With mounting pressure from consumers and investors for cleaner sources of energy, Lisa Mueller, President and CEO of FutEra Power, and her team are thinking inside the box. That is — they have built a completely new system that harvests geothermal energy from within the infrastructure and footprint of existing oil and gas operations.
Razor Energy, FutEra’s parent company and APEGA permit holder, has owned and operated conventional oil and gas assets in Swan Hills that have existed since the 1960s. As a byproduct of their enhanced oil recovery operation, large volumes of hot water are brought to the surface and subsequently re-injected into wells through high-pressure pipelines, establishing a hydrogeological loop. Until now, that hot water and heat waste have gone untapped as a renewable form of geothermal energy.
A new approach to clean energy
Starting in fall 2022, FutEra will be operating a co-production system, the first of its kind in Canada, that recovers geothermal energy for the Alberta power grid in addition to the oil and natural gas produced at the site.
“We need to diversify our energy supply. We believe this project can kick start the geothermal industry in Alberta through an approach that can be replicated,” says Lisa. “What we are ultimately doing is making something out of nothing by taking advantage of existing infrastructure and hot water reservoirs to deliver sustainable power and transition legacy oil and gas wells to green energy production.”
This is not a simple process, though. It involves integrating multiple systems into a single power plant that also integrates into the power grid all within an active oil and gas site. It’s also the combination of geoscience and engineering coming together to redefine our energy future.
“We had to approach this from multiple perspectives,” says Lisa. “Of course, we had to optimize the engineering around geothermal heat extraction. Commercially though, we had to create the power outcomes that would garner an appropriate rate of return. Since this is completely new technology, we also had to create a new regulatory pathway proving its effectiveness and impacts.”
Rising to the challenge
Lisa and her team have designed and built a co-production system that is expected to have a full capacity of up to 21 megawatts, at least 25 per cent of which will be from renewable geothermal heat and waste heat recovery. To put that into context, this would be enough to power up to 7,200 homes through geothermal energy.
The co-production system is also expected to offset up to 31,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Over the course of a year, this is the equivalent of about 9,500 gas-powered passenger vehicles, the energy use of 7,200 homes, or the electricity use of 20,000 homes.
One of the biggest challenges with geothermal energy is the initial setup cost. According to Lisa, this innovative project was born from a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ viewpoint.
“We looked at all the heat that chews through the existing infrastructure and turned the problem into a good opportunity. Hot water from previously drilled wells carried in existing pipelines on an existing footprint creates a significantly lower capital expenditure for this much needed source of energy.”
The future for FutEra
While Lisa and her team are looking forward to launching this project later this year, they are also looking to build on the momentum of this project and keep innovating in the future.
“We have other ideas for geothermal and will keep piloting new things. We also think that carbon capture, use or sequestration (CCUS) is the next logical step of the project and cannot wait to continue our efforts on that front. Using proprietary CCUS technology, we believe our co-produced, geothermal-natural gas hybrid generation project will morph to net-zero power, and that is very exciting.”
Not only will this project bring new opportunities to the Swan Hills area, it will also provide a road map for geothermal-energy innovation built on the legacy of Alberta’s oil and gas industry. This made-in-Alberta innovation for transitioning Alberta’s energy sector is the result of collaboration of engineers and geoscientists – proudly regulated by the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA).