This is Project red in Nevada where Google and
startup furo energy have been using fracking to harness the Earth's
inner heat since
last November 28th why did Google build a geothermal power plant and
why is one of the
largest and greenest companies in the world using one of the most
controversial Technologies
from the oil industry what on Earth is going on whatever happened to
don't be evil I promise you
it's not what you think for once groundbreaking and gamechanging aren't
clickbait let's fig
this out together I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci this episode
is brought to you by eight
sleep chapter 1 the first geothermal power plant larderello Italy 1904
Prince Pio jori
Conti was sweating profusely as he watched the steam rise from the bore
hole he had spent months
drilling into the volcanic soil of Tuscany with an obsessive idea on
his mind he had built a
rudimentary turbine and connected it to this B hole everything was
ready Pierro invited some
of his friends and supporters to what witnessed
The experiment as well as some journalists and
Skeptics who had come to mock him he was nervous to be sure but
confident he turned the valve and
released a steam into the turbine at first nothing happened his heart
stopped for a moment then he
heard it first a slight hissing sound followed by a woring noise as the
turbines began to spin he
looked at the meter and saw the needle move and was instantly filled
with a surge of excitement
and relief he ran to the other end of the room where a row of five
light bulbs were waiting he
flipped the switch and watched as they all lit up casting a warm glow
over the astonished faces of
his guess he heard a gas followed by loud Applause he had done it he
had created the world's first
geothermal power plant pio's experiment wasn't so much a power plant as
it was a proof of concept
he demonstrated that it was possible to convert geothermal energy into
electricity others would
take the torch and develop this technology into what it is today
however fast forward 100
years and despite multiple studies showing the geothermal could easily
power the entire world
thousands of times over it's obvious we're nowhere
Near that dream yet but that is about to change
enter alphabet AKA Google Google is one of the most well-recognized
brands on Earth anyone who
has ever searched for anything online is almost guaranteed to have used
the term let me Google
that for you so when I heard that Google had built and begun operating
a geothermal power plant I had
questions like how on Earth is that possibly core to their business
model I began researching and
reading what the news and Google were saying and it turns out a lot I
knew Google had always been
a strong proponent of corporate climate action but what I found was
pretty damn impressive in 2007
Google became the first major company to achieve carbon neutrality 3
years later Google announced
its goal to use 100% renewable energy for its Global operation and
started signing long-term
power purchase agreements or PPA to purchase clean energy from wind and
solar projects by 2012
they had already invested $1 billion in renewable energy projects with
a total capacity of over 2
GW and in 2017 Google achieved its 100% renewable energy goal matching
its annual electricity
consumption with clean energy purchases from
More than 50 projects but they didn't stop there
in 2018 Google announced its ambition to operate on 24/7 carbon-free
energy by 2030 this confused
me at first I mean what do they mean ambition to eventually operate a
24/7 carbon- free energy
system by 2030 weren't they already carbon neutral back in 2007
something like wasn't adding up so I
dug a little bit deeper and I found that what they meant was that by
2030 every Google facility Data
Center and office campus will be directly powered by Clean Energy 100%
of the time but this poses
a problem because the sun isn't always shining or the wind always
blowing the way Google setup is
working right now is that much of Google energy is still produced by
Cold fire plants especially
when wind and solar aren't producing enough to cover the load check out
this map of Google's
data centers World Wide each little circle is like a 24-hour clock
where the green Parts represent
the hours of the day when data centers run on or match their energy use
with carbon free renewable
energy you notice how there's still a lot of gray circles well that's
what Google wants to change
by 2030 there are two ways of accomplishing this
By combining solar and wind with battery storage
or by finding an alternative clean stable reliable and carbon free
source of energy to cover the
load when wind and solar aren't enough he is one of the most
fundamental forms of energy and
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the show chapter three fvo energy this is Timothy laimer Tim has an
uncommon relationship with
energy when he was a kid growing up in a small town in Texas the town
held a vote to discuss
whether or not to allow the construction of a large Coal Fired power
