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Oil and Gas Upstream
Unlocking Terawatts: The Future of Geothermal Energy with Project InnerSpace | Ep 342
00:40:52
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A
Oil and gas production is the union of natural systems with advanced science and complex engineering. Smart people across the globe create this remarkable place we call Upstream. And each day brings a new challenge. This is the Oil and Gas Upstream podcast where we look at how these systems come together and learn from the people who make it happen.
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Welcome to Oil and Gas Upstream. I'm Elena Milkert, your host. Some of you know me as the former director for Oil and gas upstream research at the US Department of Energy. I retired from the doe, founded Energia Consulting, and became a podcast host for Oil and Gas Global Network. And I'd like to thank our sponsor, IFS maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance asset reliability with IFS software designed to support the unique needs of the oil and gas industry. And now I'd like to introduce our guest, Daniel Marino Garcia. He's the vice president of research at Project Inner Space. Danny, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so glad. Absolutely. We're here recording in person at Ciro Week on day two. It's been very exciting, and Project Inner Space is a very exciting concept as well. Before we get to Inner Space, Project Innerspace, Danny, tell us a little bit about yourself, because you have a pretty unique background. Really happy that you're a guest here.
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Yeah, I'm a chemical engineering background. I worked for 20 years in the oil and gas industry doing research technology development at a Spanish oil company called Repsol. And my passion has always been research and innovation. And three years ago, I took the decision to leave the oil gas industry not because I did not enjoy it. It's because I wanted to explore new frontiers. And that's when I joined Project in Space. And if I may explain what Project in Space is.
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B
Oh, please. Yes.
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C
Project in Space is a nonprofit association that works as a focused research organ. So our purpose is to bring geothermal to terawatts of energy. The potential is there, but in terms of application, we're still not there yet. And why? Because there's still some barriers for growth. And what we do is we do our research that comprises not only the technology side, but also the finance policy and any other element that may bring a project to life. And what we do is to identify what are the main barriers. What are those barriers that a single entity may not want to do that may not be fully economical. And that's where the philanthropy money that we bring in as a nonprofit organization can help. So we try to develop products for the overall community, the whole ecosystem of geothermal that is growing, particularly associated to next Generation geothermal.
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B
Oh my gosh, that's so exciting. Boy, there's a lot in there. We're going to unpack some of that. So you're a chemical engineer. You spent your whole career in research for oil and gas upstream?
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C
All aspects or with my background, I was initially focused on fluids and understand the behavior of fluids from the subsurface to the surface. And the tendency of fluids to change phase. Going from liquid or gas into castle liquid, you have water and every single one of these may form solids. So whenever you change pressure and temperature, you have solid formation. And that's obviously not a desired outcome. So you have to think about modeling, doing experimental work first to characterize the fluids, some modeling to explain what's going to happen from, you know, through the trajectory of the fluid from the subsurface to the surface and then design mitigation options, trying to be as productive as possible. But you know very well the oil and gas industry, sometimes you forget something and you end up doing remediation jobs that are very costly but basically spanning from. In Repsol we had operations from onshore gas, oil, unconventional, deep water as well. And of course, yeah, so the degree of risks and cost associated to flow assurance was changing. But yeah, that was my first background in my initial work. Then I moved into the management ladder. I was managing a bigger group, looking at more surface technologies, copy and process engineering. And then my last part of job in Repsol was related to deep tech because every single oil and gas company is always trying to explore new features. Deepsol, yeah. So Repsol is an integrated company, takes from upstream, midstream, downstream. But they were looking at other opportunities for new business. And that's when geothermal appeared in my life. That's when I started looking at oh, geothermal looks very related, relatable for the kind of background that I had and the kind of expertise that Repsol had. So we tried to develop a strategy for Repsol to get into Geothermal. And then I realized that I wanted to go bigger and join productivity space where we have a global footprint. We're trying to, not just with a single company, but just trying to strengthen the whole ecosystem.
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B
You're passionate about the geothermal, I can tell, and that's good. But I'm not quite ready to leave oil and gas yet. Oil and gas. Did you work in reservoirs that a lot of people would be familiar with all over the world? Did you come to the U.S. we're in 156 countries right now, so we know.
