The Heat Beat recently posted an opinion piece “An Open Letter to the Oil Patch: Let’s Build Together” by Joseph Scherer and John Muir of GreenFire Energy. GreenFire Energy develops and deploys its closed-loop GreenLoop™ technology. Although they are based out of the United States, a majority of the points made in the article apply to Canada’s geothermal industry. The only differences, in my opinion, are (1) the ease at which oil and gas workers can transition to the geothermal industry (given the handful of geothermal projects in Canada, compared to the US which is the #1 producer of geothermal electricity in the world) and (2) the ability to re-purpose oil and gas wells to geothermal, especially in the WCSB where lower temperatures require much higher flow rates and, therefore, larger diameter wellbores than standard oil and gas wells.
In an article in support of geothermal energy, the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that the amount of available geothermal energy beneath our feet is 50,000 times more than the global total of oil and natural gas resources combined. Interesting, right? Put another way, the oil and gas industry has powered the world over the last centuries on the much smaller of our two subsurface resources – hydrocarbons and heat. Further, a groundbreaking and visionary study published by MIT entitled “The Future of Geothermal Energy” concluded that exploiting known geothermal resources could yield the equivalent of all current US energy requirements for the next 2000 years and that “with technology improvements, the economically extractable amount of useful energy could increase by a factor of 10 or more.” The MIT study was published in 2006, and since the publication date, it would be difficult to overstate the significance of relevant and enabling technology improvements that have occurred in the oil and gas industry - technology improvements so disruptive that over the past decade they have managed to rearrange global geopolitics and propel the US into energy independence.
Foreword by Katie Huang