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0 pointsAnimats4mo ago0 comments

> Drilling is one of those things which used to be extremely expensive but has very gradually come down in price. Thanks, ironically, to the oil industry. It's unsexy because there's no "silver bullet" waiting in the wings. It's also quite hard to find suitably hot rocks suitably close to the surface.

That's basically it. Most geothermal plants today are in locations where there are hot rocks, maybe geysers, close to the surface. "Deep geothermal" gets talked about, because temperatures high enough for steam are available almost everywhere if you can drill 3,000 meters down. There are very few wells in the world that deep, not counting horizontal drilling runs.

The economics are iffy. You drill one of the most expensive wells ever drilled, and you get a medium-pressure steam line. Average output is tens of megawatts.[1]

[1] https://pangea.stanford.edu/ERE/db/GeoConf/papers/SGW/2020/A...

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hluska4mo ago

The economics change when you’re in oil country. My beautiful little province has oil wells drilled between 250 and 2900 metres. Due to corporate ‘issues’ many of these wells are orphaned and remediation becomes a provincial problem. With deep holes and provincially owned electricity and gas companies, geothermal makes more economic sense; it’s robbing a benefit from a big cost centre.

I went to high school with two guys who are working on geothermal as a means to remediate orphan wells. I’m biased in their favour, but the numbers make a lot of sense.

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