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C
So statistically one of them. I spent Three years in Brazil, for instance, when Repsol got in there with the deep water developments, not only as partner of Petrobras, but also as operator. So that was fun to do some exploratory drilling and doing characterization of the fluids through gas drilling, which is another of my passions, because you can get so much information out of gas drilling while you're drilling. You get these little molecules coming up with the drilling mud. And you can do a lot of predictions from these. I'm going to call them fingerprints. No, because it's not the full composition of the oil. You have some fingerprints that allow you to tell your fluid quality. I work in Brazil and even though I was in the research team, we had a lot of contact with obviously the business units because they have a lot of problems and they came back to us for subject matter expertise. So I worked in Russia working with waxes and solids that are coming from the oil. We were working with duvernay in Canada, with Eagle Ford in Texas, Marcelo's in Pennsylvania.
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B
Oh my gosh, we know all those.
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C
Yeah, you probably know, you've probably been there. We had a lab. So we were basically trying to support them with experimentation followed by model and recommendation.
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B
Yeah, so you said you're in Spain. Were you in Spain with Repsol or were you over the world as oil and gas people do?
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C
I was mostly focused, based in Madrid and traveling whenever needed. But most of the samples would come to us rather than the way around. But I did spend three years in Brazil, which was a great experience because deep water was still at that time, one of these frontiers. And Brazil for the flow assurance engineering is amazing because you have basically it's like a lab, it's like a training camp. You have basically every single possible problem because they have a large variety of different fields, different fluids, and so you could really get to know and get to learn basically anything that you needed to be a solid flushurance engineer.
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B
You told us about how excited you were when you started encountering geothermal. But what were kind of like the one or two really aha moments you said, oh, I like this geothermal stuff.
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C
I'm going to answer that in two different ways.
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Sure.
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On one hand, there was starting to be a lot of excitement about next generation geothermal because thanks to the shale revolution, people understood how to drill differently horizontal wells. Thanks to the new ways of doing stimulation, this gave the opportunity for geothermal to grow in a different direction. So geothermal has been there forever, more than 100 years, producing both power and thermal energy for heating. And so on, but it's very concentrated in certain regions, California, Kenya, Iceland, that you actually see that heat coming out of the Earth through hot springs or volcanoes. Right. But thanks to the next generation, the new technologies coming from the oil and gas industry, you could go to other places and do geothermal in places that you've never done it before in a way that you've never done it before through stimulation and opening up hard rock, dry hard rock, and creating parts for fluids to be heated up. So it was really interesting to be part of that new thing that was coming up as the next generation geothermal.
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B
Yeah. Let me pause you for a minute on that transition and that insight, because I was with the Department of Energy forever, and the Department of Energy spent not a lot of money, but a lot of time and expertise understanding dry hot rocks, trying to characterize the locations of natural hot spots as a way to put it and all of that. And it was always the concept of vertical. So I did not realize that it was the concept of horizontal drilling that really gave rise to this next generation understanding or opening up geothermal. So, yeah, keep going.
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C
I would say two components. And yes, DOE has been instrumental with all of the funding that they have put since the 70s. Fenton Hill is the first example of people trying to do this kind of connection between wells and creating like a downhole, heat exchanger downhole right now.
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B
Oh, I don't think we explained that, but let's do EGS carefully. Right?
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C
Yeah.
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So EGS stands for.
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EGS stands for engineered or enhanced geothermal Systems. And the reality for somebody that is not in geothermal yet, it can be a bit confusing because it's a bit complex. So normally I try to work around this complexity with three axes to understand what you're doing. Or when you talk to somebody that is doing geothermal, you have to ask what kind of geothermal you're doing. And there's actually three axes that helps you understand that. On one hand, you have the application. You can do geothermal for multiple things. You can do it for power generation, for thermal purposes like industrial heat, steam generation. You can do district heating, you can do residential and building heating. So to understand what you're going to be using, the resource for is important. Another thing is what resource you're using. Just like in oil and gas, you have different ways of generating useful energy at the surface. You may be talking about liquid, you may be talking about gas, you may be talking about reservoir that has a fluid. Geothermal, conventional geothermal. That's one way of benefiting from the Heat that is underneath the subsurface. So you have conventional geothermal where you actually have a fluid, a pressurized fluid in the subsurface. That is, you put a vertical well and it comes up to the surface
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B
based on the hot liquid.
