Geothermal startup’s drilling breakthrough shaves ‘tens of millions’ off costs
EXCLUSIVE: Eavor Technologies’ patented drilling tool just hit a critical milestone.
Geothermal energy used to be confined to locations with unique underground reservoirs of hot water, such as California or Iceland. Not anymore. A new generation of startups is now using the oil and gas industry’s latest drilling technologies to tap into the Earth’s molten heat to generate power in far more places than ever before. But drilling holes in the ground remains an expensive upfront cost, without the same kind of guaranteed payday from hitting a hydrocarbon reserve.
For Eavor Technologies, it’s not just about drilling down. The Calgary-based company’s systems work on a loop that requires boring two parallel holes at once that ultimately intersect deep underground in hot bedrock – far out of range of GPS or electromagnetic signals that could help engineers on the surface precisely steer the drilling equipment.
To get around this, Eavor helped design its own in-house drilling tool that allows the equipment boring each hole to communicate through magnetic signals while digging nearly as deep as 20 times the height of the Empire State Building. Until now, the company – which is building its debut project in Germany – had been slowly rolling out its drilling tool while still relying on traditional technology to dig the 48 separate underground loops per facility.
In a critical milestone, Eavor has completely switched over to its drilling technology as of Wednesday, this newsletter can exclusively report.
“In drilling, time is money. All the drilling equipment costs on an hourly basis,” Matthew Toews, Eavor’s chief technology officer, told me on a call. “This saves upward of 120 hours per multilateral. To put that in perspective, we have 12 multilateral pairs per Eavor Loop. That adds up quickly, there are four Eavor Loops per pad – so, 48 loops.”
Put in money terms, Toews said, “It’s saving tens of millions of dollars per project.”
Eavor worked with the drilling equipment supplier Erdos Miller, the geothermal drilling company Gunnar Energy Services, and oilfield services giant SLB to produce its specialized tool.
Once Eavor’s two boreholes link together in the hot rock, the company pumps water through the piping in its looped well. By absorbing the underground heat, the water works like a steam radiator, coming to the surface where it can be used for heating or spinning turbines to generate electricity.
The company expects to produce its first electrons at its debut plant later this year in Geretsried, Germany, roughly 45 minutes’ drive south of Munich.
Eavor’s overall business plan is deploy its drilling technology “multiple times and continuously drive down the cost of these Eavor loops by going deeper, faster, to higher temperatures.”
“We could drill anywhere on Earth – and you get hotter as you get deeper,” Toews said. “All these technologies combined is how we’ll make geothermal anywhere a reality.”
PROGRAMMING NOTES: I have a new story up on Latitude Media about the challenges ahead for President Donald Trump’s executive orders on nuclear power.
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The soundtrack to this edition is “Top 5” by Ryan Witherspoon, a rapper from East New York who has a real classic New York hip hop. I’m patiently awaiting his latest track, “Bori,” to drop next month, an ode – I presume – to Nuyoricans.
Signing off from a rainy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which held the 158th annual Memorial Day Parade on Monday – the nation’s oldest such procession marking the holiday.