Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy

Landsvirkjun, who had financed much of the IDDP’s work, decided he needed financial support to drill more exploratory wells. “We said, ‘We’re just a small energy company in Iceland,’” Palsson told me. But he made his research available to the international scientific community, and attracted intermittent interest from the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and New Zealand. “That’s where we are right now, trying to fund it as a science project that can also benefit the energy industry,” Palsson said.

On the way back to the airport, we saw ptarmigans and black stone cairns marking trails that stretched as far as the eye could see. Iceland’s transition to a country powered almost entirely by renewable energy may seem fantastic, and the landscape reinforces this impression. Because Iceland is unique in many ways: this solitary species of Arctic char! these little horses with their tölt!– one may have the impression that geothermal energy is a niche activity, as opposed to one that is technically and economically feasible in places where volcanic eruptions are not part of the daily forecast. But this feeling is outdated and misleading.

Geothermal energy is underdeveloped and its initial costs can be high, but it is still used and, once installed, is cheap and durable. The dream of geothermal energy is to meet humanity’s energy demand at an affordable price, without exploiting horses for power, without slaughtering whales for their oil, or without burning fossil fuels. The planet’s heat could be used to pasteurize milk, heat dormitories or light a baseball stadium for a night game.

At over five thousand degrees Celsius, the Earth’s core is about as hot as the surface of the sun. On the Earth’s surface, the temperature is around fourteen degrees. But in some places, like Iceland, the ground underfoot is much warmer. Hot springs, geysers and volcanoes are signs on the surface of the Earth’s hell. Some say that Dante’s description of Hell was inspired by the landscape of sulfurous vapor plumes discovered in the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany.

Snow monkeys and humans have used the Earth’s heated waters as baths for ages. In the Azores, a local dish, cozido de las furnasis cooked by burying a clay pot in hot volcanic soil; In Iceland, bread is still sometimes baked this way. The first geothermal energy generator was built in the Devil’s Valley, in 1904, by Prince Piero Ginori Conti of Trevignano, who extracted borax from the region and thought of using the steam coming out of mining drilling. The generator initially powered five light bulbs. Soon after, it supplied the railway system of central Italy and some villages. The geothermal complex is still in operation today and provides 1 to 2 percent of Italy’s energy. In the United States, the first geothermal power plant was built in 1921, in northern California, in an area filled with geysers that one surveyor described as the gates of Hell. This plant powered a nearby resort hotel and is also still in use.

“So, anyway, tell me something about yourself.”

Cartoon by Avi Steinberg

There are no gates of Hell anywhere. It is considerably warmer one kilometer underground in Kamchatka than one kilometer underground in Kansas. There is also readily available geothermal energy in Kenya (where it provides almost fifty percent of the country’s energy), New Zealand (about twenty percent), and the Philippines (about fifteen percent), all volcanic areas located along tectonic faults. But in less Hadean landscapes, the costs and uncertainties of drilling deep in search of sufficient heat have hampered development. This partly explains why, in the area of ​​clean energy, geothermal energy is often either absent from the list or mentioned under the “other” heading. For decades, private and government investment in geothermal energy was virtually negligible.

This has now changed. Over the past five years, in North America, more than a billion and a half dollars have been invested in geothermal technologies. This is a modest amount for the energy sector, but it is also an exponential increase. In May 2021, Google signed a contract with Texas-based geothermal company Fervo to power its data centers and infrastructure in Nevada; Meta signed a similar deal with Texas-based Sage for a data center east of the Rocky Mountains, and with a company called XGS for a data center in New Mexico. Microsoft co-develops $1 billion geothermal data center in Kenya; Amazon has installed geothermal heating in its newly built distribution center in Japan. (Geothermal energy allows companies to avoid the uncertainties of the power grid.) Under the Biden administration, the geothermal industry finally received the same type of tax credits given to wind and solar power, and under the current Trump administration, it received the same type of expedited permits given to oil and gas. Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, spoke at a conference on geothermal energy and told a MAGA-like a sign that said “MAGMA (Making America Geothermal: Modern Advances),” that even though geothermal has not yet “taken off, it should and it can.” Depending on who you talk to, either it’s strange that suddenly everyone is talking about geothermal, or it’s strange that there’s a competitive energy source with bipartisan appeal that no one is talking about.

Scientific work that has been abandoned or forgotten can return – sometimes through unintentional repetition, other times through deliberate recovery. In the early 1970s, the U.S. government funded a program at Los Alamos to develop geothermal energy systems that did not require proximity to geysers or volcanoes. Two connected wells were constructed: in one, water was sent into hot, dry fractured rocks; on the other, the steam resulting from the meeting of the water with the rock emerged. In 1973, Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which aimed to develop energy sources other than fossil fuels. “But when Reagan came to power, he changed things,” Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University who was involved in the Los Alamos project, told me. The price of oil had fallen and support for geothermal energy had dissipated. “People felt like it was a failure,” Tester said. “I think if they looked a little closer, they would see that a lot of the knowledge gained in those early years could have been used to take advantage of what’s happening now. »