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Yeah, hot liquid comes up, you have a different way of doing extracting energy from a different resource, which is dry rock. So the moment you start drilling downwards, you start increasing your temperature because obviously the center of the earth, the nucleus, is 6,000 degrees Celsius. So the deeper you go, the higher the temperature. And there are areas that are not, they don't have fluids, they don't have a massive amount of liquid inside of them, they're just hard rock. Imagine granite, that's a very hard rock, but it's hot and it has a good thermal conductivity. So what people have been trying since the 70s is to try to drill wells and connect them so that you're creating a downhole heat exchanger. And in order to do that, of course you can have vertical wells and frack, but then your surface area is limited.
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B
You're talking about two wells, an injector and a producer.
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That's right.
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And fracking between them.
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Exactly. So you're kind of stimulating between two vertical wells. But the great, let's say, breakthrough was when people realized that the way that you're doing shell developments with horizontal wells and fractures and when you were having these parent to child interactions that nobody wants. But that's connecting two wells. That for geothermal is exactly what you need. You need to connect them, you need to frack in between, you need to increase in this way the surface area that has contact between the hot dry rock and the fluid that you're circulating and create a loop where you're injecting fluid from the surface, you have some certain residence time of the fluid that is going to be circulating and coming up again. So in terms of the axis, as I said, you have application for what you have. What is the resource? Is it dry rock or. It's actually an aquifer, not an equivalent to an oil and gas reservoir. The way that I look at this is like if you have shale, you're developing the source rock. If you have a conventional reservoir, you have liquids in there. So shale would be the equivalent to hot dry rock and an aquifer would be the equivalent to a reservoir with porosity, permeability and flow. The third element is how you're going to be extracting the fluid. As I said, if you have an aquifer, pressurized aquifer vertical well is enough. If you have dry rock, you have two ways of doing that. You have what I explained, which is to have multiple wells and fracturing system
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in between injectors and producers, injector and
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producer, a doublet injector and producer. And with this you can create contact with the rock and circulate the fluid that is heating up and you're bringing that heat to the surface. There are other technologies that are also applicable and that are being tested these days.
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B
Let me slow down here. I want to stay with you here. Okay, so injector and producer pairs and we're saying that the injector is also has a horizontal leg and that's where you inject the colder water and you let the geothermal heat heat up the water and it just keeps traveling because you are pushing it basically through the injector. And then the producer, just like a regular producer, will just pressure differential to bring it up.
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C
You may think about it as a water injection, as an improved oil recovery.
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B
There you go. That's exactly what I want to think about. Okay, excellent, excellent.
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C
But there are other technologies that take this to a different approach. You have companies that are trying to do this in a closed loop environment, meaning that you have a tubing that goes down and then you have a tubing that goes up. And you're relying 100 on conduction between the rock. So there's not actual contact between the fluids that you're circulating and the and the hot rock, this just conduction. And of course it has its benefits because then you can predict much better what's going to happen. The moment you have a fracture, you have uncertainty and risk of flowing fluids going down. But the problem is that you don't have that much residence time. So in order to bring to the surface 200 degrees Celsius, you cannot operate at the depth that you have 200 degrees Celsius. You have to go deeper because in terms of residence time, you're not going to have time enough for that.
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B
Oh, you're saying, okay. And then again, this is for people who aren't new to the oil and gas sector and we're talking about that instead of in hydraulic fracturing, horizontal, well, you would actually just distribute the water into the rock and it'd be direct water rock connection. But in this closed loop system, you're talking about a pipe and you're injecting it into the pipe and then the pipe has to heat up from the geothermal and then it has to transfer that heat into the water and then that's what you bring up to the surface.
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It's a chain reaction associated to conduction.
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B
And because of that it's inefficient rather than the water.
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It's less efficient.
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B
Less efficient.
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Okay, but at the same time, the premise is that there are countries around the world, not the US but other countries, where fracking is banned.
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Oh, I forgot about that.
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C
There's an opportunity for doing geothermal in a different way with these closed loops. And as I said, it's not always. The target may not be to produce power for which you need 150 degrees Celsius, 200, 250 degrees Celsius. They're able to do this consistently and economically viable for 100 degrees Celsius, 80, 60 degrees Celsius for district heating. That's value. And let's not forget that half of the energy that we consume is thermal energy. It's not so much power around the world. You have a lot of terawatts of thermal energy that geothermal could provide with open loop systems, engineered geothermal systems, or with closed loop systems. So it's really, we're at the point that we need to understand each one of these technologies where they can be more effective and for what. So as I said, it's what resource I'm developing, what is the application I'm going to be using it for, and what is the technology that you can have just traditional, you plug and you produce because it's a conventional reservoir. You can have these engineered systems that you frack and create a larger surface area in between the two, the injector and the producer. Or you can have a close loop. Or there's another company that is trying to do this even differently because they create a fracture on a single well and then they pump fluid. So it's like a lung that is compressing and expanding.
