This piece first ran in the Idaho Statesman on September 23, 2022, and can be accessed here.
For the West to expand renewable geothermal energy, we need smarter federal land regs
By John Karakoulakis
Fossil fuels and emission-free energy sources are not enemies, as some of the loudest voices in the environmental debate want you to think.
In fact, the science, technology and know-how of the fossil fuel industry is laying the groundwork for an economy that runs on reduced emissions energy. That was true more than a decade ago, when flexible natural gas turbines opened up the power grid to much larger volumes of electricity from wind and solar.
Today, the same trend is playing out in a new arena – geothermal – which is a critically important source of future energy, investment and jobs for Idaho and other Western states. The key, however, is reforming the nation’s outdated permitting laws so that they encourage rather than stifle innovation.
Enter Rep. Russ Fulcher and Sen. Jim Risch, who are working to end the unfair treatment of geothermal energy on federal lands. Compared to other energy sources, geothermal developers must wait an additional 10 months on average before they even know if they have a viable project.
That’s a big reason why geothermal projects made up just 100 megawatts of the 2,890 megawatts of renewable energy projects approved on federal lands during 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Fulcher, Risch and other conservative lawmakers have found further flaws in the federal permitting process, adding more red tape to geothermal permitting applications than even exist for oil and gas.
As a result, these lawmakers are pushing a legislative fix that would create “parity” between geothermal permitting and oil and gas permitting at the BLM. “Federal regulations should not discourage geothermal exploration,” Fulcher said when the legislative fix was first proposed last year. The current process is “long and burdensome” and is blocking “new opportunities to harness this clean energy.”
Their bill, H.R. 5350, the Enhancing Geothermal Production on Federal Lands Act, was brought up for a hearing in the House in July, and hopefully it will continue to move forward.
If this problem isn’t fixed, Western states could mostly miss out on huge breakthroughs in geothermal energy – breakthroughs that the oil and gas industry is deeply involved in.
For example: An innovative startup called Transitional Energy is using oil and gas infrastructure and advanced heat-exchange technology to produce geothermal electricity in Nevada and Colorado.
Unlike wind and solar, this geothermal technology is expected to produce baseload electric power that’s available around the clock.
Traditional geothermal power plants use very hot sources of underground water to produce steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, these plants require underground water sources with temperatures of at least 360 degrees Fahrenheit.
With current technologies, there are relatively few places where geothermal wells can be economically drilled to reach these superheated underground water sources. But Transitional Energy has found a way around this problem.
First: Instead of drilling new wells, Transitional Energy is harnessing geothermal heat from existing oil and gas wells, which produce hot, briny water as a byproduct. Temperatures inside these wells can reach above 200 degrees, but this promising source of geothermal heat has gone entirely unused.
And second: Transitional Energy’s technology uses a specially designed turbine that doesn’t require superheated water and steam to generate electricity. Instead, the turbine uses liquid refrigerant with a much lower boiling point than water.
“We run the hot water from the oil and gas well through a heat exchanger, which flash boils the liquid refrigerant into a vapor,” said Salina Derichsweiler, CEO and co-founder of Transitional Energy. “That moving vapor turns the turbine, which generates electricity, just like steam would in a regular turbine, but at a lower temperature.”
Transforming oil and gas infrastructure into renewable energy infrastructure? That’s something everyone can get behind – even federal bureaucrats.
John Karakoulakis is director of The Western Way, a conservative nonprofit that seeks pro-market solutions to environmental challenges.