revolution,” said Trey Lowe, Chief Technology Officer of Devon Energy. “When you operate continually and understand the resource, you dramatically streamline operations. That’s the unique value of Fervo’s approach to enhanced geothermal.”
Fervo achieved its results by increasing both the rate of penetration (ROP) and life of drill bits. On the fourth horizontal well drilled at Cape, for example, Fervo sustained an average ROP of 70 feet/hour, already outpacing NREL’s 2035 projections for moderate technology improvement. Modern oil and gas drilling equipment enabled this performance.
Fervo used polycrystalline diamond compact (PDC) drill bits typically deployed in shale basins to cut through hard, abrasive granite, while mud coolers counteracted high subsurface temperatures that have historically derailed geothermal exploration. These results underscore the applicability of oil and gas technology to enhanced geothermal. “We now have the best drilling technology from the petroleum drilling industry. What encourages me now is that we’re starting to learn how to use it in ways that specifically maximise performance,” said Fred Dupriest, Professor of Engineering Practice at Texas A&M University and Former Chief Drilling Engineer at ExxonMobil. “Performance isn’t just what you use, but how you use it. We’re not just achieving technology transfer, but an impressive rate of knowledge transfer in how to use it.”
80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Project Red horizontal wells
Original est Revised est Actual
Barefoot completion
1500’ additional granite drilled
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Well #
Fervo drilling learning curve (spud (start) to actual TD (total depth)) showing planned 18% learning curve and realised 35% learning curve across all EGS (enhanced geothermal systems) projects. Source: Fervo Energy
36 | September 2024|
www.modernpowersystems.com
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