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B
Oh my gosh, like it's breathing.
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C
Almost like when you do half emptying unconventional reservoirs. So they do half empath with let's say control fracture. And they also, they benefit for the pressure and the temperature. So if you're doing this deep enough, you have a temperature component, but you also have a pressure because you are over pressurizing that fracture in some way. Right. So right now they're collaborating in Nevada to do their one of the first commercial sites. So there's a lot of different technologies for geothermal that are coming up over the next years. And I would also say for your audience is that many of them are founded by oil and gas veterans that just like me, right now is maybe am I retiring or am I doing something fun and new? And they're funding this, they're founding these startups, and they're bringing in all of their oil and gas knowledge into geothermal.
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B
Since you speak both languages, let's go ahead and translate for everybody just how many different areas in oil and gas really do transfer to geothermal and how exciting that might be for people.
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Yeah, it would take less time to say the ones that do not. But I'm going to go the other way around.
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B
Oh, my gosh.
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C
There are some applications that talk that basically 80% of the disciplines in oil and gas are applicable to geothermal. Because basically the whole cycle of developing a geothermal field resonates a lot with the way that you do an oil and gas development. Because you always start with exploration. You need to characterize the subsurface. You have maybe a portfolio of opportunities. You do play fairway analysis around certain areas, your prospecting. And you're going to. I'm gonna drill here then. So that's the work of geologists, the geoscientists, that you understand the subsurface. You may have differences in how you do that because it's magnetic. Magnetics. I'm a chemical engineer, so if I say something that is not right on the geophysics side, that's the hardest one for me when I was an oil and gas engineer.
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B
Okay.
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C
To speak the language of geophysicists. But the passive, seismic, active, seismic, when you're looking for hot water, may be different. Or when you're looking for hot, dry rock, may be different than when you're trying to find this contrast and these anticlines and these seals, for instance, for geothermal, the seal is. May not be that relevant because you're looking for hot dry rock. Right. But you do have the same workflow for subsurface characterization and exploration. And then you drill your Wildcat and then you start getting first samples and start getting first understanding. Oh, I drilled 5 kilometers or 3 kilometers. I have this temperature. My model was 10 degrees off or on. So you have this iterative process from the first well. And if that first well is successful, you do the same kind of appraisal process so that you're de Risking the whole.
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B
So the whole modeling piece of it
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C
is essentially from the perspective of modeling, having basin modelers. Maybe the heat flow. The heat component is more important in geothermal. Not to say that in the oil and gas it affects viscosity.
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B
You got to know.
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C
Yeah, you got to know. But it may be less relevant or Critical here is absolutely critical to understand what is the temperature of the resource at the target that you have defined for depth. Once you have the risk then understood, okay, this can be a plausible development. You enter into the same kind of development with multiple drilling locations, multiple stimulation locations. You have this learning curve of the first one is always going to be more expensive because you're careful with the casing design. The more you understand and the faster you can go, cost will decline. And then you start testing and you have your well test and then you have your construction of the plant. You need exactly the same itinerary as in oil and gas, that you first design and build the wells and then you design the pipeline transportation to take fluids to your central facilities. And in your central facilities you still have heat exchangers, just like in oil and gas. You still have, maybe even separators are needed. If you're working with open systems, you may have to separate the gas that has been produced because you're changing pressure in the liquid may be losing some pressure, some gases. And then the only difference, maybe for upstream people, is that you're not just producing the fluid, you're transforming that fluid into something else, which is electricity.
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B
So that's right at the surface?
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C
That's right at the surface. If you're thinking about a power generation project, you need a turbine, and that may be the most. But again, if you're in downstream or in midstream, you have turbines.
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B
Yeah, we artificial create upstream midstream and downstream. You're right. It's all one thing, one value chance.
