If you haven’t already, go and skim the WIRED characteristic article “A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet,” which particulars the hunt to faucet into geothermal power utilizing drilling strategies initially developed for fracking fuel.

WIRED senior author Gregory Barber adopted Joseph Moore, a geologist on the University of Utah, on his quest to work out tips on how to drill down hundreds of toes into sizzling, dense granite, earlier than utilizing water to extract geothermal power.

I requested Barber to inform me extra concerning the story, and whether or not “enhanced” geothermal methods (EGS) are actually going to uncork a clean-energy bonanza.

Will Knight: I actually loved the story. Tell me the way you first got here throughout the know-how on the coronary heart of it.

Gregory Barber: I initially heard about it as a result of I used to be trying into geothermal heating methods. These are a lot shallower, easy-to-access methods that straight warmth properties and companies utilizing warmed-up water. They’re getting way more well-liked as individuals attempt to kick pure fuel, particularly in Europe. But anyway, in the middle of studying about this, I heard a couple of large Department of Energy experiment centered on electrical energy era utilizing enhanced geothermal methods, which requires way more costly, deeper drilling to entry increased temperatures. And they’d simply picked a workforce out in Utah to take it on.

Why is it taking place now? As you say, geothermal power has been a factor for many years.

I feel it displays the confluence of some issues. One being 20 years of the fracking increase, which yielded large enhancements within the artwork of drilling deep down and cracking open rocks—particularly the new and arduous rocks related to creating geothermal methods. It was once that you simply’d spend thousands and thousands of {dollars} drilling down after which crack the rock and notice—oops!—the cracks did not open absolutely, otherwise you drilled right into a hidden fault and misplaced your water and even worse, triggered an earthquake. Nowadays the dangers of which might be a lot decrease.

You are writing loads about efforts to mitigate local weather change with various power and options like carbon seize. How optimistic are you about these tasks?

I feel there are helpful purposes, however the battle is all the time in how these fuels will probably be used and the way they’re produced. There’s a perennial debate round biofuels, for instance, which add to greenhouse fuel emissions by taking on land that may very well be wild. And what in the event that they merely forestall the electrical transition? For carbon seize, it is a related story. So far, outfitting coal vegetation with that know-how has been ludicrously costly—it is a lot better to simply shut them down and put up photo voltaic panels. Plus, previous experiments have failed to totally seize the carbon popping out of them. And you have gotta make certain that no matter fuel goes underground goes to remain there for hundreds of years. Sometimes it jogs my memory a bit bit concerning the debate round underground storage for radioactive waste. It’s arduous to ensure issues over generations.

Given that photo voltaic and wind require much less price upfront, do you suppose the extra steady nature of EGS is sufficient for it to take off? Or can we merely want each method attainable if we’ll kick fossil fuels?

That’s actually the query. Most consultants agree that baseload energy that may be turned on 24/7 is important transferring ahead. Solar and wind are fairly space-intensive, and constructing them out goes to get trickier as we run out of optimum locations for them. While batteries assist, it is not probably the most environment friendly method to do issues.

The query is whether or not EGS will probably be kind of sensible than constructing a nuclear plant or a dam or putting in carbon seize at a pure fuel plant. There are good causes to suppose it is going to be—particularly should you consider security and ecological issues offered by the options—but it surely’s early.

I’d additionally observe that the massive promise of EGS is that you are able to do it “anywhere,” however in fact, sure areas will probably be extra geologically interesting than others, at the least initially. So whereas it guarantees to be much less ecologically harmful than present geothermal vegetation, which might dry up sizzling springs and hurt distinctive species, it is not inherently freed from these conflicts.