There’s a valley in rural southwest Utah that’s become a hub for renewable energy. Dozens of tall white wind turbines whoosh up in the sky. A sea of solar panels glistens in the distance.
But the new kid on the block is mostly hidden underground.
From the surface, Fervo Energy’s Cape Station looks more or less like an oil derrick, with a thin metal tower rising above the sagebrush steppe.
But this $2 billion geothermal project, which broke ground last year, is not drilling for gas. It’s drilling for underground heat that CEO Tim Latimer believes holds the key to generating carbon-free power — lots of it.
“Just these three well pads alone will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Around-the-clock, 24/7 electricity,” he said.
Latimer stood overlooking the project, which is currently under construction, on one of the drill rig’s metal platforms 40 feet off the ground. This well is one of the 24 Fervo is in the process of completing at Cape Station to harness the Earth’s natural heat and generate electricity.
Not your father’s geothermal energy
This isn’t the type of geothermal that’s already active in volcanic hot spots like Iceland or The Geysers project in California. It’s called an enhanced geothermal system.
Cold water goes down into a well that curves like a hockey stick as it reaches more than 13,000 feet underground. Then the water squeezes through cracks in 400-degree rock. The water heats up and returns to the surface through a second well that runs parallel to the first. That creates steam that turns turbines to produce electricity, and the water gets sent back underground in a closed loop.
This horizontal well technique has been pioneered at a $300 million federal research project called Utah FORGE located in this same valley, which has paved the way for private companies to take the tech and run with it.
Recent innovations like better drill bits — made with synthetic diamonds to eat through hard subterranean granite — have helped Fervo drill its latest well in a quarter of the time that it took just a couple of years ago. That efficiency has meant an 80% drop in drilling costs, Latimer said.
Last year, Fervo’s pilot project in Nevada used similar techniques to begin sending electricity to a Google data center. And the company’s early tests at Cape Station in Utah show the new project can produce power at triple the rate of its Nevada pilot.
“This is now a proven tech. That’s not a statement you could have made two or three years ago,” Latimer said. “Now, it just comes down to how do we get more of these megawatts on the grid so we have a bigger impact?”
This summer, this type of geothermal got one step closer to Americans’ living rooms.
Fervo signed a landmark deal with Southern California Edison, one of the country’s largest electric utilities with 15 million customers. It will send the first 70 megawatts of geothermal juice to the grid in 2026. By the time the project is fully completed in 2028, this Utah plant will deliver 320 megawatts total — enough to power 350,000 homes.
SOURCE: npr.org
