Eavor energy German project

https://apnews.com/article/energy-transition-gas-geothermal-geretsried-germany-heat-electricity-89a356c70851938963314b3882377247

Fervo energy shows promising future with flexible output geothermal

First Audience Question Well, thanks to both of you for a great discussion and hearing some things we, in following this area, haven't heard before. I talked to a couple of your colleagues at the break and I didn't swab them too hard, but I'll swab you. You talked about scalability in your blue sky view to the degree that you're comfortable talking about it, Tim, how do we downscale? Because people are talking about small nuclear reactors that, if everything goes right, are going to take 10 years between permitting execution. You can fill a pad and drill it out in a year or two. Tim Latimer Yes, I think I heard — you know, how do we scale beyond these hotspots and also how do we maybe do smaller projects to tackle this market? David Roberts Smallest viable. Like, is it distributed at all? What's the smallest viable project size? Tim Latimer Five or 10 megawatts is probably as small as we'd go. I could say what we've learned through doing these projects is our products do benefit from economies of scale. There's a reason why we're pushing for multi-hundred megawatt projects. And so, that's what we're pushing on right now. I can tell you that we are looking to go smaller. And to go smaller, you have to get more value for it, right? Because no one wants to pay more for electricity unless you're getting something there. So, when we look to go smaller, that is because we are looking for a direct heat business that may have a different load and clean heat is incredibly valuable. And as proud as we are about the conversion efficiencies going from heat to power that we have on our sites, you're still talking about low-grade heat that only has somewhere between a 15 to 20% conversion efficiency. So, if you can just keep a direct heat, there's a lot more you can do there. So, we definitely see that going forward. Fervo is certainly not the only company in the space too. I mean, I think I've been really excited to see the ecosystem around geothermal grow up. I think Bedrock is a company that just announced a $12 million Series A just last week, and they're going after more building heating and cooling things. So, I think there are things you can do to go smaller. It may not be what Fervo does right away, but there are other companies out there and it's a big market. Moving beyond the basin and range and the East African Rift and things, it's just a function of drilling costs. If you can drill a 20,000-foot deep well tomorrow for the cost of a 10,000-foot deep well today, you can make that project in the money. And so, that's why we're so relentlessly focused on dropping drilling costs, because ultimately we don't see any geology as being a place that's not developable. It's just how ambitious can we get on driving drilling costs down? Second Audience Question So, my question is: The comparison was made between geothermal, nuclear, and natural gas, and it always is. But my question is a comparison question as well between Fervo geothermal and traditional geothermal. If on your eight-well pad, where you're generating 30 megawatts of power, if Joe Geothermal, the traditional geothermal guy, rocked up and drilled those, their typical eight wells on that same location, what do you think they would have produced or what would it have cost or what? You know, pick your metric. I'm just trying to draw an apples-to-apples comparison. Tim Latimer Yeah, I think that if you look at the well test results, well number one, conventional geothermal technology probably wouldn't have gotten much of anything because it's so reliant on natural permeability. But if there were to be, like I mentioned this before between Los Alamos and really when Fervo started, there's been about 50 different EGS attempts and the vast majority of them got 5 liters per second to 10 liters per second if they were successful. And many of the projects didn't even get to a flow test. And you compare that to 60 liters per second on our pilot project, and we got to 120 liters per second on our flow test there. So, we're at least one order of magnitude more productive than what any prior enhanced geothermal systems attempt had been. And that's why in 2025, we're talking about EGS and it's not on the fringes anymore. Third Audience Question Oh, sorry, man. I have a technical question for you. So, I know geothermal is lumped into baseload, which is so hot right now, but was not so hot just a year or two ago when solar was ascendant and we wanted everything to be very flexible, right? And still, in some places, I expect flexibility will be the premium thing and not the baseload. So, can you tell us, can you be flexible and how much with geothermal? Is there a problem with depleting the well or having it, you know, lose? David Roberts Oh, I love this question and I love the answer. Tim Latimer "Yes" is the answer. So, we actually have a technology that we've developed. And actually, you know, I haven't mentioned it a lot, but we've gotten a wonderful partnership with the Department of Energy for the last eight years since we started Fervo. We expect it to continue under the new administration as well. And one of the things we got was an RPE grant just to test the technology we call Fervo Flex. And actually, at that pilot in Northern Nevada, I can tell you the last year of production, we just brought it on as baseload. Because as you can imagine, in an offtake agreement that's megawatt-hour based, that's your incentive as a developer. But we know where the market's going and we know baseload went from being the thing to being dead to now the phoenix rising from the ashes. But clearly, the electric grid of the future is going to be one that's driven by ever-increasing levels of variability. So we do think that dispatchability attribute is going to continue to be important. And so, what was interesting about Fervo Flex is we, basically through this ARPA-E grant, were able to test our well system in Nevada to operate in a storage and dispatchability mode. And I think one of the things that's interesting about the way we develop our systems is the fact that there's no permeability for the last hundred years has meant that you can't develop geothermal there. But because it's impermeable, it actually gives us an interesting way to do energy storage. Because the only permeability that ends up in the geothermal reservoir is the fractures that we create, and the surrounding area is actually impermeable. And so, what that means is that we operated the mode in a flexible cycle where we shut in our production well and kept pumping down our injection well. We mimicked specifically sort of 12-hour diurnal cycles of no production, flush production, no production, to sort of simulate a solar heavy grid of the future. And found that we got really great numbers on round trip efficiency. You know, we were able to actually get much higher max peak output than our steady state operations through that energy storage.

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