Could Texas be drilling for geothermal energy?

 The Hill:

Four years of drilling for energy deep underground would be enough to build Texas a carbon-free state electric grid, a new study by an alliance of state universities has found.

The state’s flagship universities — including the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University and Texas A&M University — collaborated with the International Energy Agency to produce the landmark report.

It depicts the Texas geothermal industry as a potential partner to the state’s enormous oil and gas sector — or an ultimate escape hatch.

In the best case, the industry represents “an accelerating trend” that could replicate — or surpass — the fracking boom, said Jamie Beard of the Texas Geothermal Entrepreneurship Organization at the University of Texas.

“Instead of aiming for a 2050 moonshot that we have to achieve some scientific breakthrough for — geothermal is deployable now,” Beard said. “We can be building power plants now.”

The authors stressed that the geothermal, oil and gas industries all rely on the same fundamental skillset — interpreting Texas’s unique geology to find valuable underground liquids.

In this case, however, the liquid in question had long been seen as a waste product: superheated water released as drillers sought oil and gas.

About “44 terawatts of energy flow continually out of the earth and into space,” said Ken Wisan, an economic geologist at the University of Texas.

“Rock is a great heat battery, and the upper 10 miles of the core holds an estimated 1,000 years’ worth of our energy needs in the form of stored energy,” Wisan added.

Most of the state’s population lives above potentially usable geothermal heat — as long as there’s a will to drill deep enough.

Superheated trapped steam that is nearly 300 degrees Fahrenheit — the sweet spot for modern geothermal — is accessible about three to five miles below the state capital of Austin and 2 1/2 to 3 miles beneath its most prominent city of Houston, the report found.
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Rebuilding the state a power system on a base of geothermal energy would give “the same performance as gas, coal or nuclear” at a lower cost, said Michael Webber, a professor of clean energy at the University of Texas.

But Webber said it would also do so “without the same fuel reliability problems.”

During Texas’s February 2021 winter storm, Webber noted, natural gas and coal supplies froze — which wouldn’t have been a problem with geothermal.
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The piece goes on to point out that using geothermal I texas would free up substantial quantities of natural gas to be sold in other parts of the country that does not have geothermal energy available.  It is an interesting concept that should lower energy costs for Texas homeowners and industry. 

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