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The article at the link below is about a German designed seismic sound truck to help to find geothermal well locations...
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/revolutionar … 00509.html
Revolutionary trucks could detect locations to extract game-changing energy from earth: 'Hurdles would be significantly reduced'
Jeremiah Budin
Wed, April 24, 2024 at 3:30 AM EDT·2 min read
The trucks were designed (apparently) to help with searches in urban areas, where traditional (open prairie) thumpers are not welcome.
(th)
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'Iceland plans to drill into a volcano's magma chamber to attain unlimited geothermal power'
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Fusion Tech Finds Geothermal Energy Application
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geothermal-en … ron-quaise
MIT spinoff eyes microwave drills as route to robust geothermal rewards
plans to deploy what are called gyrotron drills to vaporize rock using powerful microwaves.
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The answer to this question from 2021 is ** yes! **
In 2026 we have news of a company organized to harvest geothermal energy more efficiently than previous methods, using a combination of new technologies.
In other topics, kbd512 has described how spent oil wells in Texas might be used to harvest geothermal energy.
The company itself is reported to be using fracking technology to harvest energy from new locations after a given region has been exhausted.
The geothermal energy harvested comes from the planetary core, which makes this topic the best match for this post.
I am returning this topic to active status in hopes there are members of the forum who will want to study whether it is economically feasible to build a small business around a geothermal power well.
My guess is that this concept is not yet economically feasible, or it would already be happening.
However, advances in drilling technology may permit excavation of material below a drill site at a rate that could be justified for investment.
In this scenario, an individual might be able to obtain funding to drill a geothermal well, and sell the power to enough neighbors to repay the loan.
In other topics kbd512 has described how SCO2 can serve as a working fluid for efficient transfer of thermal energy from one place to another, such as from the interior of the Earth to the surface where it can be harvested.
This topic would appear to have significant growth potential, because the company embarked upon this venture appears to be well funded.
In the quote from 2021 above, the scenario of an individual being able to finance one of these systems was offered. My guess today in 2026 is that the cost of one of these wells may be out of reach for most of us, but the cost may fall over time as the risks of the venture are retired.
(th)
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quote from another topic with "geothermal" in the title
This post is about work done to harvest thermal energy from under the surface of the Earth.
Void's topic about planetary cores and potentials for geothermal power seems a better fit for this news than a topic about storage.
Void brought the company Fervo to our attention, on one of his topics. This post offers a report on the company.
https://propane.com/environment/podcast … eothermal/
Update: I just re-read the article after scanning it the first time. The company is planning to use fracking technology to solve the problem that Calliban brought to our attention long ago ... perhaps (by now) years ago ... the geothermal resource will expire because the Earth is such a poor thermal conductor.
When a particular field "dries up" the plan is just frack a different field.
Geothermal Isn’t Niche Anymore: Fervo Energy’s Sarah Jewett on Next-Generation Geothermal
6.25 - Geothermal Isn’t Niche Anymore: Fervo Energy’s Sarah Jewett on Next-Generation Geothermal
Sarah JewettGeothermal is having a breakthrough moment and one of the biggest signals is happening right now in southwest Utah. Fervo Energy has begun developing Cape Station, a first-of-its-kind 500-megawatt next-generation geothermal project that could become one of the largest in the world when fully built. Cape Station has drawn national attention, including a recent visit from Bill Gates.
In this episode of Path to Zero, Tucker Perkins talks with Sarah Jewett, Vice President of Strategy at Fervo Energy, about what this Utah project means for the future of clean, firm power and how advances borrowed from the shale revolution are unlocking geothermal in places once considered impossible.
Before joining Fervo, Jewett spent years in the oil and gas sector, including time at Schlumberger, where she worked directly with the subsurface technologies — directional drilling, completions, and reservoir analysis — that now form the backbone of Fervo’s geothermal approach. Trained as a mechanical engineer with additional business and strategy expertise, she brings a rare combination of deep technical fluency and commercial insight to one of clean energy’s most promising frontiers.
Fervo Energy photo
Fervo Energy photo
Reinventing geothermal with oil and gas technology
Fervo’s mission is to reinvent geothermal energy so it becomes the cleanest, most scalable, reliable, and affordable source of power on the grid. Traditional geothermal has been geographically constrained to rare spots with naturally occurring hot water and steam in complex fracture networks underground. Developers had to “get lucky” and hit those fractures with vertical wells, which made the resource risky and hard to scale.
Fervo flips that model. Instead of hunting for perfect natural geology, they create predictable “subsurface radiators” almost anywhere there is hot rock. Using proven tools from the shale industry, such as horizontal drilling, multi-stage completions, fiber-optic monitoring, they drill long horizontal wells into hot rock and engineer the pathways that move heat to the surface. On the surface, the power plant is relatively conventional; the innovation is underground.
