(Oil Price) – Geothermal could soon be the hottest new thing in the United States energy mix. The naturally clean energy source has traditionally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in the United States, which is an increasingly impressive feat for any item of legislative interest.
But while geothermal has a lot of things going for it – zero emissions, constant productivity – but it has a lot of hurdles to overcome before it becomes commercially competitive.
“To grow as a national solution, geothermal must overcome significant technical and non-technical barriers in order to reduce cost and risk,” says the introduction to a 2019 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) report — GeoVision: Harnessing the Heat Beneath Our Feet. “The subsurface exploration required for geothermal energy is foremost among these barriers, given the expense, complexity, and risk of such activities.”
Currently, geothermal energy accounts for just a tiny portion of the world’s total energy mix, representing just 0.5% of renewable energy globally. But a growing number of geothermal proponents are determined to grow the geothermal sector in the United States. Since one of the biggest hurdles to geothermal buildout is exploration, a nonprofit called Project Innerspace is launching an initiative to use the surface data of Google Maps to map out exactly what parts of the United States are most optimal for tapping into the heat from the Earth’s core.
The North American version of GeoMap, which was released in June of this year, includes over 150 layers of subsurface and surface data, allowing users to “explore and rank geothermal development opportunities utilizing factors like state and county boundaries, pollution point sources, transmission lines, heat and electricity demand, regulatory incentives, and techno-economic considerations” according to the organization’s website.
Those maps have revealed that there are widespread hot spots for potential geothermal access close to the surface of the earth across the United States, but particularly in the West. Texas in particular could be a major geothermal energy hub, with a hundred-mile-wide corridor of near-surface geothermal heat spanning from the Rio Grande Valley in northwestern Texas, passing Houston, and stretching all the way to Shreveport, Louisiana. Critically, the GeoMap shows that a huge number of military bases in the western United States are situated atop relatively easily exploitable geothermal resources. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Department of Defense is currently funding geothermal pilot projects at six military bases across the West.
There are also some critical hot spots in the colder and older East, but these are more isolated and anomalous. “There’s huge parts of Texas and the Gulf Coast that have far more potential than previously thought,” says Drew Nelson of Project Innerspace. “Parts of South Carolina and into West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York are some interesting hot spots.”
The hope is that this map will help kickstart a rapid interest in investing in a new wave of geothermal energy across the United States. “The next generation of geothermal is currently in its infancy, and the first few projects will be expensive and high-risk as the industry gets its feet under it,” the Hill reports. “The point of GeoMap […] is to help planners, researchers and the general public identify the lowest-hanging fruit: the places where the best geothermal resources lie closest to both the surface and the industries that demand it.”
Once investors take these low hanging fruit and run with it, the hope is that the industry will then progress toward ‘enhanced geothermal,’ which involves drilling deep into the earth using technology borrowed from the fracking industry. In this way, geothermal energy can be accessed from virtually anywhere on earth, instead of depending on the geographically unique places where heat already reaches close to the surface. While such projects are cost-prohibitive up front, the overhead would be relatively low, and could even overtake nuclear power in the United States. If geothermal finally gets its moment in the sun, it will massively and irreversibly transform the energy sector, providing a completely emissions-free baseload power source available to any country and county with the means and the will to tap into it.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