plant after was approved
by the majority he witnessed both the positive economic growth and the
negative environmental
impacts of energy production on his community he once said that you
could hear the turbines
humming from 5 miles away Tim became interested
In finding a better way to power the world and
became a drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry there he
mastered the tech Technologies
and innovations that drove the shell Revolution a controversial
technique called fracking but
working in this field all the negative side effects eventually took a
toll on Tim he quit
his job as a drilling engineer and enrolled at Stanford for an MBA in
energy resource Engineering
in another part of the country a guy named Jack Norbeck was graduating
as a geotechnical
engineer Jack got a job at the geysers in Northern California the
world's largest geothermal
field there he helped Pioneer a new approach to extracting geothermal
energy through fracking
although they prefer the term mixed hydraulic stimulation of course
they do nobody wants to be
painted with that brush he later enrolled as a PhD student at Stanford
and met Tim Timmy and Jackie
hit it off right away they shared a common vision for using geothermal
energy to address climate
change together they had the perfect skill set for the job Tim was an
expert at fracking and drilling
Wells while Jack was an expert on geothermal
Energy in 2018 they joined forces and co-founded
fero energy a company that designs lowcost enhanced geothermal systems
fvo energy attracted
investment and support from organizations like Stanford cyron Road
program and even Big Oil they
also caught the attention of Michael Terrell head of Google's Global
energy Market strategy and
24/7 carbon-free energy initiatives Tim and Jack pitched their ideas of
a new Advanced enhanced
geothermal power plant to Terrell and he was hooked a few weeks later
Google signed the world's
first Cooperative agreement with fvo energy and invested $1 million to
develop a NextGen
geothermal power plant in Nevada codenamed project red we've made a
video about geothermal energy
about a year ago and we've even made another video on why China is
drilling the world's deepest
hole where we talked about how geothermal energy works and why going
deeper is usually better for
energy production if you haven't watched those we'll put links to those
down below but the tldr
version is that a geothermal power plant either extracts hot
pressurized Steam from an underground
reservoir to drive a turbine or it injects cold
Water through the injection well to absorb heat
energy underground then extracts the hot water through a production
well to generate electricity
so basically a heat pump fos power plant is one of the second type and
this is where things get
interesting for the system to work the injection and production Wells
must be connected somehow you
need water to be able to flow from one well into the other so either
the two Wells form a closed
system or you need the hot rock to be permeable if it's not then you
need to break it apart one
popular way of doing this is by injecting large amounts of high
pressurized water and sand to
hydraulically fracture the rock this is why it's called fracking
geothermal systems that use
fracking to enhance water flow between the two Wells are called
enhanced geothermal systems if
the word fracking sounds familiar it's because it is fracking is a
technique used in the oil and
gas industry to extract fossil fuels from Shell formations the
development of shell fracking
propelled the US to become the world's largest producer an exporter of
oil and gas something
climate activists aren't particularly thrilled
About but more oil and carbon emissions are
the least of our problems we'll get back to why fracking is so
dangerous in a moment first
let's look at Google's geothermal plant although geothermal plants have
been around for almost 120
years there have been very few significant changes in how these plants
work so what's so special
about this one I read somewhere that project red was America's first
enhanced geothermal system
to come online which seemed odd so I did a quick Google search I
Googled it and found dozens of ESG
plants dating back to the 1970s so that's not it the next thing I
thought is how deep are the wells
perhaps they go deeper than previous ESG projects and no no that's not
it either project rag goes
down about 7700 ft or 1.46 Mi while the deepest ESG B hole to date goes
down 3.2 Mi more than
twice as deep another key aspect of commercial geothermal Wells is
temperature temperature
drives the maximum possible efficiency of a geothermal power plant
project red reaches a
maximum operating temperature of 376 de F which is pretty high however
it's not the highest the
reganis geothermal power plant in Iceland reaches
A scorching 550° F how about power output is it
the largest ESG power plant in terms of power no not by long shot
project red is just a commercial
Scale Pilot plant with an output of 3.5 megawatt that would only be
