WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:03.920 JUDY WOODRUFF: As we reported President Biden and the European Union today announced plans 00:03.920 --> 00:08.400 to enable Europe to become less dependent on Russian oil and gas, 00:08.400 --> 00:12.800 but those efforts will take a lot more money and time to execute. 00:12.800 --> 00:16.560 For now, the Russian invasion is raised much larger questions over 00:16.560 --> 00:21.560 our dependence on fossil fuels and the need to develop cleaner renewable energy. 00:21.760 --> 00:26.760 Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on why geothermal energy is attracting new interest. 00:28.640 --> 00:33.640 MILES O'BRIEN: There's a lot of heat beneath our feet, and that's pretty obvious here, 00:34.560 --> 00:38.080 near the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley. 00:38.080 --> 00:39.120 BILLY THOMAS, Berkshire Hathaway Energy: These are 00:39.120 --> 00:42.320 really world-renowned mud pots that occur naturally. 00:42.320 --> 00:47.320 MILES O'BRIEN: Hot water and carbon dioxide create mini-volcanoes at the Davis-Schrimpf mud pots. 00:49.680 --> 00:51.520 BILLY THOMAS: 00:51.520 --> 00:55.760 They just come up in different areas. They all go dormant and just come up somewhere else. 00:55.760 --> 01:00.760 MILES O'BRIEN: They sit right in the middle of one of the largest geothermal generation fields 01:00.800 --> 01:04.800 in the world. It's renewable, sustainable and carbon-free, 01:05.360 --> 01:10.360 so exploring new ways to tap into this resource is now a very hot field. 01:11.600 --> 01:12.480 What are we seeing here? 01:12.480 --> 01:17.480 BILLY THOMAS: So, here, we're looking at some of our production wells for the Region 1 facility. 01:18.080 --> 01:21.920 MILES O'BRIEN: Billy Thomas is a senior geoscientist at Berkshire 01:21.920 --> 01:26.920 Hathaway's CalEnergy project. He showed me some of the 25 wells and 10 power plants 01:28.880 --> 01:33.880 which together generate 345 megawatts, enough to power more than 300,000 homes. 01:36.560 --> 01:39.840 But, he says, they are only scratching the subsurface. 01:39.840 --> 01:44.240 BILLY THOMAS: This field is a perfect example of field that has a lot of potential. 01:44.240 --> 01:47.840 There's about 5,000 gallons per minute flowing through here. 01:47.840 --> 01:51.680 MILES O'BRIEN: Geothermal heat comes from the molten core of our planet, 01:51.680 --> 01:56.680 which, at more than 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, is as hot as the surface of the sun. 01:57.520 --> 02:01.040 As the heat radiates up, it gradually cools. 02:01.040 --> 02:06.040 Here, they drilled wells between 2,000 feet and two miles deep, where the temperature is 02:06.800 --> 02:11.800 only about 600 degrees Fahrenheit. Very salty, very hot water, called brine, 02:13.280 --> 02:18.280 along with steam, race upward. The steam spins turbines, producing electricity, and the brine 02:20.400 --> 02:25.400 is injected back into the ground, where it is reheated by the earth, replenishing the reservoir. 02:26.720 --> 02:31.720 Is this kind of managed well more or less infinitely sustainable? 02:31.760 --> 02:35.920 BILLY THOMAS: So, yes, we have had the benefit here of actually operating for 02:35.920 --> 02:40.920 some of these fields up to 40 years, and we really have a very robust reservoir, 02:41.360 --> 02:45.520 where we don't see a lot of the decline. So we really have a good system set in 02:45.520 --> 02:49.840 place right now to really make this a sustainable renewable baseload energy. 02:49.840 --> 02:54.840 MILES O'BRIEN: Baseload, meaning 24/7/365, steady production that wind and solar cannot provide. 02:58.400 --> 03:03.400 Geothermal is an emerging dark horse in the race to a stable zero-carbon electrical grid, 03:04.560 --> 03:06.000 AMANDA KOLKER, National Renewable Energy Laboratory: The last couple of decades 03:06.000 --> 03:08.320 have seen about a 25 percent growth worldwide. 03:08.320 --> 03:13.320 MILES O'BRIEN: Geologist Amanda Kolker is program manager for geothermal technologies 03:13.600 --> 03:17.440 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. 03:17.440 --> 03:21.440 AMANDA KOLKER: The technology that we're using today really hasn't changed substantially. 03:21.440 --> 03:25.120 There have been little, incremental kind of optimization improvements. 03:25.120 --> 03:28.800 It's a really exciting time, because we are getting a lot more, I think, 03:28.800 --> 03:32.400 innovative ideas in the geothermal sector than we have for decades. 03:32.400 --> 03:35.360 JIM TURNER, Controlled Thermal Resources: So this area is highly fractured underneath. 03:35.360 --> 03:37.680 MILES O'BRIEN: One of the surprising innovations, 03:37.680 --> 03:41.760 geothermal wells can also be a great source of minerals. 03:41.760 --> 03:44.000 JIM TURNER: So, we just drilled two wells. 03:44.000 --> 03:46.800 MILES O'BRIEN: Jim Turner is chief operating officer 03:46.800 --> 03:51.800 of the U.S. division of Australia-based Controlled Thermal Resources. He walked me 03:53.440 --> 03:58.440 through the 50-megawatt geothermal power plant the company is building in the Imperial Valley. 