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Offshore Wind Moves Forward on California Coast

Christine Heinrichs
News Feed
Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Progress continues on the controversial proposal to install a multi-billion dollar wind farm off the California coast. The five project areas will provide future power needs equivalent to the electricity produced by Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which was on schedule to be retired until this past legislative session. On November 21, PG&E received a federal grant of $1.1 billion to keep it operating for another five years. California’s deep waters, 3,000 feet, are three times as deep as any floating wind turbines have been launched. Forging into the unknown presents a number of concerns and promises that engineers, officials and citizens are weighing out. Leases to Outer Continental Land, needed to locate as many as 1,300 mega-sized wind turbines, will be auctioned off December 6. The process for building 2-5 GigaWatt offshore wind projects, producing more electricity than Diablo Canyon, gets underway with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s lease sale auction starting at 7 a.m. Pacific. They will warm up with a practice auction the day before. The auction could take two days to reach a conclusion and settle on five winning bidders. The lease sale includes three Morro Bay areas, (80,062 acres, 80,418 acres, 80,418 acres), and two Humboldt areas, (673,338 acres and 69,031 acres) totaling 373,268 acres of the Outer Continental Shelf, 20-30 miles offshore. Forty-three bidders have qualified and ponied up the $5 million bid deposit to participate.‍ Bidding credits‍ Bids will be considered not only on amount of money, but also on how they propose to use the bidding credits. Bidders can qualify for up to 20 percent credit by committing to investing in workforce training and supply chain development. They can also get up to five percent credit for a Lease Area Use Community Benefit Agreement and five percent for a General Community Benefit Agreement. CBAs are intended to mitigate potential impacts on- and offshore to communities, tribal, or other stakeholder groups and may assist fishing and related industries by supporting their resilience and ability to adapt to impacts that may arise from the development of the lease area. A Lease Area Use CBA would be between the lessee and a community or stakeholder group “whose use of the geographic space of the Lease Area, or whose use of resources harvested from that geographic space, is directly impacted by the Lessee’s potential offshore wind development. ”The General CBA would be with communities, tribes, or stakeholder groups that are expected to be affected by the potential impacts on the marine, coastal, and/or human environment from activities resulting from lease development that are not otherwise addressed by the Lease Area Use CBA. Eric Endersby, Morro Bay’s harbor director, sees how those credits can help the waterfront. “We are the closest port to the Morro Bay area, and we are a protected port, so it makes sense for the operations and maintenance boats to be coming and going out of Morro Bay,” he said in an interview. “There would be a lot of fuel sales, a lot of high-dollar, high-skilled jobs. The cable is coming into Morro Bay, through the grid system, so there’ll be that aspect to it. We see a revitalization of our working waterfront.” Other ocean users The leases require consideration of other users, from commercial fishing and Department of Defense national security to vessel speed requirements, use of low-energy geophysical survey equipment and coordinating with the Coastal Commission on plan submissions. Bidders know that BOEM has no authority to issue leases in national marine sanctuaries. The Morro Bay wind areas are adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and the proposed Chumash Heritage NMS. Violet Sage Walker, chair of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, wrote in an op-ed in The Tribune, “The Northern Chumash Tribal Council advocates for marine conservation, equitable mitigation measures and fair community benefits. We believe offshore wind must coexist and cooperate with marine protections, and we see this as a unique opportunity for a collaborative effort, not a combative one.” Frankie Myers, vice chair of the Yurok Tribe in Northern California, said at the Floating Wind USA 2022 conference in San Francisco, that the ocean is the last place his people have to pray. “We can’t go any further west,” he said. “What will our descendants see? Another colonial resource or a collaborative partner?” Lines on a map are abstractions that are irrelevant to fisheries and tribal lands. Full details are in the Final Sale Notice National and state goals The West Coast Floating Offshore Wind projects, with a goal of 4.5 GW of power by 2030, are part of the Biden administration’s goal for Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, a commitment to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and at least 25 gigawatts of onshore renewable energy by 2025.The state of California has set a target of 2-5 GW of offshore wind power by 2030 and 25 GW by 2045. