Jacobson the power-ful.stanford.eduI was disappointed when I discovered that the list of experts at last week's Clean Energy Summit would not include Stanford University's Mark Jacobson. Of course, no individual is indispensable at such a summit. But as the day went by I felt his absence more and more keenly.

That's because Jacobson is one of the few scientists looking at energy's Big Picture. How big?

In an article published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science earlier this year, Jacobson reported the first quantitative, scientific study evaluating the top energy sources based on:

By using each of these factors to assess ten major energy sources, Jacobson produced a list that should be the starting point in any discussion about our energy future. Here's what he found:

The top electrical generating energy sources are (from best to worst):

Nuclear and coal actually tied for last place.

For powering vehicles, Jacobson produced a second list. Again going from best to worst:

Jacobson's findings are a surprising blow to backers of ethanol-based biofuels. He also had harsh words for politicians who are pouring money into this area. "Biofuels are the most damaging choice we could make in our efforts to move away from using fossil fuels," Jacobson told a reporter. "We should be spending to promote energy technologies that cause significant reductions in carbon emissions and air-pollution mortality, not technologies that have either marginal benefits or no benefits at all."

Jacobson highlights the need to fund wind energy in particular. He says that the entire U.S. fleet of vehicles could be powered by as many as 144,000 five-MW wind turbines. That's a large number. But the country has met higher production goals in the past. In WWII, Jacobson says, America built 300,000 airplanes -- a far larger and more difficult job than building wind turbines.

Such a program would be a positive way to stimulate and grow our economy as well, he adds.

"There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession," Jacobson says. "Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles, and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage, and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power."

The entire article is available here.

[This post was originally published in a slightly different form at The Phoenix Sun.]

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A veteran of the Manhattan Project is developing technology that could make it easier to tap geothermal energy locked deep underground.

Potter Drilling

It's the archetypal Silicon Valley story: Unknown entrepreneur toils away on a Big Idea in an anonymous office park until discovered by one of the Valley's legendary deep-pocketed investors.

Another boy wonder CEO hatching the next Twitter or Facebook? Not quite. Meet Bob Potter, 88. He started his hardware company when he was just 83 with technology that grew out of his work on the Manhattan Project (yes, that Manhattan Project) back in the 1940s at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

It's all about bits, not bytes. Bits as in drill bits. Potter Drilling is developing a deep-drilling technology to tap geothermal heat miles below the earth's surface -- heat that could be used to generate carbon-free electricity.

Conventional geothermal power plants draw upon underground aquifers of hot water relatively close to the surface to create steam that drives electricity-generating turbines. The problem is that underground water currently tapped for geothermal is found mainly in the western United States. But the technology Potter is developing could drill much deeper, meaning geothermal energy could be generated nationwide.

According to a 2006 MIT study, so-called Enhanced Geothermal Systems could potentially supply 2,500 times the country's current energy consumption. That grabbed Google's attention, and last August the Internet giant's philanthropic arm agreed to invest $4 million in Potter Drilling as part of its green energy initiative.

The tech twist: Potter drills not with hard-as-diamonds bits but with water -- extremely hot water. (More on that in a bit.) The goal is to radically cut the cost of EGS to spread the technology to regions that rely too much on coal for generating electricity but are not suited for solar, wind and other renewable energy generation.

"It is fun to see some old dreams come true," says Potter standing in the company's Redwood City lab-slash-workshop in a light-industrial park wedged in between Interstate 101 and the railroad tracks. He has just pulled into the parking lot after making the 1,200-mile drive up from his home in New Mexico (with a side trip to Fresno to visit his 95-year-old brother).

Tall and lean and partial to bolo ties, Potter looks as much a western rancher as a rocket scientist. He is in fact one of the fathers of EGS. Starting in the 1950s, Potter and colleagues at Los Alamos began investigating the potential of fracturing pockets of super-heated rocks located deep beneath earth's surface. Their idea: Inject water in the fractured rock and pump the hot water to the surface to create steam to drive a turbine. The water is then re-circulated back underground in a closed loop.

But Potter soon encountered a major obstacle to making geothermal as common as coal: Drilling as deep as six miles below the earth's surface is incredibly expensive, presenting a host of obstacles to overcome. Even conventional geothermal developers spend millions of dollars to just drill test wells. But EGS rigs must penetrate miles of hard rock that slows drilling to a crawl. And a broken drill bit 30,000 feet underground can force the abandonment of a $10 million well.

"Getting into the drilling was forced on us in a way because that was thing that really prevented hot fractured rocks from being viable," says Potter.

