ENERGY: A Vast Untapped Green Energy Source Is Hiding Beneath Your Feet. “New experiments in the deserts of Utah and Nevada show how advances in fracking — technology developed by the oil industry — can be repurposed to tap clean geothermal energy anywhere on Earth.”
Right now, Speyrer’s equipment is about 8,500 feet below us, or about 2 percent of the way through that layer, where the heat is already so great that every extra foot, every extra inch, is a hard-won victory. Down there, any liquid you pumped in would become, as Speyrer puts it, hot enough to deep fry a turkey. “Imagine that splashing you,” he says. At that temperature, about 450 degrees Fahrenheit (228 degrees Celsius) his gear can start having problems. Electronics fail. Bearings warp. Hundreds of thousands dollars worth of equipment might go down a borehole, and if it breaks down there, make sure it doesn’t get stuck. In that case, best to just plug that hole, which probably cost millions to drill, tally up your losses, and move on.
Even when things are going well down there, it’s hard to know from up here on the Earth’s surface. “It’s frustrating as hell,” says Joseph Moore, a geologist at the University of Utah, as he watches the halting movements of a 160-foot-tall rig through a trailer window. It’s a cool day in 2022, in a remote western Utah county named Beaver, a breeze whipping off the Mineral Mountains toward hog farms and wind turbines on the valley floor below. The rig looks much like any oil and gas installation dotting the American West. But there are no hydrocarbons in the granite below us, only heat.
Since 2018, Moore has led a $220 million bet by the US Department of Energy (DOE), called FORGE, or the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy, that this heat can be harnessed to produce electricity in most parts of the world.
It’s always fascinating to watch the left to backflip to gushing about practices like fracking — which was once going to destroy entire ecosystems or something — as soon as they can be harnessed for the left’s goals.