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C
So if you're considering even downstream, process engineer, it's key for geothermal as well. And these cycles that you're using to produce electricity, in some places you can just use the steam coming from the geothermal field directly as a steam turbine. But in other locations you're more going into rankine cycles, organic Rankine cycles, which is like a loop, a cycle where you have isobutane as a or another organic working fluid that goes through a loop. So it exchanges heat with the geothermal brine. And after that it's vaporized, it passes through a turbine, then you have some cooling, then you have a pump, and then you do that cycle again and again and again and again. That's probably the only area orcs ranking cycles that is not so familiar for oil and gas. But again, it's thermodynamics.
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B
It's the stuff that we know.
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C
It's the same language, a little bit different. You end up talking about watts rather than barrels. But it's like when you speak Spanish and you want to learn French, you just have a hundred words that you just have to understand and then you're suddenly fluent in French.
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B
Yeah, that's right. Okay. Wow, that was a great, fascinating story. I have the impression that geothermal reservoirs or the sites that would be the most optimal for geothermal through the enhanced geothermal that requires hydraulic fracturing are deeper. I have a sense that they're real deep and it's just a little more expensive because you run into things that can mess up your equipment. Because that's the bottom line.
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C
Okay. The funny thing about geothermal or the heat that is emanating from the Earth is that it's not homogeneous. We have to think about the Earth as like an on have different, like the nucleus, the mantle, the lithosphere. And this is not homogeneous through the world. In many places you have folds and fractures that are. Imagine you have a blanket, you're cold, you have a blanket, but then suddenly that blanket is broken. So there are some areas where that heat is emanating, so you're losing that insulation. Right. So around the world there are places where you have even surface manifestations like hot springs.
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B
Oh, right.
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Iceland or in Kenya or many even
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B
in California, Southern California or Nevada.
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C
So on those places where you have your blanket is broken, if I may say, you have much higher heat flow, much higher temperature, shallower. Meaning that in the conventional geothermal world you typically do 2, 3 kilometers only. Then when you're moving from conventional geothermal where you have these super hot conditions very close to the surface and move into gradients, I mean, let me go back a little bit. These conventional systems probably have 80, 70 degrees Celsius per km. So this is very high temperature gradients. The average is around 20 to 30 degrees per km. But you have many locations where you have anomalies. For instance, in Texas, Presidio, the anomalies there that you have a much higher temperature gradient because the Earth is not. Sediments are not insulating enough. So you may have 40, 50, 60 degrees Celsius. So that means that you may just need to drill 3 to 4 to 5 kilometers to do geothermal. The beauty about this is that by all of the technology developments that right now oil and gas can drill to 7,8 kilometers no problem. World record these days is 12 kilometers. But there's companies that are trying to even go deeper because really anywhere around the world you can, if you start drilling and go deeper, you're going to reach this 200 degrees Celsius at some point. But obviously right now, if that means 10 km, it may not be economical. But the industry is trying to do at least that region between 3 and 6 kilometers to go to those places where you have a temperature gradient between 40, 50, 60 and start there. And just like oil and gas went first to offshore shallow and then you went offshore deeper and deeper and then you have 3 kilometer the water depth. That's the same for geothermal. You can be. We have the technology. There's companies like Sage, Furbo and many others that are right now operating in that depth range. But who knows what the next wave is going to bring us. Maybe we'll go down to seven, we go down to eight. And as Project in Space, what we're doing to help in that route is to make sure that we have, for instance, one of the products that we have is called GeoMap. It's an open access tool that people can see how deep you need to go anywhere in the world to reach a certain temperature.
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B
Did you say geomap?
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C
Geomap, yeah. That's an open access tool that we have developed to facilitate people understanding what is the size of the opportunity and where to get started. And by understanding the size of the opportunities, companies can understand how they can position themselves in geothermal and understand where they may have facilities already that can benefit from geothermal energy. If you're a user or if you're a developer, they have well characterized the Eagle Ford, you have the Wilcox, you have areas here in Texas that get hot quite fast when you start going down, or even the Hinesville of course. So by having that early characterization, thanks to all of your gas activities in the legacy oil and gas regions, you can go deeper and start doing co production of geothermal. So that's one of the stories that we're telling oil and gas companies to not only benefit from the skill set, but also their own fields for geothermal.
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B
So this is a sandwich. You need the workers and you need the opportunity. Talk a little bit about Project Inner Space Space. And now I understand where we're coming from. How exactly does Project Inner Space support business opportunities?