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant’s two units combined produce 2.2 GW. Although intended to be retired in 2024 and 2025, in 2022 the legislature extended the plant’s licenses five years. ‍New port terminals needed Ten additional port terminals along California’s coast will be required to support the projects. None of California’s current ports is large enough or strong enough to support the wind turbine staging and fabrication. Terminals may be located in existing ports such as Long Beach and San Francisco, but construction of entirely new ports may be required. ‍Building the turbines Turbines are 1,100 feet tall on a base 425 feet wide. About 1,300 are projected to be installed in the West Coast projects. The size of the turbines presents problems yet unsolved, including moving the assembled turbines from the manufacturing facility into the water. It could take two weeks or longer to tow them out to the site where they will be tethered. The size and complications of constructing the turbines and setting them in place presents risks that are difficult to evaluate and insure. “What keeps me up at night is a project that is uninsurable,” one insurance executive said.‍ Deeper waters, bigger ships Hanson Wood, regional senior vice president for development in the West Region, EDF Renewables, said that although technical lessons have been learned from projects in Asia, there is no precedent for a wind project in California’s depths, around 3,000 feet. The chains tethering the turbines to sea floor anchors could put marine mammals at risk by catching drifting fishing gear and ensnaring them. The area is known as the Blue Serengeti for its migration routes of whales and seals. A ship large enough to transport the turbine parts, in compliance with U.S. Jones Law, is under construction in Texas. The 472-foot-long Charybdis is estimated to cost around $500 million. Humboldt has already received a grant for $10.5 million to renovate its facilities into the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal, which will be capable of handling large heavy cargo vessels, offshore wind floating platform development and integration and decommissioning, and other maritime activities. Developing the Central Coast wind area could create around 15,000 new jobs, according to a report on the economic impact by REACH Central Coast and Cal Poly. Environmental impacts Environmental impacts such as the loss of wind energy that drives the ocean upwelling which is the central feature of ocean ecology in the area remain to be evaluated in the future. The amount of money involved is staggering, hundreds of billions of dollars, so those credits – 20 percent for workforce and supply chain, and five percent each for offshore and onshore impacts – will represent large amounts of money to communities like Morro Bay and Humboldt. It’s not without significant risk, though. In mid-November, Shell, with partners China General Nuclear Power Group and France’s Caisse des dépôts et consignations (CDC) canceled a demonstration floating wind project offshore France. Shell’s statement cited ”technical, commercial and financial challenges” in the execution of the project as the main reasons for the decision to cancel the EUR 300 million, 28.5 MW Groix & Belle-Île pilot wind farm, Le Parisien reports.“ The economic conditions linked to the project have been significantly modified, calling into question, for all the partners of the consortium, the economic viability of the project,” Shell was quoted as saying in a statement. State regulators Representatives of California’s State Lands Commission and the Coastal Commission attended the San Francisco conference, supporting the projects. Governor Gavin Newsom is committed to floating offshore wind and the regulatory agencies are on board. All projects will be subjected to California's notoriously contentious permitting process, but the pressure is on to get turbines in the water by 2030. With the workforce development required – it will take as long as two years to train welders to the skill level needed – new port terminals to be constructed, and techniques for anchoring the turbines in such deep water refined, sussing out the risks of screwing it up is needed. Yurok Vice Chair Myers said, “The path to messing it up is just so wide. ”While the powers behind the idea and the money are moving forward, those communities that will be most affected are watching from the sidelines. “I’m afraid that it will be just such a bright, shiny object that it will distract us from the changes we need to make,” one conference participant said privately. The question of whether this provides the solution California needs for its future power requirements, or if expenses and technical problems overwhelm it remains to be seen. We will keep you posted.

