For $1 billion over the next 40 years, the U.S. could develop 100 gigawatts (a gigawatt equals one billion watts) of electricity generation that emits no air pollution and pumps out power to the grid even more reliably than coal-fired power plants, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now Google.org—the charitable wing of the search engine giant—has chipped in nearly $11 million for this renewable resource: so-called geothermal power, or tapping the Earth's heat to make electricity.

That makes Google.org the largest funder of enhanced geothermal research in the country, outspending the U.S. government. The Australian government has pledged $43.5 million for such projects and already has several in the works, as do Europe and Japan.

But no such advanced geothermal plants are online in the U.S. at present, and may not be for many years to come. No one has successfully completed all the steps—or demonstrated all the technologies—needed to drill deep beneath the surface, fracture the rock, pump water or other fluids down into the ground to absorb the interior heat, and then bring it to the surface. Once topside, the hot water can be used to make steam to turn turbines and produce electricity.

"We think we can open up fractures, that's not a problem. You can certainly drill wells and directionally. You can convert the hot water into steam," says chemical engineer Jefferson Tester of M.I.T., who co-authored a report detailing the promise of so-called enhanced geothermal systems (EGS). "It gets down to good well connectivity."



"The fireball that sits within the Earth is a resource," said geothermal evangelist Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, president of Iceland, a country now largely heated and powered by the Earth's heat, at the Geothermal Development and Finance Workshop on July 23 in New York City. "We walk on it, we sleep on it, we work on it; the question is: How do we harness it?"

Google.org hopes that Sausalito, Calif.–based AltaRock Energy can begin to develop the answer with the $6.25 million it is investing in the company. The challenge is steep for such power-producing technology. That is because rather than relying on areas where Earth's heat comes close to the surface—such as The Geysers geothermal formation in California and similar resources that provide nearly 3,000 megawatts of power at present in the U.S.—AltaRock and companies like it would actually drill deep into the Earth, fracture the subterranean rock to create a reservoir, and then pump fluid through the repository to capture the surrounding geothermal heat.

"The geology is very important," says Paul Thomsen, public policy manager for conventional geothermal outfit, Ormat Technologies in Reno, Nev. "The deeper you drill, the more expensive it is. Geology brings magma and heat closer to the surface in the western U.S. If we could drill deeper, then we could move east."

Mastering said drilling is why Google.org also invested $4 million into Potter Drilling, a Redwood City, Calif., enterprise built from EGS drilling work done at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico during the last oil crisis in the 1970s. As it stands, the oil and gas industry routinely drills wells of more than 18,000 feet—nearly 3.5 miles, or 5.5 kilometers—which would "essentially unlock the entire country" to produce geothermal power, said Dan Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org and former assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, at the same conference.

But that also means that would-be geothermal companies are competing with the flush oil and gas industry for drilling rigs. "There are roughly 1,900 drilling rigs in the U.S.," added Lou Capuano of ThermaSource, another geothermal drilling outfit, at the conference. "Seven, maybe up to 11 now, are geothermal."

And, even if the rigs become available, it remains unclear just exactly what is lurking where under the surface. Maps for geothermal potential have not been updated since 1974 despite more than a million new oil and gas wells in the interim offering more data. So Google.org is also giving $489,521 to Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory to update the resource maps.

"EGS is not for tomorrow," adds Lucien Bronicki, Ormat's co-founder and chief technology officer. "You have to reduce the cost of drilling to be able to go deep. You have to improve the efficiency of the pumps so you don't lose too much electricity pumping water around."

But for Google, one of the world's largest consumers of energy for its endlessly multiplying data centers, access to a googol's worth of clean energy is quite appealing. "EGS is a very exciting opportunity," Reichert adds. "We have a long way to go to bring it to commercial reality."

14 Comments

1. 1. srland@4fast.net 11:02 PM 8/20/08

   Very sweet forward thinking.
   I always wondered why an laser could not be used to drill. Lots of power would be needed to vaporize the tailings.
   Really I dig what google is doing.

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2. 2. kiwichick 01:03 AM 8/21/08

   check out Australia at least 6 companies developing Hotrock geothermal

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3. 3. frgough 11:51 AM 8/21/08

   But, wait a minute. We have been repeatedly told that if you can't see results for at least 7 years, there is no point in any drilling at all.

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4. 4. David M. Clemen 02:14 PM 8/21/08

   The statement that Iceland is "...a country now largely heated and powered by the Earth's heat..." is totally false. Iceland obtains 83% of its electrical power from hydroelectric power plants, and 17% from Geothermal power plants. (Reference Hydro Review magazine, June 2004).
   