As Jewett puts it, there’s hot rock everywhere. The challenge is figuring out how to cost-effectively pull the heat out.
From Project RED to Cape Station
Fervo’s first big milestone was Project RED in Nevada, a combined technology and commercial pilot. Instead of just proving out the engineering, Fervo chose to prove that customers would pay for “firm clean energy” at the same time. They located next to an existing geothermal plant, developed their own horizontal well pair just outside the traditional resource area, and sold hot brine into the existing facility.
Project RED used a three-well system—two 3,500-foot horizontal wells (one injection, one production) and a vertical monitoring well—and now delivers about three megawatts of net power that didn’t exist before. Just as importantly, it showed that Fervo’s approach could work technically and sell commercially.Cape Station team
Fervo Energy photo
Those lessons are now being applied at a much bigger scale at Cape Station in Beaver County, Utah. Cape Station is planned as a 500-megawatt, two-phase project: 100 megawatts to the grid in 2026, and another 400 megawatts in 2028. Fervo has already completed the well field for phase one—24 wells drilled from three pads—and has significantly reduced drilling costs compared to Project RED by repeating and refining the process.
Jobs, trust, and community benefits
Jewett spends a lot of her time selling the project to the communities where Fervo works. In Milford and Beaver County, Fervo arrived just as a major non-ag employer was laying people off. The biggest question locals had was simple: “When are you going to start hiring?”
Fervo’s answer has been multi-layered. They have roughly 20 full-time Fervo employees based in the local community and around 350 people on-site through contractors and construction firms. The company actively encourages local hiring and works with regional firms such as Rollins Construction and Vortex Crane to keep as much spending in the community as possible.
At the same time, Fervo is careful to acknowledge and address local concerns: induced seismicity, water use, groundwater protection, truck traffic through town, and the visual and noise footprint of the plant. The company works to mitigate risks proactively and to be transparent about what can go wrong, how they aim to prevent it, and how they would respond if something does happen. Over time, Jewett says, building venues for honest dialogue has created trust.
Fervo Energy photo
Fervo Energy photo
Quiet, closed-loop, and low-impact
Compared with many forms of energy development, operating geothermal plants can be surprisingly unobtrusive. Fervo’s designs are closed-loop: geothermal brine is pumped through a heat exchanger, where its heat is transferred to a working fluid that powers the turbines, and then the brine is reinjected underground. There are no big steam plumes venting to the atmosphere, and sound levels are relatively modest.
Water consumption is a concern in the arid West, but Fervo uses air-cooling on its plants and keeps brine in a closed loop rather than venting it, which helps minimize water use and contamination risk. Because there are no hydrocarbons in these reservoirs, many of the chemical and methane issues associated with oil and gas fracking simply don’t apply.
Another key selling point is land efficiency. Jewett notes that Fervo can place around 10 horizontal wells on a single six-acre pad and potentially produce about 50 megawatts of power from that footprint. Replicating that output with solar or solar-plus-storage would typically require far more surface disturbance.
Cost, scaling, and the shale analogy
Historically, geothermal has had a reputation as an expensive, high-risk resource, in part because of “dry wells” and declining reservoir performance. In older projects, developers depended on natural fracture systems that weren’t fully characterized; roughly a third of wells in some fields turned out to be duds, and once the resource declined, there was often no way to economically “recharge” it.
Fervo’s horizontal-well approach is designed to remove both problems. By engineering the fracture network they need, they greatly reduce dry-hole risk. And if temperatures or output decline over time, they can drill new well pairs into the same field to boost production rather than being stuck with a stranded power plant.
Jewett draws a direct analogy to the shale revolution. Techniques like long horizontals, precision fracking, and sophisticated monitoring completely transformed U.S. oil and gas. Many experts said those tools wouldn’t work in geothermal—until Fervo went out and used modern flex rigs, drilled long horizontals into the granitic basement, and proved otherwise. She believes that the same physics-driven toolkit can unlock geothermal at a much larger scale.
Policy support, investors, and the cost of capital
On the policy side, geothermal has traditionally been an afterthought, struggling to access the same level of tax incentives that wind and solar enjoy. That changed with recent legislation, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which put geothermal on a more level playing field with solar for at least the next decade. Fervo’s founders deliberately built their business assuming they wouldn’t have generous tax credits forever and are focused on driving down costs quickly enough that the technology can stand on its own.
Even with improved policy, Jewett says the biggest bottleneck now is low-cost capital. Given how capital-intensive geothermal projects are, the ability to attract investors who see the risk as manageable is critical to scaling. Fervo has built credibility in the investor community by setting ambitious but clear technical milestones for each funding round—then achieving them and showing exactly how the money was used. That track record, along with high-profile interest from clean-tech investors and figures like Bill Gates, is helping open the door to more funding.