Progress continues on the controversial proposal to install a multi-billion dollar wind farm off the California coast. The five project areas will provide future power needs equivalent to the electricity produced by Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which was on schedule to be retired until this past legislative session. On November 21, PG&E received a federal grant of $1.1 billion to keep it operating for another five years.

Progress continues on the controversial proposal to install a multi-billion dollar wind farm off the California coast. The five project areas will provide future power needs equivalent to the electricity produced  by Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which was on schedule to be retired until this past legislative session. On November 21, PG&E received a federal grant of $1.1 billion to keep it operating for another five years. 

California’s deep waters, 3,000 feet, are three times as deep as any floating wind turbines have been launched. Forging into the unknown presents a number of concerns and promises that engineers, officials and citizens are weighing out. Leases to Outer Continental Land, needed to locate as many as 1,300 mega-sized wind turbines, will be auctioned off December 6. 

The process for building 2-5 GigaWatt offshore wind projects, producing more electricity than Diablo Canyon, gets underway with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s lease sale auction starting at 7 a.m. Pacific. They will warm up with a practice auction the day before. The auction could take two days to reach a conclusion and settle on five winning bidders.

The lease sale includes three Morro Bay areas, (80,062 acres, 80,418 acres, 80,418 acres), and two Humboldt areas, (673,338 acres and 69,031 acres) totaling 373,268 acres of the Outer Continental Shelf, 20-30 miles offshore. Forty-three bidders have qualified and ponied up the $5 million bid deposit to participate.

Bidding credits

Bids will be considered not only on amount of money, but also on how they propose to use the bidding credits. Bidders can qualify for up to 20 percent credit by committing to investing in workforce training and supply chain development.

They can also get up to five percent credit for a Lease Area Use Community Benefit Agreement and five percent for a General Community Benefit Agreement. CBAs are intended to mitigate potential impacts on- and offshore to communities, tribal, or other stakeholder groups and may assist fishing and related industries by supporting their resilience and ability to adapt to impacts that may arise from the development of the lease area.

A Lease Area Use CBA would be between the lessee and a community or stakeholder group “whose use of the geographic space of the Lease Area, or whose use of resources harvested from that geographic space, is directly impacted by the Lessee’s potential offshore wind development.”

The General CBA would be with communities, tribes, or stakeholder groups that are expected to be affected by the potential impacts on the marine, coastal, and/or human environment from activities resulting from lease development that are not otherwise addressed by the Lease Area Use CBA.

Eric Endersby, Morro Bay’s harbor director, sees how those credits can help the waterfront. “We are the closest port to the Morro Bay area, and we are a protected port, so it makes sense for the operations and maintenance boats to be coming and going out of Morro Bay,” he said in an interview. “There would be a lot of fuel sales, a lot of high-dollar, high-skilled jobs. The cable is coming into Morro Bay, through the grid system, so there’ll be that aspect to it. We see a revitalization of our working waterfront.”

Other ocean users

The leases require consideration of other users, from commercial fishing and Department of Defense national security to vessel speed requirements, use of low-energy geophysical survey equipment and coordinating with the Coastal Commission on plan submissions. 

Bidders know that BOEM has no authority to issue leases in national marine sanctuaries. The Morro Bay wind areas are adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and the proposed Chumash Heritage NMS.

Violet Sage Walker, chair of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, wrote in an op-ed in The Tribune, “The Northern Chumash Tribal Council advocates for marine conservation, equitable mitigation measures and fair community benefits. We believe offshore wind must coexist and cooperate with marine protections, and we see this as a unique opportunity for a collaborative effort, not a combative one.”

Frankie Myers, vice chair of the Yurok Tribe in Northern California, said at the Floating Wind USA 2022 conference in San Francisco, that the ocean is the last place his people have to pray. “We can’t go any further west,” he said. “What will our descendants see? Another colonial resource or a collaborative partner?”

Lines on a map are abstractions that are irrelevant to fisheries and tribal lands.

Full details are in the Final Sale Notice

National and state goals

The West Coast Floating Offshore Wind projects, with a goal of 4.5 GW of power by 2030, are part of the Biden administration’s goal for Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, a commitment to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and at least 25 gigawatts of onshore renewable energy by 2025.

The state of California has set a target of 2-5 GW of offshore wind power by 2030 and 25 GW by 2045. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant’s two units combined produce 2.2 GW. Although intended to be retired in 2024 and 2025, in 2022 the legislature extended the plant’s licenses five years. 

New port terminals needed

Ten additional port terminals along California’s coast will be required to support the projects. None of California’s current ports is large enough or strong enough to support the wind turbine staging and fabrication. Terminals may be located in existing ports such as Long Beach and San Francisco, but construction of entirely new ports may be required. 

Building the turbines

Turbines are 1,100 feet tall on a base 425 feet wide. About 1,300 are projected to be installed in the West Coast projects.  The size of the turbines presents problems yet unsolved, including moving the assembled turbines from the manufacturing facility into the water. It could take two weeks or longer to tow them out to the site where they will be tethered. 

The size and complications of constructing the turbines and setting them in place presents risks that are difficult to evaluate and insure. “What keeps me up at night is a project that is uninsurable,” one insurance executive said.