When government funding of geothermal research dried up with the crash of oil prices in the early 1980s, Potter moved on to other endeavors. But in the late 1990s he returned to geothermal, and with MIT chemical engineering expert Jefferson Tester patented a drilling technology called hydrothermal spallation. Potter then persuaded his son Jared to start a company in 2004 to commercialize the technology and serve as its CEO.

The younger Potter holds a Ph.D. in geology from Stanford University and had already started two Silicon Valley geological-related companies. Potter Drilling limped along for a few years, unable to interest the Valley's venture capitalists to fund basic R&D on something that seemed so, well, industrial and old economy.

Then Google came calling on a recommendation from Tester. "If Google hadn't come along, the company would have died," says Jared Potter, 56.

What sealed the Google deal was a demo of Potter Drilling's technology like the one I'm about to see. We're standing in front of a contraption that looks like a prop from the original "Star Trek." Salad plate-sized analog gauges line either side of the seven-foot-tall U-shaped device. Suspended in the center is a silver container about the size of small beer keg connected to various tubes and valves.

A technician loads a 4 x 6-inch cylinder of solid Sierra white granite into the bottom of the container. Above the granite is the drill apparatus. It resembles a round garden hose nozzle with slotted openings at the end. We put on safety glasses and switches are flipped, buttons pushed. As chemical reactants begin to heat up the water supply, a battered, second-hand flat-screen monitor attached to the apparatus shows the temperature rising -- 200C, 400C, 600C. When it hits 800C (lead melts at 327C), the hot water is forced through nozzle. As the sound of the machinery intensifies, the jets of water begin to fracture the surface of the granite, dislodging tiny particles of the rock.

About two minutes later, the too-hot-to-handle chunk of granite is removed and now features a round, 3.5-inch-long, 1.25 inch-diameter bore hole through its middle.

By dispensing with breakable drill bits and other components that risk failing at great depths, the Potters hope to jump-start EGS by slashing both the cost and the time it takes to drill a well, which can account for more than half of a geothermal power plant's price tag. That drilling risk has proven a deterrent to investors who don't want to take the chance of literally pouring millions of dollars down a dry hole.

"We think we can cut the cost by 50 percent," says Jared Potter. That has sparked interest from such leading EGS companies as Geodynamics of Australia.

But getting from the lab to the center of the earth, as it were, is another matter. Later this year, Potter Drilling will take the technology into the field at its first test site in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where the company plans to drill a 1,000-foot hole. The further down they go, the greater the technological challenges, such as maintaining super high water temperatures and evacuating the displaced rock particles.

"Will the technology work? Maybe," says Mark Taylor, a geothermal analyst at market research firm New Energy Finance. "I think it's got great promise."

To make the technology viable will take money. Geothermal has been something of a loser in the green energy stakes, with most private and governmental funding flowing to solar and wind companies. But the Obama administration has increased funding for geothermal, and Potter Drilling has applied for a U.S. Department of Energy grant. The company will soon need to raise venture funding to commercialize its technology.

Given that Bob Potter hashed out the initial calculations for hydrothermal spallation by hand -- "I never did get into computers," he says -- any risk-taking venture capitalist's money probably will go far.

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PARIS—A major new project is under way in Paris to provide ecologically clean heating for an entire district by extracting piping hot water from nearly two kilometers under the earth.

In a revival of the French capital’s geothermal potential, drilling has just begun in the north of the city on a desolate building site sandwiched between the traffic-clogged inner ring road and the Saint-Denis canal.

“In Paris we’re trying to adopt a strategy in which France is largely behind other European countries, because we’ve under-invested in renewable energies,” said Denis Baupin, a Paris deputy mayor.

At the construction site, a 36-meter (120-foot) yellow mast rises above a dense cluster of machinery that is usually used to drill for oil. Here the drilling is not for black gold but for hot water.

“The lower you go, the hotter the water,” explained Michel Galas of CPCU, the urban heating company carrying out the work, as he stood next to a shaft that when finished will delve 1.7 kilometers (one mile) into the earth.

At that depth lies a geological stratum called the Dogger from which water, heated naturally to 57 degrees Celsius (135 Fahrenheit), will be sucked up to the surface, where it will be used to heat another stock of water.

This will be pumped to apartment blocks to heat radiators and provide hot water.

“It’s energy that is 100 percent renewable,” said Galas, adding that drilling will go on night and day for about 100 days to reach the required depth.

The scheme will heat around 12,000 apartments and other buildings due to be built by 2011 in a new residential area in the city’s 19th district. The project will cost €31 million ($40 million), €5 million of which will come from the state environment agency and the regional council.

Galas, whose company is jointly owned by the City of Paris and the energy group GDF Suez, pointed to a row of high-rise tower blocks on the other side of the ring road and said they too would eventually be hooked up to the system.

