By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
EAVOR has pioneered a new kind of geothermal that can provide heat and power almost anywhere on the planet. This could be the missing link in the energy revolution that could not only help electricity get to net-zero it also solves an even bigger challenge of how to heat buildings with zero emissions.
The idea of simply dipping into the Earth to extract free, clean energy in the form of heat to generate electricity and thermal energy has long mesmerized energy advocates in Canada.
At long last EAVOR, a Canadian company is building a large deep geothermal project that will produce enough electricity and thermal energy to heat and power all of the homes in a town.
More than 100,000 shallow, low-temperature geothermal projects (properly called geoexchange) have been built at homes, farms and commercial buildings across Canada, but not a single stand-alone deep geothermal project has been built.
Oh, there are a few pilot projects in various stages of design and there is a hybrid natural gas/geothermal plant in Swan Hills but no deep geothermal projects that harvest high enough temperatures to produce both electricity and heat.
EAVOR is not only building a full-scale geothermal combined heat and power project they have pioneered a new technical approach they call Eavor-Loop.
Taking the guesswork out of geothermal
Traditional geothermal requires the discovery of hot aquifers or using fracking to increase the permeability of the rock deep in the Earth. EAVOR’s technology uses conduction to draw heat from hot rocks that are almost everywhere “just below our feet.”
This proprietary process is a huge innovation for geothermal and it’s pretty straightforward, but before EAVOR could sell a client on their approach they had to prove it works.
“We use the heat beneath your feet to provide utility-scale heat and power using oil and gas technology,” says Jeanine Vany, VP of Corporate Affairs with EAVOR and a geologist who has worked in Alberta’s oil and gas industry.
“Our operations are completely carbon-free. We use very little land and water and it will have the ability to act as an Earth battery.”
Concept was piloted in Alberta
To prove their technology EAVOR carried out a pilot project in Alberta.
“The pilot is near Rocky Mountain House in central Alberta. So, oil and gas country, farm country,” says Vany.
“So what we did there was drill two vertical wells down and turn the corner like I described. So we drilled 2.4 kilometers down, set the intermediate casing, drilled horizontally and then we connected them toe to toe,” she explains.
For the pilot they reused two oil wells. The pilot went “swimmingly,” she says.
Since they are not searching for the perfect aquifer EAVOR is counting on some relatively simple science that suggests the temperature goes up 30 degrees Celsius every kilometre you go down. So, they have a pretty good idea of what the resource is before they drill.
“We can predict our thermal output prior to drilling. This is much like if you’re going to design a solar plant, you know how many megawatts you’re going to get out of it,” says Vany.
And no surprise, it worked. “We’ve been operating within 2 % of the predicted thermal output for five years,” says Vany.
Now that they had a pilot project and some hot pipes that prospective customers could come and see and touch EAVOR took their product to market.
$350 million Euro Project in Geretsried
They found their first big customer in Geretsried, Germany.
Europe is desperate for alternatives to natural gas and the European Union has aggressive emissions reduction goals so the project won support from the EU Innovation Fund and some financing from the European Investment Bank.
The project is a combined heat and power project that will produce 8 megawatts of electricity and 64 megawatts of heat which is enough to provide electricity and heat for the region.
“We now have a heat purchase agreement with the town of Geretsried,” says Vany.
And EAVOR has secured a feed-in-tariff agreement and expects to begin feeding electricity into the grid as early as the end of the year.
John Redfern, founder of EAVOR (left) and a gathering of people at the EAVOR-Lite pilot project in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. Photos EAVOR
How it works
“We’re drilling four and a half kilometres [deep] in Germany,” says Vany. And then “We’re turning the corner and drilling about three kilometres horizontally.”
There are 12 parallel branches of pipes running horizontally which forms a giant radiator four kilometers beneath the surface. This involves 90 kilometres of drilling for the loops and about 320-360 kilometres of pipe in the four loops.
A big benefit is the geothermal project can produce electricity and heat 24 hours a day providing much coveted baseload energy.
“The project in Germany is an 8-megawatt electric project,” which will provide electricity for 8,000 homes,” says Vany. “The thermal output is about 64 megawatts and it will provide space heating for approximately 120,000 homes in Geretsried.”
The project will take three years to complete.
“We’re drilling 96 lateral wells there. That’s a lot of drilling. We have two large land rigs contracted there to just sit there and drill wells for the next three years.”
In addition, the energy is dispatchable meaning it can be ramped up and down which can help with the integration of solar and wind renewable energy as well.
EAVOR’s Geothermal 101 – How geothermal and EAVOR’s EverLoop works
Geothermal’s bright future
There is huge potential for this geothermal technology in Europe.
“There’s a lot of district heating networks that are coal-fired fed currently in Europe. And they’re shutting down all the coal because of the climate strategy and because of the energy security crisis. You know, they’re in dire need of heat and they see geothermal as a key part of the solution. So, there is there’s a very strong push.”
“We have follow-on projects in Germany that are other heat projects. We have another project in design phase in the Netherlands. And we have a portfolio here in North America that we’re working through,” says Vany.
EAVOR is now working on their model going forward and by licensing the technology they see rapid deployment over time, but what about their home province of Alberta?
“The potential for our approach to work in Alberta is massive,” says Vany adding they are working on pilots with support from the Government of Alberta to take the wells even deeper.
The project in Germany is expected to be completed in 2027 and is likely we will see an explosion of interest because few other approaches tick so many boxes that help create a sustainable future with low to no carbon energy.
This could be the missing link that can provide baseload power and heat and help us get to net-zero electricity and heating around the world.