Deeper waters, bigger ships

Hanson Wood, regional senior vice president for development in the West Region, EDF Renewables, said that although technical lessons have been learned from projects in Asia, there is no precedent for a wind project in California’s depths, around 3,000 feet.

The chains tethering the turbines to sea floor anchors could put marine mammals at risk by catching drifting fishing gear and ensnaring them. The area is known as the Blue Serengeti for its migration routes of whales and seals.

A ship large enough to transport the turbine parts, in compliance with U.S. Jones Law, is under construction in Texas. The 472-foot-long Charybdis is estimated to cost around $500 million.

Humboldt has already received a grant for $10.5 million to renovate its facilities into the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Marine Terminal, which will be capable of handling large heavy cargo vessels, offshore wind floating platform development and integration and decommissioning, and other maritime activities.

Developing the Central Coast wind area could create around 15,000 new jobs, according to a report on the economic impact by REACH Central Coast and Cal Poly. 

Environmental impacts

Environmental impacts such as the loss of wind energy that drives the ocean upwelling which is the central feature of ocean ecology in the area remain to be evaluated in the future. 

The amount of money involved is staggering, hundreds of billions of dollars, so those credits – 20 percent for workforce and supply chain, and five percent each for offshore and onshore impacts – will represent large amounts of money to communities like Morro Bay and Humboldt.

It’s not without significant risk, though. In mid-November, Shell, with partners China General Nuclear Power Group and France’s Caisse des dépôts et consignations (CDC) canceled a demonstration floating wind project offshore France. Shell’s statement cited ”technical, commercial and financial challenges” in the execution of the project as the main reasons for the decision to cancel the EUR 300 million, 28.5 MW Groix & Belle-Île pilot wind farm, Le Parisien reports.

“The economic conditions linked to the project have been significantly modified, calling into question, for all the partners of the consortium, the economic viability of the project,” Shell was quoted as saying in a statement.

State regulators 

Representatives of California’s State Lands Commission and the Coastal Commission attended the San Francisco conference, supporting the projects. Governor Gavin Newsom is committed to floating offshore wind and the regulatory agencies are on board.

All projects will be subjected to California's notoriously contentious permitting process, but the pressure is on to get turbines in the water by 2030. With the workforce development required – it will take as long as two years to train welders to the skill level needed – new port terminals to be constructed, and techniques for anchoring the turbines in such deep water refined, sussing out the risks of screwing it up is needed. 

Yurok Vice Chair Myers said, “The path to messing it up is just so wide.”

While the powers behind the idea and the money are moving forward, those communities that will be most affected are watching from the sidelines. 

“I’m afraid that it will be just such a bright, shiny object that it will distract us from the changes we need to make,” one conference participant said privately.

The question of whether this provides the solution California needs for its future power requirements, or if expenses and technical problems overwhelm it remains to be seen. We will keep you posted.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of
Christine Heinrichs, Moffat & Nichol, NREL, and Humboldt Bay Wind Port
Christine Heinrichs

Christine Heinrichs writes from her home on California’s Central Coast. She keeps a backyard flock of about a dozen hens. She follows coastal issues, writing a regular column on the Piedras Blancas elephant seal rookery for the San Luis Obispo Tribune. Her narrative on the Central Coast condor flock will appear in Ten Spurs 2021 edition.

Her book, How to Raise Chickens, was first published in 2007, just as the local food movement was starting to focus attention on the industrial food system. Backyard chickens became the mascot of local food. The third edition of How to Raise Chickens was published in January 2019. The Backyard Field Guide to Chickens was published in 2016. Look for them in Tractor Supply stores and online.

She has a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Oregon and belongs to several professional journalism and poultry organizations.

Is the future of energy ... pouring water on hot rocks in the ground?