The use of this natural energy source will prevent 14,000 tonnes a year of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide being pumped into the capital’s already polluted air.

That is roughly the same amount of CO2 that an average car would belch out if taken on a 470,000-kilometer (290,000-mile) trip, which is longer than the distance from the Earth to the moon.

It will also provide 54 percent of the new area’s energy needs.

Galas said there were around three dozen sites using geothermal energy in the greater Paris region, nearly all dating from the 1970s and 80s.

“For about 25 years there were no new projects because the price of a barrel of oil had gone down, but in recent years there has been a growing awareness of environmental issues, combined with a hike in the price of oil,” he said.

With the environment placed high on President Nicolas Sarkozy’s political agenda, and with Baupin and his Green party as the Socialists’ coalition partners in Paris city hall, the time appeared right to return to geothermal.

Geothermal energy in use since Roman times

Geothermal energy has been used since Roman times to heat buildings. It uses the energy recovered from the heat of the Earth’s core and can be seen naturally in the form of volcanoes, geysers and hot springs.

Heated water drawn to the surface can, if of sufficiently high temperature, also be used to drive turbines to create electricity.   In Iceland, about a quarter of the island nation’s electricity comes from geothermal power plants, while geothermal schemes provide heating and hot water for almost nine tenths of the country’s buildings.

France’s geology does not permit tapping into geothermal energy on the Icelandic scale, but there is much unused potential.

Currently around 170,000 French homes are heated geothermally, but the government plans to multiply that number by six by 2020, which would mean that four percent of the nation’s households would be thus heated.

The Paris area, Alsace in the east, and Aquitaine in the southwest are the regions geologically best suited for such projects.

Baupin, the deputy Paris mayor in charge of sustainable development and the driving force behind the city’s wildly successful Velib bike-sharing scheme, said a second project is already being developed in the north of the city.

And the capital’s second airport, Orly, a year ago announced plans to extract geothermal energy to slash its heating bills.

Galas of the CPCU could not provide figures comparing geothermal energy costs with costs from using gas or oil alternatives, but he said geothermal heating was financially “competitive” compared to gas.

Baupin promised that residents of the new area in north Paris “will certainly be a lot less exposed to the vagaries of the price of oil or gas.”

Experts agree.

At talks on climate change in December in Poland, UN Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner spoke of geothermal as clean and “indigenous”—code for free from geopolitical risk and immune to market fluctuations.

“We’re not trying to make Paris self-sufficient in energy, that would be too ambitious,” said Baupin, who nevertheless talks enthusiastically of other green energy projects such as harnessing the flow of the River Seine.

“But we should aim to make ourselves less vulnerable to future energy crises,” he said.

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Here's some steamy action: The Department of Interior on Wednesday announced plans to open 97 million acres of public land in 12 states to geothermal energy development. The plan could more than quadruple the U.S.'s current output of underground-heat power, potentially generating enough electricity to power 5.5 million homes by 2015 and 12 million by 2025. Some national forestland could be leased under the plan, though national parks, including geyser-full Yellowstone, are off-limits. Kempthorne praised geothermal energy as "a renewable resource that generates electricity with minimal carbon emissions ... [and] reduces the need for conventional energy sources." Indeed, you'll note that geothermal energy needs no qualifier, unlike "clean coal" and "safe, clean nuclear power."

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Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant, has unveiled a plan to move the U.S. to a clean-energy future. The vision: In 2030, electricity will be generated not from coal or oil but from wind, solar, and geothermal power. Energy demand will be two-thirds what it is now, thanks to stringent energy-efficiency measures. Ninety percent of new vehicle sales will be plug-in hybrids. Carbon dioxide emissions will be down 48 percent. Getting there will cost $4.4 trillion, says the plan -- but will recoup $5.4 trillion in savings. The Clean Energy 2030 plan would require ambitious national policies, a huge boost to renewables, increased transmission capacity, a smart electricity grid, and much higher fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles. But hey, says the report: "With a new administration and Congress -- and multiple energy-related imperatives -- this is an opportune, perhaps unprecedented, moment to move from plan to action."

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Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search giant, has announced a $10.25 million investment in geothermal energy technology. The money will back two start-up companies that specialize in enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), the process of pumping water underground to crack hot rocks and use the resulting steam to power a turbine and create electricity. "EGS could be the 'killer app' of the energy world," says Dan Reicher of Google.org. "It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind." Geothermal currently supplies a mere 0.5 percent of global energy supply and 0.4 percent of U.S. supply. The investment is a part of Google.org's RE<C effort, which has an end goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal. We hope coal is quakin' in its dirty black boots.

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