enough to power about 2,900
average US homes now take a look at this graph the world's largest
geothermal power plant is
the geysers in the US which outputs 900 megawatt of electricity out of
its 22 power plants for an
average of roughly 40 megaw each that's 10 times more power out of each
of these power plants
and by the way it's also satisfying for me to see lardell up there as
the second largest
geothermal power plant in the world Pierro jori must be so proud so
what is it then after
digging a little bit deeper I found two things that make this power
plant truly groundbreaking
the key difference between project red and every other ESG plant in the
world is that the wells
aren't completely vertical they go down 7,700 ft then they do a 90°
turn and extend horizontally
for another 3250 ft as you can see here this is standard practice in
the oil industry but it had
never been done before on a geothermal power plant
And the implications are profound most ESG experts
thought it was impossible to drill horizontally into hot rock to make
horizontal Wells and even
if someone did manage it it would be even harder to seal or plug the B
hole tight enough to
perforate pressurize and Fracture the rock around the B hole with water
and sand something
called completion in the fracking industry and even if someone
magically Harry pottered the whole
thing and was able to fracture The Rock Around The Impossible
horizontal well the previous cementing
of the well would have clogged up all the natural fractures in the Rock
so the fracking operation
wouldn't work at all well fero and Google run ahead and did it anyway
and they proved everyone
wrong they published the result in a pre-print article I'll leave a
link in the description
the results show over twice the water flow rate out of the fractured
horizontal Wells than the
previous record holder this is important because more water flowing
through the wells means you
can extract more energy from the ground faster which means more power I
can't begin to tell you
how gamechanging this is do you remember when we
Made a video about the residential geothermal heat
pumps and how you could choose between drilling a deep vertical hole
which is too expensive or
opting for a much shallower but longer horizontal configuration that's
exactly what's going on
here only at a much larger scale this is one of those rare times when
the words gamechanging
isn't clickbait it's actually the real deal there are dozens of
multi-million dollar companies out
there that specialize in fracking and horizontal well drilling but
before fvo nobody had ever
been brave enough to try to make this work for geothermal today thanks
to Google and fvo
we know it actually works fvo just took the risk and the guesswork out
of the equation now
these companies can confidently dedicate their industry knowhow and
capital to make the dream of
large scale geothermal power a reality the second key difference of
fero's design is adding sensors
everywhere to monitor the Well's performance in terms of temperature
pressure flow rate Etc I'm
not entirely sure how or why it works but they claim this this allows
them to carefully control
the plant's output power in real time now this
Is something nobody had ever really seen before
and it's an entirely different ball game let me explain why electricity
grids are super complex
every time you switch on a light bulb a power plant somewhere has to
produce that little bit
of extra energy to make it shine grids rely on gas powered peer plants
for this precise control
because you can adjust the power output with a dial and it'll respond
pretty quickly geothermal
power plants have only ever been used for base load because they
traditionally produce constant
power but fero's design lets us use geothermal to follow the load and
dispatch only the energy
that's necessary when it's necessary making it not only truly carbon
free but an alternative
to gas peer power plants and remember Google is looking for a way to
power its data centers
with 100% carbon- free energy 24 hours a day this is exactly what the
doctor ordered and it's
why they invested that $10 million into it this animation shows the
load of a typical Google
data center since these run 24/7 and there's always someone somewhere
Googling something the
power consumption is pretty flat when you add
Intermittent Renewables like wind and solar you
get times when you produce too much and that the power goes to waste if
not stored and others when
you produce too little to meet demand so you need a peer power plant to
cover these little gray gaps
shown here with a traditional geothermal you add a constant base load
that offsets a part of the
power demand when wind and solar aren't working but you can still get
these annoying little gaps
here and there and more wind and solar energy can go to waste if you
don't store it but with fero's
new load following geothermal you can get the best of both worlds you
can precisely tune the power
plant to cover the load when wind and solar don't work and throttle it