Fervo’s test well in Nevada. | Fervo Energy Geothermal’s “breakthrough,” and the challenges ahead, explained. If you read about the energy industry in the ’00s and ’10s, you probably caught some excited, hopeful stories about geothermal, the renewable energy source that harnesses heat hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. “Enhanced geothermal” — a novel approach in which fluids are poured deep underground, heat up, and then are recovered for their steam heat and used to generate electricity — got particular attention, because it promised a geothermal technique that could work most places on earth, not just in volcanic areas like Iceland or Indonesia.Enhanced geothermal is “increasingly being eyed as an enormous potential source of pollution-free energy,” science journalist David Biello wrote all the way back in 2008. Enhanced geothermal has “often been touted as the answer to the tepid growth of the geothermal industry,” reporter Megan Geuss wrote in Ars Technica in 2014, already with a bit of jaded weariness that the promises were yet unfulfilled. Startups like AltaRock Energy got press for their promises of a clean energy source, deployable in any geography, that still worked when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing.But as of 2022, a mere 0.4 percent of US electricity generation came from geothermal. That’s some eight times less than solar, 25 times less than wind, and 45 times less than nuclear. If that weren’t depressing enough, consider those numbers still meant the US produced more geothermal electricity than any other country that year, even surpassing heavily volcanic Indonesia.But some significant breakthroughs have recently earned geothermal renewed attention. Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal company, announced that it was able to build and run a well in Nevada for 30 days, generating 3.5 megawatts of power. That’s not a lot (a typical natural gas power block produces over 800 megawatts), and it’s still much more expensive to produce than solar or gas power, but it’s the furthest an enhanced geothermal project has gotten to date. Last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a major initiative promising to slash the cost of geothermal generation by 90 percent by 2035. That announcement put the current cost at about $450 per megawatt-hour, compared to around $30 to $50 for onshore wind and solar. On one reading, geothermal is finally getting the private finance, the technical progress, and the government support it needs to thrive. But having read the old press, I had a more pessimistic reaction. Is this turning point for geothermal for real, or just more hype? And if it is for real, what took so long? We have known for decades that geothermal has the potential to provide carbon-free energy that, unlike rapidly growing wind and solar, is constantly available, which we desperately need. Why, then, is its market share still stuck at 0.4 percent? What went wrong, and how can we fix it?Why enhanced geothermal is promising, and why it hasn’t happened yetThe crust of the earth (the outer layer on top of which we all live) contains a lot of heat, ultimately generated by the radioactive decay of elements in the mantle, which sits below the crust. So beneath us, at all times, are deep rock formations with regular temperatures far hotter than those above ground. In certain locations, these rock formations also contain considerable amounts of fluid (mostly water with some salts in it). When these boiling fluid reservoirs burst through the surface, they appear as hot springs. Franco Origlia/Getty Images A geothermal plant in Larderello, Italy, the first place such a power plant was ever constructed. Those sources have provided heat for centuries, and in 1904 the first successful effort to use this liquid to spin a turbine for electrical generation occurred in Italy. A key limitation, though, is that most areas of the earth do not have easily accessible and/or sufficiently large reservoirs for this kind of “hydrothermal” system to work. Iceland runs largely on geothermal, but it’s very much the exception, and a beneficiary of an unusual geology that leads to a volcanic eruption every five years on average.This has provoked a search for geothermal methods that are not limited to places with existing, accessible reservoirs of water underground. Perhaps the most famous is “enhanced geothermal” (EGS), which Fervo and other companies are pursuing. The idea here is to drill deep into the earth, pour in a liquid to be heated by the hot rocks down there, and then provide a way for steam or very hot water to exit, either to use directly for heat or to spin a turbine.If successful, this approach would mean that geothermal plants could be built in a wide range of areas, with many different geologies. That would provide a useful source of low-carbon “base load” power: a source, like hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants or most coal plants, that produces a consistent electric output all the time. That would be invaluable in moments when intermittent sources like solar and wind are insufficient to meet energy demand. In the mid-’00s, experts believed that we had the technical tools to vastly scale up enhanced geothermal. A panel report released in 2006 by an MIT-led team concluded, “Most of the key technical requirements to make EGS work economically over a wide area of the country are in effect, with remaining goals easily within reach.” But in the 17 subsequent years, surprisingly little progress has been made.Jefferson Tester, then a professor at MIT and now at Cornell, chaired the panel behind that report. When I asked him what happened, he pointed me to the report’s recommendations: accelerated permitting and licensing for geothermal projects, loan guarantees for businesses, tax credits and portfolio standards like those that benefit wind and solar, large investment from the Department of Energy (DOE) in setting up demonstrations in a large number of locations. Very little of that actually happened — and the problem is that very little isn’t enough to get geothermal going.