Jamie C. Beard The untapped energy source that could power the planet TED
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The core of the Earth
is 6,000 degrees Celsius.
It’s the same temperature
as the surface of the Sun,
but it’s not 94 million miles away,
like the extra terrestrial sun is.
It is right here beneath our feet.
Really, literally right there.
But we don’t think about this, right?
I mean, when you go outside,
you walk barefoot,
you don’t burn your feet.
The Earth’s crust
is an incredible insulator,
and it keeps this massive,
inexhaustible heat source
beneath us invisible.
But if you’ve ever visited Iceland
or an active volcano,
you’ve got geysers
and steam vents and lava.
These are surface manifestations
of the incredible amount of heat
that lies beneath us.
Anywhere and everywhere in the world.
And we don’t have to drill very far
to reach temperatures
that far exceed what we would need
to power the world thousands of times over
for all of civilization.
Pretty cool, right?
So we got to get to it.
How do we do that?
Let’s tap it. Let’s tap it fast.
I’m a climate activist.
I am very worried about climate change.
It keeps me up at night.
So we need to make this happen, right?
So how?
So I’m here with good news
about that and also a proposition.
Let’s do the good news first.
There are teams of innovators
right now in the field
that are working on figuring out
how to most efficiently
and effectively tap this enormous
heat source beneath us.
And they are running sprints,
and I’m not talking about the type
of geothermal that you find in Iceland.
That’s easy to get to.
It’s shallow, it’s close to the surface,
and in those places in the world,
we already have geothermal energy.
I’m talking about making
geothermal energy accessible
anywhere and everywhere in the world
that energy is needed.
But in order to do that,
we’ve got to figure out
how to mimic the conditions
that occur in places like Iceland, right,
that make geothermal easy to tap
and extract and harvest.
And those conditions are hot rocks,
pore space in the rocks
and water filling those pores.
Those conditions seem simple,
but they actually occur naturally in very,
very few places in the world, right?
And that’s why we don’t have
geothermal energy everywhere.
We have it in just a few places.
But the past couple of decades,
there have been really disruptive
and breakthrough technological innovations
that enable us to engineer the subsurface
to mimic Mother Nature’s geothermal.
So technological innovations
like high-pressure
and temperature-drilling technologies
that were developed for offshore
oil and gas exploration.
Technologies like directional drilling,
where no longer we can just
drill straight down,
but instead we can actually turn
and steer drill bits
to reach very precise
and specific locations
in the subsurface, miles underground.
And we can also fracture rock now,
which means that we can create pore space
where pore space does not exist naturally.
So if you take these innovations
that I just listed
and you put them all together,
you end up enabling an entirely new breed
of scalable geothermal concepts.
Geothermal concepts can be done
anywhere in the world.
So, for instance now,
we have engineered
geothermal systems or EGS.
In this concept,
several wells are drilled,
at the bottom of the well
the rock is fractured.
It creates a reservoir under the surface.
Think of it as a pot where you boil
your water underground, right?
You send a fluid down,
it percolates through the fractures.
It comes back up really hot,
and we use it for all sorts
of interesting and important things
like heating buildings directly.
Or we can run it through a turbine
to produce electricity.
Now, EGS can take a lot of forms.
This is an area of intense
innovation right now.
You can engineer these systems
in a variety of ways,
but the basic concepts stay the same.
Then we have closed-loop systems.
Closed loops are pretty new.
It’s another really
hot area of innovation.
Same concept, basic is EGS,
you have one or more wells drilled,
you create a reservoir underground,
but in closed loops,
instead of fracturing
to create that reservoir underground,
it’s entirely drilled,
like a radiator in the rock.
And they take many forms too,
just like EGS, check it out.
You can see in closed-loop systems
how useful it is to be able to turn
and steer that drill bit right?
Totally enabling in terms of getting
these concepts to work.
Another really cool aspect
of closed-loop systems,
another fierce area
of innovation right now,
is what we’re putting in these systems
as the working fluid to harvest the heat.
Most of the time it’s water.
But what if we could optimize a fluid
to perform better than water?
So it heats up faster than water
at lower temperatures than water.
And the really cool thing
about closed loops
is the going candidate, right,
one everybody loves right now
to put in these systems
to most efficiently harvest heat
is actually a substance that’s the center
of our climate angst right now.
It’s around us in excess in abundance.
It’s CO2.
Super cool.
So then there’s hybrids, not the cars,
geothermal hybrids.
You take the best of both worlds, right?
You get the increased surface area
and heat that you get from
fracturing rock.
You combine that
with a closed-loop well design
so you can use that optimized fluid.
The goal of hybrid systems
is to extract the most heat,
minimize drilling costs.
So that’s what’s happening right now.
A lot of innovation.
It’s really, really cool.
But these concepts,
none of them are without
their technology challenges.
But y’all, these are not moonshots.
They are not moonshots.
We are talking about making
very incremental changes
to existing technologies,
methods and techniques
with an eye on more hotter
and deeper geothermal development.
And these also aren’t just ideas.
There are teams right now in the field
demonstrating these concepts.
Teams like Sage Geosystems,
a team that I mentor.
This is a well that they are
demonstrating this summer
in – get this – Texas.
Not in Iceland,
not on the side of a volcano,
not in the ring of fire.