Fervo Energy photo
Fervo Energy photo
A 20 percent vision for geothermal
Today, geothermal provides about half of one percent of U.S. electricity. Fervo’s internal vision is far more ambitious: Jewett says the company believes geothermal can supply more than 20 percent of the U.S. power grid by 2050—roughly the scale of the current nuclear fleet.
Investors, policymakers, and communities are starting to see that potential. A resource once thought of as niche and location-limited is now being reimagined as scalable, dispatchable, around-the-clock clean power that borrows the best of America’s oil and gas know-how.
It seems to me that this same technology would work at Mars. On Mars the pipes would need to be at least as deep as the ones described in this article.
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Mars has a thicker crust, a more rigid mantle and no extant plate techtonics. But recent discoveries have shown that there are extant magma plumes within the Martian mantle that do reach the surface. But only in a few locations. Geothermal power on Mars is only realistic in specific locations. The area to the south of Elysium appears to be one such area. Unfortunately, it also appears to be the most seismically active part of Mars. Not ideal if you want to build an underground base.
Last edited by Calliban (Yesterday 08:52:32)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
I don't think we're going to build much underground to start off with, primarily because the equipment and energy requirements for tunneling are so substantial. It's not impossible to do and may be advantageous in select locations, but there is no absolute requirement to build underground when above-ground structures can still be adequately shielded against radiation. Any GCR mitigated structure is a SPE / CME impervious structure by default. Those are the only forms of radiation known to be problematic on Mars, so 1-2m of regolith protection creates an Earth sea level radiation environment. I think we can create tensile structures made from recycled Starship 304L stainless steel and compressive structures using cast basalt tiles, as you already suggested. The walls of the structure can be "bermed" with regolith piles. There will still be direct overhead GCR that makes it through, but much less, so if the base (shielded by the planet itself) and walls (shielded by the regolith piles) are there, you simply deal with not having perfect GCR protection. People who live on mountain tops or fly commercial aircraft for decades of their lives don't seem to have dramatically higher cancer rates later in life.
If we limit ourselves to singular building materials, then we end up with either impossible materials importation or impossible indigenous materials processing requirements. Here on Earth, every structure is built using a combination of materials that are most ideal for resisting either tensile or compressive forces. We may be able to technically build a skyscraper using concrete or steel alone, but the energy and therefore monetary tradeoffs involved in structures built that way are so over-the-top that nobody actually does that unless someone with more money than common sense comes along and doesn't care what it costs. That's how we get buildings like the Burj Khalifa, but those are one-of-a-kind things.
We've already decided that even though we have the tech to house everyone in a pyramid carved from enormous rock slabs, it's inefficient and wasteful, therefore we're not doing that as a general practice. I have to believe that a city on Mars will still be subjected to the energy / engineering / economic / timeline factors which drive housing development here on Earth. If you have enough personal wealth, someone will build a rock slab home for you, but most millionaires and billionaires still live in larger / fancier versions of what you see average middle class people living in. Historic homes are the only ones "built differently". Architects live for projects like those, but the rest of the time it's pretty meat-and-potatoes.
I've been in multi-million dollar homes owned by wealthy people here in Houston. Their slabs are still concrete. Their walls still use pine even though they could easily afford hardwoods. They still have a roof using shingles or tiles. Their floors, wall coverings, and furnishings are much nicer, but not fundamentally different. The craftsmanship is better. We still sit at a wooden table and so do they. The near total lack of exceptions seems to indicate that even when money is far less of a factor, engineering and economy don't change. President Obama still lives in a seaside McMansion, not an abandoned missile silo. President Trump still lives in one of his seaside luxury hotels. Elon Musk still lives at work because he's not interested in anything else. Jeff Pena lives in a Scottish castle because he has a castle fetish. He's not the only one, but the Vanderbilts and Rothschilds of the world live in prototypical mansions. Governments create giant reinforced underground shelters to shield themselves from their own poor decision making, and to alleviate their own paranoia, but only using other peoples' money.
If someone hands me $10M tomorrow, I'm not going to live in a bunker. Moving is exhausting. I'm very happy right where I'm at. I might travel and spend more time with my family, but that's about it. I would imagine it's largely the same for almost every other person, even though there are eccentric exceptions. As far as what I think we'll build on Mars is concerned, I think we'll spend the minimum amount of money for adequate shelter, then worry about style later. If we apply sound basic engineering principles, then in all probability our colonists won't have much to worry about. The key to good engineering will be finding people who are willing to adhere to the fundamentals because they accept how important those are, rather than people looking to prove how smart or creative they can be. There's nothing wrong with being smart and creative. However, I don't want a creative type of person assessing the load carrying capacity of my home's foundation when rigid adherence to applicable engineering code determines whether or not the walls collapse or remain upright when the foundation shifts. That's an actual problem here in Houston, and a serious one.
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