“The scale of geothermal is such you can’t do it just by putting up a solar collector or one wind turbine somewhere,” he explains. “You have to do it at a reasonably higher scale, which means there has to be more net money put in at the front end to drill holes and to evaluate that resource.” Compare geothermal to solar power. A solar plant is just an array of individual solar panels, each of which might cost a few thousand dollars. It’s totally doable for a small company without much capital to build out a single panel and show that it works — which is precisely what’s happened, as solar generation grew globally from around 1 TWh in 2000 to nearly 1,300 TWh in 2022.Geothermal drilling operations, by contrast, are massive, much more expensive endeavors. The largest federally supported demonstration, the FORGE project in Utah, has an initial budget of $220 million, with another $115 million in funding expected. That is well outside the budget of most energy startups, and the kind of thing where government support is usually necessary. Part of why Fervo’s breakthrough raised so many eyebrows is that, according to company claims, most of its funding is private. CEO Tim Latimer says the company has raised over $200 million to date, only a small share of it from DOE. Getting that level of funding for a geothermal endeavor is highly unusual.There have been occasional bursts of federal interest in supporting the technology, but they’ve been partial and abortive. The 2009 Obama stimulus included $368.2 million earmarked for the Geothermal Technologies Office at DOE, but negative headlines followed when some supported projects struggled. Although the loan guarantees actually wound up being profitable, they earned huge Republican opposition in Congress that prevented the program from continuing. Throughout the 2010s, the investment tax credit (ITC) included in the corporate income tax as a subsidy to clean energy offset 30 percent of the cost of solar and wind projects, but only 10 percent for geothermal.“By the early 2010s, natural gas prices got really cheap, solar prices got really cheap, and the market support for geothermal basically evaporated,” Latimer told me. “The irony is that tech for drilling got really good by the early 2010s,” as fracking transformed the oil and gas sector, helping drive those cheap natural gas prices. “But there was no investment or market demand for geothermal. It was this cool technology that just had nowhere to go.”The typical tools used for supporting renewable energy also might not work as well with geothermal. The loan guarantee program, for example, is primarily for projects ready for commercialization, with minimal technical progress needed — just add money. “What they fund meets a certain threshold of proven commercial viability,” Arnab Datta, a senior counsel at Employ America who has studied policy barriers to geothermal, tells me. That doesn’t describe most enhanced geothermal, where commercial viability hasn’t yet been shown.Equity investments — which provide more upside for investors if a project succeeds while minimizing risk for companies should they fail — might work well, but government accounting rules treat such investments as grants and assume they will never make back any money. Normally, government budgeting operates on a cash flow basis, and in an equity investment, the only cash flow at the time of investment is from the government to the firm in which the government bought equity. But the effect is that even government offices authorized to make such investments are hesitant to do so, knowing they will never be credited, either politically or in their future budgets, for any money earned.Is geothermal finally turning around? Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images A geothermal drill tower in Szaflary, Poland, which is aiming to make the deepest geothermal borehole in the world. Fervo’s bet is that progress in drilling technology due to the fracking revolution in oil and gas has changed the dynamics that have historically held geothermal back. Historically, geothermal projects have involved drilling vertically downward. But fracking has made horizontal drilling cheaper, which enabled a different approach Fervo is using: drilling vertical wells several hundred meters apart, and connecting them underground through horizontal drilling. They argue this lets them move fluid along a larger segment of rock underground, producing more steam and making the well more efficient.Fervo claims its system is ready for commercialization: It just needs to scale up the test well that it’s already shown works, and it’ll be in business.Still, there are hang-ups. Geothermal drilling, unlike some oil and gas projects, is subject to challenge under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which can lead to years-long regulatory delays in getting projects off the ground. (Yes, you’ve read that right — it’s legally easier to permit an oil or gas well that will add further greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than it is to drill geothermal wells that can provide near-zero-carbon electricity.) Adding in a “categorical exclusion” for geothermal, similar to that for oil and gas, could help a bit. So too would directing some of the resources in the Inflation Reduction Act and the 2022 infrastructure law toward geothermal projects in the stage between speculative R&D and full-scale commercialization.