03:59.440 --> 04:04.440 The salty brine rising from the wells contains almost the entire periodic table of elements, 04:06.000 --> 04:09.760 and Turner says the rocketing demand for electric cars 04:09.760 --> 04:13.520 has made it profitable to extract and sell lithium. 04:13.520 --> 04:16.480 Do you have any projections on how much lithium you might be able to produce? 04:16.480 --> 04:21.480 JIM TURNER: We will produce about 20,000 metric tons a year of lithium product. 04:21.920 --> 04:25.680 MILES O'BRIEN: That would be about 8 percent of the current global production, 04:25.680 --> 04:28.880 four times more than the U.S. provides today. 04:28.880 --> 04:30.240 That's a nice bonus, isn't it? 04:30.240 --> 04:33.680 JIM TURNER: It is. It is a very good bonus. In the past, 04:33.680 --> 04:38.680 it just didn't have enough value to warrant the cost of money to develop, 04:39.040 --> 04:43.600 build a plant and operate it to be able to sell the lithium compounds. 04:43.600 --> 04:47.360 MILES O'BRIEN: The rock beneath is naturally fractured and permeable. 04:47.360 --> 04:50.320 This is the end of the famous San Andreas Fault. 04:50.320 --> 04:53.520 AMANDA KOLKER: The types of resources that you need to produce power are not 04:53.520 --> 04:58.520 available everywhere within drillable depths. It's just, at this stage, 04:58.880 --> 05:02.560 not economic to produce steam from extremely deep wells. 05:02.560 --> 05:07.520 MILES O'BRIEN: But that could be changing at the FORGE project in Utah. Here, 05:07.520 --> 05:12.520 the Department of Energy is piloting a technique called Enhanced Geothermal Systems, or EGS. 05:14.240 --> 05:19.240 The plan is to drill two deep wells into low-permeable hot rock, 05:19.440 --> 05:24.440 fracture the rock in between the wells to create a reservoir, and then pump water into 05:24.560 --> 05:29.560 the cracks. It returns to the surface piping hot. The notion is making for some strange bedfellows. 05:32.080 --> 05:37.080 Oil and gas industry veterans are now drilling for hot rock, instead of black gold. 05:37.840 --> 05:41.920 CINDY TAFF, COO, Sage Geosystems: What we want to prove is a single well EGS system. 05:41.920 --> 05:46.920 MILES O'BRIEN: Petroleum engineer Cindy Taff is a 35-year veteran of the oil business. 05:48.240 --> 05:52.880 Now she is chief operating officer of Houston-based Sage Geosystems. 05:53.520 --> 05:58.520 The company is hoping to reduce the cost of EGS. Near McAllen, Texas, 05:59.040 --> 06:04.040 they are testing a single well alternative for harvesting heat from hot dry rock. 06:04.800 --> 06:09.800 They drill down and then horizontally, from here fracturing the sedimentary rock in between. 06:11.440 --> 06:16.440 Cold water is pumped down through the cracks. Now hot enough to generate power, 06:16.720 --> 06:21.600 the water heads up to the turbine in a concentric pipe in the very same well. 06:21.600 --> 06:26.400 CINDY TAFF: The oil and gas industry has fracked in sedimentary rock for years, 06:26.400 --> 06:29.920 and we know how to mitigate induced seismicity. And, quite frankly, 06:29.920 --> 06:34.920 the rock is so soft, you usually don't get to induced seismicity in sedimentary rock. 06:35.200 --> 06:39.200 MILES O'BRIEN: Still, the well is ringed by seismic monitoring sites. 06:39.840 --> 06:43.360 Geothermal fracking has triggered earthquakes in the past. 06:43.920 --> 06:48.920 This one in South Korea in 2017 made news, causing 135 injuries. 06:49.680 --> 06:53.360 AMANDA KOLKER: We don't need stimulation for most geothermal. 06:54.000 --> 06:59.000 Where we do, do stimulation, I think we can be smart about avoiding zones of seismic risk. 07:01.840 --> 07:06.840 MILES O'BRIEN: The shale fracking boom has driven a lot of innovation in the drilling business. In 07:08.000 --> 07:13.000 Houston, a small company called Particle Drilling is partnering with a big player, 07:13.040 --> 07:17.680 NOV, to help push drilling technology into a geothermal era. 07:19.120 --> 07:24.120 The bit they are developing fires 12 million ball bearings a minute out of four nozzles. 07:25.360 --> 07:27.840 Jim Schiller is CEO of Particle. 07:27.840 --> 07:30.640 JOHN SCHILLER, CEO, Particle Drilling: It obliterates the rock. What you get 07:30.640 --> 07:33.760 out are some very fine cuttings and every once in a while a bigger piece. 07:33.760 --> 07:37.040 What we envision was always a three-to-five-time improvement. 07:37.840 --> 07:41.360 As we have combined our bits between NOV and Particle and all, we're seeing that. 07:41.360 --> 07:44.800 MILES O'BRIEN: Tony Pink is chief technology officer of NOV. 07:45.440 --> 07:50.320 He says it costs about $100,000 a day to run a typical drilling rig. 07:50.320 --> 07:52.960 TONY PINK, Chief Technology Officer, NOV: We're at that tipping point now. And so, 07:52.960 --> 07:57.960 if we take the particle drilling technology or drill bit technology and make that jump from 07:58.240 --> 08:03.240 60 foot an hour to 80 to 100, then we move that economic needle that you get geothermal anywhere. 08:04.640 --> 08:09.040 MILES O'BRIEN: Geothermal anywhere, it's an enticing prospect. 08:09.600 --> 08:14.600 The path to zero carbon may well take us on a journey toward the center of the Earth. 08:16.560 --> 08:21.560 For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Miles O'Brien in Houston.