   I do like geothermal power sources because they do not burn fossil fuels, and therfore have zero emissions; and they are reliable with a high availability rate. This is a big bonus when compared to wind & solar. However, the ability to determine the location of a "good"/reliable geothermal source is still as much art as science.

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5. 5. j.quasimodo 02:28 PM 8/21/08

   Worth a shot or Google wouldn't be investing -- surely they did the "due diligence" that their stockholders expect. One thought: there are a lot of oil wells that have all the reachable oil pumped out even after fracturing. The casings may go through some brackish water-filled strata on the way down. If the casing were perforated at the right level, maybe that's all it takes to get some dirty steam. But wouldn't want to jeopardize a potable water stratum.

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6. 6. tpetscha 02:45 PM 8/21/08

   Iceland is currently drilling into high enthalpy magma zones, with each well possibly producing 50 MW as opposed to the the standard 5 MW per well. Iceland is only planning to drill 5 Km deep, but this is revolutionary since the temperature is so high, and the resource so hot. Contact Krafla power station in Iceland if you want more info.... this could be an epic development for stationary electrical sources.
   
   If the deep drilling was used in conjunction with a kalina cycle geothermal plant, efficiency would rise... but kalina cycle plants have had technical trouble and may still be many years away from being fully operational.

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7. 7. Atlon 06:51 PM 8/21/08

   I was thinking rather , pumping fluids thrue umps to deep in the ground why not use speciall fiber like fiber glass or some thing made with nano technoplogy to transport heat from below the surface to the ground .

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8. 8. Rickster 11:19 PM 8/21/08

   I know there is a lot of heat generated by the earth's interior...but was there not an article some time ago about how the earth's core will eventually cool. That would lead to the magnetic field dissapearing and the earth dying. I am just curious as to what the experts think the tapping of this heat and abnormall releasing it would do to speed up something like that.

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9. 9. elderlybloke 02:06 AM 8/23/08

   Dear Rickster,
   Any energy that we could possibly extract from drilling wells , compared to the energy in the earths core is so insignificant that it there is no need to worry about that.
   
   Consider the amount of energy that volcanoes bring up from a small magma chamber close to the surface.

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10. 10. Pish 10:08 AM 9/2/08

    Are they looking at drilling near Yellowstone ,where thermal resources should be abundently available.I should think that drilling horizontally from outside the park would allay environmentalist concerns.Pish

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11. 11. venkatesh 09:11 PM 2/26/10

    why not think about geo thermal cooling which has become popular nowadays especially in tropical coumtries?this initiative can help expand the spectrum of geothermal energy.

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12. 12. AtlanticGeothemal 12:35 AM 3/30/10

    The new geothermal electric technologies that our consortium is developing will help advance GeoVoltaic development significantly. Geothermal is the answer, although there is a lot of work still to be done. The Closed Loop Energy Mine (CLEM) Geothermal concept is attracting a lot of attention from potential investors. For more info see AtlanticGeothermal.com

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13. 13. max funston 11:47 PM 3/31/10

    Ideally tapping into magma centers would allow increased thermal diversion through tectonic overlapping. Many of their existing algorithms could be aligned to bring back results bringing them closer to their core followers.

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14. 14. DestroyingMagmaenergycorp in reply to David M. Clemen 12:14 PM 8/11/10

    Greetings from Iceland !
    It is close to 90 %, the houses which are heated by geothermal enrgy in my country of Iceland.
    The thing is, that we do not use the electricity to warm or heat the houses we use directlly the geothermal heat which has been used to drive the turbines and generators to produce the electricity.
    That heat is the heated water which runs through the electricity producing system.
    There are some variations of this fx. closed circulations and the used heat from the electricity generating pipesystem is used to heat water from another system which goes in to the city, towns and individual houses.
    
    The first houses in the capital city Reykjavik where systematically heated by direct geothemally heated water almost 100 years ago.
    Geothermal heat has however been used to heat farms and houses and pools or swimmingpools for hundreds of years though, to be exact, since the times of the Viking settlements 1100+ years ago.
    I have bathed in a specially "holied" or helgened pools which are that old and that is a special experience really.
    
    They are made in the simplest way by hewed rocks and laden very watertight in a circle whith seating design and water flow is adjusted from a creek and a hot water from a hot spring or a little bibbling hot pool pouring out from the earth, rock or moss, but they are not easy to find.
    
    With best of intentions however, I am sorry to say your statement is absolutely false !

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