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C
As I said, our purpose is to bring terawatts of geothermal energy. And in order to do that we have to understand what are the barriers for geothermal growth. One of those barriers was understanding the size of the opportunity. There was no global map that gave you that idea that actually you should go here or should go there beyond the traditional hotspots for geothermal pun intended to go to areas that do have the oil and gas legacy industry like India, like Nigeria, like Brazil, that have resources and that can help unlock and bring this first wave of demonstrations. Of course, the U.S. i forgot about the U.S. but what, what. Yeah, sorry for that.
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B
Let's go ahead.
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C
Obviously all these countries and states inside of the U.S. like Nevada, that's a traditional place for your thermal. But if you go to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, this potential in this industry. So our goal with geomap was to show that size of the opportunity. And just like we did that for the size of the opportunity, we also identified other barriers for geothermal growth and we act and we develop projects. There's two things that we are announcing these days. Tomorrow we're going to present the GRMs because for the finance world, they still don't understand geothermal fully. They don't understand resources and they don't understand how to quantify volumes. And there's an opportunity to translate the PRMs, which is the Petroleum Resource Management System, into geothermal. We call it the GRMs. Oh, and we have a collaboration that is going to start on Wednesday with the Society of Petroleum Engineers to translate to. You don't really need that much of a translation, but just to make sure that geothermal speaks the same language as oil and gas because the finance market has been operating for decades with that language.
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B
Oh, they understand money far better than we do. They understand oil and gas far better than we understand money. Let's put it that way.
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C
By simplifying their entry into next generation geothermal by speaking the same language as oil and gas, we believe that this can unlock a much better and more dynamic market for geothermal to make it equivalent to oil and gas. So the moment that geothermal starts to grow, tutawatts and gigawatts and almost terawatts of energy, you really need this language. That's the barrier that we're trying to break as braking space. Again, an open tool that is an open framework that will be available for the overall community focused on finance on the supply chain. That's also important to talk about. What are those potential bottlenecks for geothermal to grow into terawatts? You may think about drilling rigs. Do we have sufficient drilling rigs that can drill deep and hard and into very high temperatures? Companies are working on that already. And again, it's always this chicken and egg situation that people say I know how to do it, but if the market is not there, how can I? Why should I invest on this? So drilling rigs is an area that needs to grow for geothermal to be able to do the same kind of, let's say 70,000 wells a year that oil and gas has been doing. If we want geothermal to reach that point there, there needs to be a strong market signal for the developers and the suppliers to dedicate money and time to geothermal. The other element is the ranking cycles. The turbines that I mentioned before. You don't have that many suppliers. You don't have a robust supply chain that knows how to that have standardized and modularized burgers in McDonald's one after each other. That may be needed will be needed when we are scaling up. So one of the things that we're launching today is an xprize. XPRIZE is xprize.
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B
Oh yeah. In geothermal.
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C
In geothermal for turbine turbo machinery. Xprize. So what we did is we analyzed the ecosystem, we understood what could be this bottlenecks. We have a publication that is coming out today to justify to explain why we're putting some effort, some philanthropy money into supporting and X price so that companies will have the opportunity to innovate in this area. That is going to be critical for geothermal because it's not enough different to oil and gas. Once the barrel of oil is in the surface, you sell it here. You have to transform that liquid and that carrier of heat into electricity and there's room for innovation there. And innovation will bring costs down and will make geothermal more competitive. So that's again one example of how we do research as a focus research organization. We do research and we don't stop at the publication. We do something afterwards trying to bring something, a product, an initiative, something that the whole community of geothermal will benefit from.
- [29:31]
B
Yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm just fascinated. This is so exciting. So before I left the Department of Energy I was part of a team representing oil and gas with geothermal and other parts of the Department of Energy focused on subsurface. Many applications for subsurface way beyond oil and gas and geothermal. But one of the things was Congress said Department of Energy, you will transfer the oil skill set to geothermal. Let's do a partnership between you, blah blah, blah blah. We'll give you some money. Is this part of that same legacy? I want to say this is a long time ago. So you're talking about now.
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C
This is happening now as well. We have as predicting space. We are prime investigators together with SP Society of Petroleum Engineers with the Department of Energy in a consortium called geode.
- [30:14]
B
Yes, that's the one. Yeah, that's the one actually.
- [30:17]
C
Yeah, we will be So I got
- [30:18]
B
to work on that before it was geode. Oh, that's.