This is a Texas pasture
where you would never suspect
the enormous geothermal resources
that lie below.
And this well is an existing
abandoned oil and gas well
that they have repurposed
for this geothermal demonstration.
If all goes well with this demonstration,
by 2022, that is next year,
they will have a geothermal
power plant in Texas.
There are dozens of examples like this,
right now in the field.
These are all start-ups.
They’re out there proving
geothermal concepts,
new technologies, new drilling,
the concepts that I
showed you in the slides.
We are in the midst
of a geothermal renaissance.
In the past 18 months,
more geothermal start-ups have launched
than in the past 10 years combined.
If even one of these
start-ups is successful
at proving a scalable geothermal concept,
we are literally off to the races
in developing this massive,
reliable 24/7 clean energy source
anywhere in the world.
And by off to the races,
I mean that, right?
Like, we got to go.
The clock is ticking, we need scale.
It’s going to be cute if it works,
but we’ve got to have global scale.
So how do we do that?
It brings me to my proposition.
So it turns out that there is an industry
that is perfectly positioned
to take us from the few geothermal
power plants we have today
to the hundreds of thousands
that we need to meet demand.
The industry that everyone loves to hate,
who cares about the
environment and climate,
is that industry.
To scale geothermal,
what do we need to do?
We need to efficiently, effectively
and safely drill below the surface
over and over and over and over again.
And who does that now?
The oil and gas industry does that now.
The oil and gas industry
is a global specialized
workforce of millions,
backed by almost 200 years
of breakthrough technological innovation,
all aimed at exploring for, drilling for
and producing energy
from deep underground.
You flip the switch
and you have green drilling.
And oil and gas keeps
its current business model,
the business model that keeps them
firmly rooted in hydrocarbons now.
They’re doing what they know how to do,
which is exploring for, drilling for
and producing a subsurface energy asset.
But what we’re talking
about here is a pivot
from hydrocarbons to heat.
A global workforce of millions,
highly skilled and trained
doesn’t need to be retrained.
They can keep doing
what they already know how to do.
But this time around for clean energy.
If we’re able to pull this off
and team up to do it,
we are talking about the ability
to meet world energy demand.
We are talking about the ability
over the next few decades
to put more geothermal energy on the grid
than we currently have in dirty energy.
Geothermal energy at oil and gas scale.
So I bet I know
what some of you are thinking
because I was that person
to like, I used to think it.
And so I will tell you how I got
from there to here.
I used to feel
that we just needed to let
the oil and gas industry go away.
So I’m a climate activist
and a lifelong environmentalist,
the kind that would have chained myself
to a tree if I needed to,
of that flavor.
I grew up and got a job,
became an energy lawyer
and then an energy entrepreneur,
and entrepreneurship took me out
into the field for product deployments,
and I ended up living on drill rigs.
And I had a complete epiphany,
it was a total mind shift,
bias out the door.
Because I got to know many individuals
in the oil and gas workforce.
And y’all that grit.
I mean, it is incredible grit.
Those people are there for it.
But I also got to know
the amazing technological innovations
of that industry.
And what I’ve come to believe
is those are assets.
The workforce, the technologies,
they are assets that we can leverage now
to solve climate change.
So what I do for my job
is I recruit oil and gas veterans
to the cause of geothermal.
If we want to turn the ship,
we recruit the sailors.
And it’s working.
So there’s good news.
Do you remember that slide I showed you
with all the start-ups,
the geothermal start-ups
that are in the field?
A good many of those teams
are actually oil and gas veterans.
Sage Geosystems with their Texas well.
That is an all-oil-and-gas team
with almost 300 years
of collective experience
at entities like Shell, BP,
Halliburton and Weatherford.
Y’all, that is really interesting, right?
I mean, that world take notice
because what this is is oil and gas
brains actively reinventing themselves,
using everything they know
that they learned in their entire
oil and gas experience
to solve climate change.
But it’s also interesting
because this new flourish
of entrepreneur, you know,
oil and gas veteran
turned geothermal entrepreneur
is helping the oil and gas industry
engage actively with this problem set.
They speak the language of oil and gas.
They understand the business
models of oil and gas.
They are out building
partnerships and relationships
with oil and gas entities
that are based on decades
of trust and experience
they have with one another.
In the past six months,
geothermal start-ups have closed more
than 100 million dollars in funding deals
with oil and gas entities
as funding partners.
We are at the beginning
of a huge and exciting shift here.
If it’s the best and brightest
minds in oil and gas
who are off launching
geothermal companies,
then y’all, this very well may be
the future of the oil
and gas industry itself.
But here’s my worry.
So say oil and gas grabs the reins here,
takes us to global scale fast,
exponential growth.
We put terawatts
of geothermal energy on the grid.
Are we going to fight about this?
The thing that I love about geothermal
is that it gives us all
a way around ourselves, right?
A way around extreme polarization.
Environmentalists and drillers,
dogs and cats, right and left,
we all get what we want.
Clean energy where we need it,
climate change solved,
energy poverty solved
and drillers keep drilling.
If we build the right collaborations here
and unite behind a shared vision,
we solve energy in the next 30 years.
We change the conversation
from worrying about whether
we’re going to meet 2050 climate goals
to how they look kind of lazy.
We can do this.
We’ve just got to drill the limit.
Thank you.
(Applause)