down when they Peak so you
can use just the available wind and solar without wasting it just
brilliant chapter five things
aren't what they seem okay so Google's geothermal power PL is awesome
but now it's time to address
the elephant in the room which is fracking now I did my best to put my
biases aside for a minute
and look at this objectively but for me even if everything works
perfectly if this technology is
going to poison my kids or cause more harm to the
Environment than the carbon emissions it avoids
then it's a noo so I started researching why so many people winse at
the mere mention of the word
fracking here's a gist of what I found when used in the oil industry
fracking uses a series of
toxic chemicals to help dissolve minerals kill bacteria reduce friction
and enhance the flow
of oil and gas from the fractured Rock these chemicals produce toxic
Wastewater they can cause
toxic air pollution killed wildlife and cause a slew of health problems
like childhood leukemia
cardiac problems asthma birth defects headaches and even cancer in fact
they are so dangerous
that the safest way to dispose of contaminated water is to re-inject it
into a depleted Reservoir
underground and just leave it there but this has two major drawbacks we
risk polluting groundwater
and this extra water can make the terrain unstable and cause increased
seismic activ ity in the area
or even earthquakes oh the irony you're telling me that Google one of
the most greenest companies
is using fracking one of the oil industry's most controversial and
despised Technologies to pursue
climate action goals it kind of boggles the mind
A little bit and I kind of feel like I'm missing
something so I read a little bit more about how exactly the fracking
process for esgs work and how
it's different from the process in oil and gas one thing stood out to
me right away in geothermal
we don't need to kill bacteria or extract oils from The Rock so the
fracking fluids used in esgs
don't contain any of the toxic chemicals that we were just talking
about this means two things no
chance of air ground or water pollution and no need to dispose of the
fracking fluid by burying
it underground so the main drawbacks of fracking for oil don't apply to
geothermal that said there
is a small caveat worth mentioning remember that graph I showed you a
minute ago with the flow
rate take a closer look at it notice anything peculiar let me give you
a hint the well-labeled
fvo 34 a22 is the injection well and the one label fvo 3422 is the
production well notice how the
power for the injection well is taller than the other that means that
more water is going into
the ground through the injection well than is coming out through the
production well put two
and two together and you conclude that part of
The injected water stays under the ground but why
the problem is that when you fracture the rock you can't control where
exactly the fractures are
going to go and some of those cracks May simply lead away from the
production well remember in
engineering there's always always a trade-off and in this case the
trade-off is that you need
a constant supply of water to replenish the reservoir and keep the
plant running judging
from this graph it's about 2 L per second of water or almost 17 million
gallons per year so
yes even though they prefer calling it stimul for marketing reasons
Google's doing the fren but
it doesn't mean that it's a bad thing necessarily and it doesn't make
ESG is any less clean as a
source of carbon- free energy but for me it's kind of interesting to
see what a constant influx
of water underground can do to you know stability for the top soil we
shall see this whole thing
reminds me of a story Israel our headwriter once told me about a
4minute mile before the 1950s it
was thought that it was humanly impossible to run a mile and under 4
minutes for decades this held
true no one could do it because no one thought it
Was even possible that is until Roger banister
broke the barrier on May 6th 1954 with a time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds
those few tents of a
second broke the spell and changed the game all of a sudden Runners
everywhere were breaking the
4minute mile Mark today's record is 3 minutes 43 seconds and is held by
two-time Olympic medalist
hikam elguero I believe Google's geothermal power plant plant will have
the same effect no one
thought it was possible to build such a system and make it work but now
we know you can do it
and we know how it works so it's only a matter of time until others
follow infero and Google's
footsteps and make widespread geothermal for base Peak power more of a
reality and maybe
they'll figure out even more clever ways of minimizing Water waste or
improving efficiency or
anything else that's how this goes everything was impossible until it
wasn't and like we mentioned
sign off the comments below write to us read your comments hit the like
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I'm R Da Vinci we'll catch you guys next week
