I’ve been to Iceland and seen geothermal in action powering a data center. It is a dream to have geothermal in the USA for a data center given the lack of availability, but tracking is arriving to improve geothermal performance.
The economist posts on the state of geothermal in the USA.
DEPENDING on your point of view, hydraulic fracturing—or “fracking”—is either the future of clean, natural gas or an environmental apocalypse. Fracking liberates gas trapped underground by drilling sideways from vertical well-shafts into horizontal layers of shale rock. Millions of gallons of a cocktail of water, sand and chemicals are injected into the horizontal wells at high pressure, fracturing the shale, releasing the gas—and causing violent protests in Europe and parts of America.
It looks like the industry will have chances within a year or two.
The sticking-point, says Susan Petty, AltaRock’s founder, is commercialisation. Geothermal is a steady source of energy (unlike windpower), has very high capacity-utilisation rates, zero fuel costs and near-zero greenhouse-gas emissions. The trouble is that successful existing geothermal plants do not need EGS, and for many failed wells it is uneconomic to introduce it. So with the help of an as-yet unnamed partner, AltaRock plans to buy up existing fields that it thinks it could make profitable using its version of EGS. That way it will avoid the costs of new infrastructure while demonstrating its technology’s viability.
The energy department reckons that EGS techniques could be commercially viable as soon as next year, at which point more private investors and perhaps utilities might pile in. It is not alone in its optimism: Germany, France and Britain have state research programmes for EGS.
