In its new paper, Eavor said it encountered significant challenges in drilling its first eight of twelve lateral wells, which took over 100 days to complete — a major expense in an industry where drilling rigs can cost about $100,000 a day to run. But the company said it improved its techniques and adapted its equipment in ways that reduced the drilling time for the remaining four wells by 50%.
For example, Eavor said it successfully deployed an insulated drill pipe technology, which can actively cool drilling tools even as they encounter increasingly hotter conditions underground and helps to increase drilling speed. The adjustments also enabled Eavor to triple the length of time its drill bit could run before wearing out, further reducing downtime during the operation.
On top of cutting drilling time and costs, these improvements should also pave a path to boosting Eavor’s thermal-energy output per loop by about 35%, Vany said.
The Germany project will be the first commercial system of its kind when it starts producing power later this year. But other next-generation approaches — like the enhanced geothermal systems that Fervo is building in Utah and operating in Nevada — are also scaling up.
Enhanced geothermal involves fracturing rocks and pumping down liquids to create artificial reservoirs. The hot rocks directly heat the liquids, which return to the surface to make steam. This approach is relatively more efficient at extracting heat from the ground, but it can also raise the risk of inducing earthquakes or affecting groundwater — though experts say that’s unlikely to happen in well-managed projects. In places that ban fracking, like Germany, closed-loop systems can still move forward.
But the closed-loop design has trade-offs of its own, said Jeff Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University and the principal scientist for Cornell’s Earth Source Heat project. Namely, the pipes can limit the transfer of heat from the underground rocks to the fluids inside the pipe, which in turn limits how much energy a system can produce.
“While companies developing closed-loop systems can make them work, the main challenge they face is for fluid temperatures and flow rates to be high enough to pay off economically,” Tester said. “You can get energy out of the ground; it’s just, how much can you sustainably and affordably produce from a single closed-loop well connection?”
Vany said that Eavor’s modeling shows its technology is already in line with the “levelized cost of heat” in Europe, which estimates the average cost of providing a unit of heat over the lifetime of the project. That figure can fluctuate between $50 and $100 per megawatt-hour thermal in the region’s volatile energy market, she said.
“After we’ve drilled those first four loops, we will be at the bottom of the learning curve,” Vany added. “And that’s the purpose of the Geretsried project.”
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Great Job Maria Gallucci & the Team @ Canary Media Source link for sharing this story.