“Theoretically, the place that should be doing this is the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which has about $25 billion,” Datta says. “But that doesn’t have the authority yet to fund exactly this type of thing.” It would need more direct authority from Congress to deploy that money for large-scale geothermal demonstrations. Even before that, though, it could offer the kinds of creative funding mechanisms it has used to promote the hydrogen industry, which are already authorized, to geothermal companies.Some critics are also worried that enhanced geothermal is not as ready for primetime as boosters like Latimer claim. “I think Fervo has done an incredible job of raising money, getting customers, raising awareness, etc.,” Austin Vernon, an engineer who writes extensively on geothermal, told me in an email. “But if you read their paper they were losing 10-20 percent of the fluid they circulated. The cost of that water would be more than the electricity is worth in most wholesale markets.”Worse, he claims, “if you are losing that much fluid in the granite you are almost certainly going to induce seismicity on longer time horizons.” This is not a theoretical concern. In 2017, a geothermal project in South Korea caused a 5.5 magnitude earthquake, which luckily did not kill anyone but did cause dozens of injuries. A sizable enough earthquake problem could not only doom specific geothermal pilots but also lead to a perception of the whole technology as dangerous.Fervo, naturally, disputes these critiques. The 10 to 20 percent figure, Fervo’s Latimer tells me, “is actually a positive result and good news for project viability as the number will only decline from there.” He disputes the notion that this “leakoff” will result in increased seismic risk, because Fervo’s projects “bring injected fluid back to the surface, limiting stress state changes.”Vernon is more optimistic about “closed loop” systems, like the one the company Eavor is building in Germany, in which horizontal drilling is used to place an enclosed pipe that runs from one well to another. That way, the fluid is never released directly into the rock, meaning you don’t need to worry about losing it or it causing earthquake problems; he notes that Fervo itself could easily pivot to this kind of system. Even without liquid concerns, Vernon argues that geothermal’s niche will be in providing hot water directly to heat buildings (like a massive underground radiator) or provide steam to factories, rather than producing electricity, given the efficiency losses involved in converting steam to electricity. Useful, but not exactly world-changing. The ultimate dream is “superhot rock energy.” wherein geothermal firms would drill 4 kilometers or even deeper into the earth’s crust, to the point where the surrounding rocks exceed 400 degrees Celsius (752º F). At this temperature, and sufficient pressures, water goes “supercritical”: Liquid water and steam become indistinguishable and hold more energy, which enables turbines to operate much more efficiently. That could make electricity generation much more viable. “Imagine if you could drill down next to a coal plant and get steam that’s hot enough to power that plant’s turbines,” the CEO of Quaise, a startup attempting to develop this technology, told the New York Times’s Brad Plumer. (The reason coal plants burn coal, after all, is to generate steam to power electric turbines, which is why coal and natural gas and, for that matter, nuclear plants are all known as thermal power plants.) “Replacing coal at thousands of coal plants around the world. That’s the level of geothermal we’re trying to unlock.” This vision is incredibly exciting, because it offers the promise of ultra-low-cost, ultra-abundant zero-carbon energy basically anywhere on earth, a form that could seamlessly fit into existing energy infrastructure. It would mean not just cleaner energy, but more energy. Vernon and analyst Eli Dourado wrote a report laying out what the economy could look like with ultra-abundant geothermal, nuclear, or solar power: It includes things like vertical farming (enabling massive food production on a tiny land footprint), intercontinental travel via rocket, and mass desalination to end water scarcity around the world. It’s all very sci-fi.For the time being, the “fi” part still applies: We simply do not have the technology to drill deep enough to access this geothermal resource right now at a reasonable cost. (The deepest hole ever drilled in the earth, the 7.6 mile/12.2km Kola Superdeep Borehole in the Russian Arctic, took decades before ultimately being abandoned.)What super-deep drilling, Fervo’s enhanced geothermal project, Eavor’s “closed loop” project, and every other next-gen geothermal project have in common is a need for patient capital investment, perhaps through government subsidy. There are major steps needed to make that happen, but they tend to be fairly technocratic: empowering more equity investments from the Energy Department, offering a categorical exclusion to geothermal projects, empowering the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration to spend big on geothermal. They seem, in other words, like the kinds of things that even a divided Congress might be able to make happen, not ridiculous pie-in-the-sky aspirations.If the economics can be made to work, geothermal would provide a renewable energy source that’s always on, and that employs plenty of ex-oil and gas workers, to boot. That has been its promise for decades. Maybe the 2020s will end up being the time that promise is finally fulfilled.

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