A startup says it has found a source of geothermal energy
A geothermal startup On Thursday, he said he struck gold in Nevada. Zanskar, which uses artificial intelligence to find geothermal resources hidden deep underground, says it has identified a new commercial site for a potential power plant. The company claims the discovery is the first of its kind by the industry in decades.
The finding is the culmination of years of research into how to find these sources – and points to the growing promise of geothermal energy.
“When we started this company, I think the most common message we heard was that geothermal is dead – a history of bones, a graveyard of many failures,” says Zanskar co-founder Carl Hoiland. “To get to the point where, thanks to these new tools and these new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically mock them — we just think this is the first full-scale signal that the tide has changed.”
In theory, geothermal energy is one of the simplest methods of renewable energy production. Underground hot water reservoirs heated by the Earth’s core produce steam that can be used to power turbines on the surface, without the need for excessive extraction or complex fuel conversion. Geothermal resources are particularly accessible in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth’s crust is thinner, making the western United States an excellent candidate for power plants. The world’s largest developed geothermal field is located in California, where hot springs have been used by humans for thousands of years. The first power plant was built there in the early 1920s.
But a big part of the geothermal puzzle is actually finding these sources. It is rare to find hot springs or vents on the surface that lead to a productive point for power plant placement. Most of the geothermal systems that are hot enough to generate electricity are deep in the earth, and there is no evidence on the surface. These are known as hidden or blind systems – and locating them can be surprisingly challenging. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built on systems that are accidentally found during the drilling of agricultural, mineral, or oil and gas wells.
“It’s a needle and a straw problem,” says Joel Edwards, co-founder of Zanskar. A very small percentage of the land you will look at will have a geothermal system associated with it.
In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to increase US geothermal energy production. As part of this effort, they mapped out a grid in Nevada to try to methodically drill for blind systems.