- [30:21]
C
We've been working since 2024. And actually what I like the most about GEODE is that it brings structure. It gave us the opportunity to look at technology transfer, but also transfer in other areas like policy, workforce, public awareness and how we could discuss how oil and gas did this learning curve and reach to a moment say, okay, I'm going to be doing things like this and accelerate how geothermal could just instead of starting from scratch, use what the oil and gas. So we have developed the roadmaps and we have sent to DOE those recommendations indicating where the quick wins are and where oil and gas can transfer knowledge into geothermal. I would also also that we do a lot of work with oil and gas. We have focal points in every single major or every single service company that all excited about geothermal. They're seeing the business opportunity. But we also try and go even beyond the oil and gas because the moment that you go into very high temperatures, you also need to start looking beyond oil and gas in the military and the aerospace industry. And there are other DOE. Maybe it's more DOD than DOE or other federal agencies like Lincoln Lab in MIT. We did one event at Lincoln Lab three years ago, 2024. We brought oil and gas and geothermal experts to see what are the technologies that these other industries were developing. And some things are coming out from there on high temperature electronics, for instance, that are. That's probably where when you reach the 300 degrees Celsius, the oil and gas. I may need to change how I'm doing things in the heinzfeld. Yeah, that's maybe the closest analogy, but you may need to even think beyond oil and gas. So all of the federal work around the DOE DoD has been benefiting geothermal in multiple areas. On the technology.
- [32:08]
B
Absolutely. That was one of the most fun things I did when I was at Department of Energy was the concept of public private partnerships taking government dollars that would benefit, or I should say taxpayer dollars that would benefit taxpayers by coupling with the industry. And while the industry's contributions were had a minimum of 20%, because of that nucleus, more and more money was brought in by the industry. So that in many times, many projects there was more industry money than there was government money, I should say taxpayer dollars. And that's to the benefit of everything. That is what helped. You got me thinking geothermal because I'm all excited. That's what brought the hydraulic fracturing, the shale development was that industry investment. They put it together the government did the initial fundamental research and the industry put horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing together. And then they took the risk and that's what made it really grow. And then the other thing was the notion that we could borrow ideas from other areas. The best thing that happened to oil and gas was the computer. And we did not invent that, but we maxed it out. We really took it to ground and helped it grow. Because of our need was so great. Once we understood that we could use it. I know you're dying to say something. Go ahead.
- [33:22]
C
So many things, I'm just trying to list them in my head. I'm not going to remember them all. But when you said computer I thought AI is literally the same. We have a session today. We're going to be talking about what AI can do for geothermal and how we can leverage our own tools like GeoMap, put in a fantastic layer of AI that will take it to 10x what we can do right now. And that kind of disruptive, of course is not us developing the LLM. That's a completely different industry. But you have to be aware of all of the opportunities.
- [33:50]
B
Those are partnerships too.
- [33:51]
C
And from the perspective of this consortium I was trying to remember, I think it's hdfs, one of these industry led consortiums that helped a lot on hydraulic fracturing.
- [34:00]
B
Hydraulic Fracturing Technology Conference is a Society of Petroleum Engineers annual conference that Chris Wright. Secretary Chris Wright and Assistant Secretary Carl Highsbeit have been part of for a long time. So yeah, absolutely. That really advanced from a novelty thing to an actual real conference that has a lot of people coming. I was just there. I moderated a special panel there at the conference. In fact, I moderated the panel that Chris Wright used to moderate. Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
- [34:32]
C
No problem. And the Deep start for offshore technology
- [34:35]
B
was started by Texaco.
- [34:37]
C
Yeah, my company. We were part of it. No, that was when I was in ENI anyway, not Repsol, but that was eni. I also worked at eni. I didn't say that before. My point being that industry led consortium collaborating with federal or. Yeah, federal money and then bringing to life demonstrations. Whenever we've had conversations with the oil and gas industry in the. In the finance markets, it's always about demonstrating the business case. Not in just one geology, but across multiple geologists. Forge really unlocked.
- [35:09]
B
Tell people what Forge is.
- [35:10]
C
Forge is a test site funded by DOE in Utah that has been operative since 2018, 19, something like that. Please check the numbers around there for a while.
- [35:21]
B
Long enough to.
