As more and more attention turns to reducing carbon emissions from energy producers, experts are concentrating on the benefits of geothermal technology.
Recently, a group of researchers released “The Future of Geothermal in Texas: The Coming Century of Growth & Prosperity in the Lone Star State,” a report that heralds good news for the concept — especially for Texas energy producers.
Jamie Beard, lead author of the report, founder and executive director of Project InnerSpace, and former associate director, Cockrell Innovation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, highlighted geothermal’s “unique opportunity” to bring all types of stakeholders to the table who are typically very polarized.
Beard stated, “You have an environmental organization saying, ‘Yeah, cool, let’s do this!’ and we also have two major industries, oil and gas, saying, ‘Yeah, let’s do this!’ When does that ever happen? It’s a very rare moment when we have cats and dogs, right and left, and red states and blue states all agreeing on the same thing. We ought to grab that and run with it.”
Beard warned leaders not to expect a “perfect kum ba ya” transformation, but remains optimistic in geothermal’s ability to reach across the aisle, so to speak.
“There’s going to be some roundtabling and some real collaboration that we need to do, but geothermal is really unique in its ability to bring everybody together and find a pathway forward to beat carbonization.”
Report co-author Becky Schulz, energy supply and investment consultant with International Energy Agency (IEA) and secondment consultant with Shell, agreed with beard, and added that “geothermal is everywhere,” though has not yet been embraced as the game-changer she believes it to be.
“One of the major drawbacks of geothermal is that it’s not on the radar of the world. People assume that geothermal is only Iceland. It is assumed it is only in parts of the world where we can see it, and that is not the case,” she said. “Geothermal is everywhere in the world, beneath us. The only question is how deep we must go to get to it.”
Schulz emphasized that the oil and gas industry is “very well positioned” to help spread the geothermal good news via the industry’s technologies, learnings and expertise.
“Think of the very beginnings of oil and gas back in Spindletop; they were picking up oil and gas off the surface of the ground, in pumps,” she said. “Then they figured out if they drill, maybe there’s oil underground, and they did that. Now we’re drilling in 5,000 feet of water, offshore on billion-dollar, technically complex wells. That is what we can do with geothermal, and we can do it within the next few decades.”
Geophysicist and report co-author Ken Wisian, Ph.D., major general USAF (retired), studying geothermal systems for electricity generation at the University of Texas at Austin, said he believes oil and gas industry applications to geothermal have “tremendous potential for energy transfer in space and aerospace, especially on the electronics side with high temperatures and harsh environments.”
“Texas is already the leader in energy and the leader in space — both commercial and in government — so let’s bring those two together as we move out further into space and the permanent facilities on the moon and beyond,” he said. “Geothermal has great potential there, too.”
“We use so much natural gas in Texas,” noted report co-author Michael Webber, professor of energy resources, at the University of Texas at Austin and chief technology officer of Energy Impact Partners’ cleantech venture fund.
“If we can come up with other sources in Texas, like wind and solar and geothermal, for example, it backs out that amount of natural gas that we have to use, which frees up that gas so it can be used for other purposes,” Webber explained. “Particularly, we can export it to other states that might need it for reliability. We can also export it to our allies in Europe to help them get out from under the thumb of Russia. So, there’s a big national security/geopolitical benefit using geothermal to make more gas available for export.”
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