- [35:22]
C
Long enough to have Been very useful. Useful to make sure that people understand what's possible in granites in Utah. And now companies are populating the area around that site. Exploration leases. Not only fervor, but others are also trying to expand from a research test site into actual energy for the communities. But there's many other places around the US and around the world.
- [35:45]
B
When you said granite, the notion is that not only are you transferring oil and gas to geothermal, the skill set and all of that, but we're moving from sedimentary rock into igneous rock. Wow. Is there any place you can't do geothermal?
- [35:58]
C
And actually some of these companies are going back to sedimentary rock because the moment you go deep in Texas you don't really have permeability. And then that's. I'm not going to say that's the next frontier because the next frontier is touching the magma and drilling into volcanoes. But there's companies which could be a little dangerous. Yes and no. It wouldn't be the first time in Iceland in 10 years ago they've drilled already a couple of wells that touched the magma. Yeah, but again that'll come from the perspective of oil and gas. They're always step by steps. But yeah. So there's people drilling in sedimentary rocks that are hot enough to generate geothermal energy. So igneous rocks, 100% granite basalts, but also sedimentary rocks. Tough.
- [36:38]
B
I did not know that. We are absolutely out of time. But I want to give you a chance to make one last statement so that you can put a little cap on this conversation. Obviously, Project Inner Space. We will include links to Project Inner Space in the show notes and any other links. Maybe some technical papers or something. Anything you want that we'll add there too. And how can people get involved? Petroleum engineers with SPE may be involved in the geode if we're not already involved or. And I guess what are some of the things that you want to remind people that Project Inner Space wants to
- [37:15]
C
be sure that people know as Project Inner Space. Our vision is really that it's the oil and gas industry, the one that is going to scale geothermal. The moment that these demonstrations and first projects come to life and show that the business case can be a double digit return on investment just like oil and gas. We do expect this to boom and the oil and gas industry to drive this, let's say revolution, the geothermal revolution that will bring terawatts of energy for the communities. So we're really investing our energies and efforts to bring to life these demonstrations to support and unlock Private capital for demonstrations to happen all over the world. And I would argue that my final message would be two sided on one side. On a personal level, if people are interested in geothermal and want to explore the same route that I followed and have a second career, geothermal really is not that far from your comfort zone. You will be applying the same skills just to bring energy to the world. Please take a look at geothermal from that perspective as an opportunity for your career to grow in a different direction. At a company level, things are booming where whenever you see in the links that I'm going to share with Elina, there's some reports that we're trying to show the scale of the opportunity for oil and gas entities to position themselves into geothermal because really it doesn't. It's not related to the angle that you take to this, is it either energy abundance checked, clean energy for sure checked, or new supply chains to have more and more energy for everybody. There's literally no, no reason why companies would not explore more geothermal.
- [38:48]
B
Wow, that's exciting. Looking to the future, as an engineer, I think my heart is in the puzzle. How do we solve the puzzle? And this is a whole new set of questions, a whole new set of trying to put things together and really use all sides of your brain. And that brain candy is what I love. So I'm sure others like you and me, who, yeah, will probably never retire,
- [39:13]
C
we make fun around that because we call it a Tetris. Many times actually our logo represents the earth and a Tetris because you have so much, many facets that have to match at the same time. But this is really the decade where we expect this to click. And as you said, at a personal level, there's all these challenges that many oil and gas veterans are now founding startups because it's like, why should I just rest my brain?
- [39:35]
B
You can't rest your brain.
- [39:36]
C
If there's any challenge I can help with, absolutely.
- [39:38]
B
And I find that many of us cannot rest our brain. We just have to keep chewing on those problems. It's too much fun. And of course, who knew, who knew that your lifetime investment in your career would end up being something what in your retirement would be so much fun? Because I'm sure there's places for volunteers too. They don't really want to work 100%. They just want to play. That's a good life.
- [40:00]
C
Reach out if you want.
- [40:01]
B
That's right, exactly. You will have all your links in the show notes. Okay. Daniel Marino Garcia, vice president for research at Project Inner Space. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a fascinating.
- [40:14]
C
It's been fun. Thank you so much.
- [40:15]
B
Oh absolutely, absolutely. And thank you everyone for listening. This is Elena Melker, your host. More next time.
- [40:23]
D
Thanks for listening to oggn, the world's largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. If you like this show, leave us a review and then go to oggn.com to learn about all our other shows. Don't forget to sign up for our WIN weekly newsletter. This show has been a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network.