This is an excerpt from an article in Energi Media featuring Eavor’s Paul Cairns interviewed about innovators leading the Alberta oil patch’s energy transition.
A clean energy company using oil and gas tech that’s already turning heads is Eavor Technology. Paul Cairns, Eavor’s director of business development, is a smooth-talking storyteller with a compelling argument about why his company is the answer to the energy transition.
Much of the startup’s technology comes from the oil sands, especially SAG-D (steam assisted gravity drainage) well drilling that was developed in Alberta. One of them is “magnetic ranging,” which allows two well bores to be connected deep underground, a key part of the geothermal closed loop system to mining the earth’s heat.
“It’s one of the many borrowed technologies that we’ve re-imagined or used in a different way from Alberta’s oil sands,” says Cairns. The video below explains how the Eavor-Loop works.
Traditional geothermal energy taps pockets of hot water deep underground. Where conditions are right, such as in Iceland, this type of geothermal provides reliable heat and electricity. But the technology hasn’t fared well in Western Canada. Alberta’s open wholesale power market makes it difficult for geothermal to compete, according to Dr. Catherine Hickson of Alberta No. 1.
Cairns says Eavor-Loop solves the problem by conducting heat from rock formations deep under the earth’s surface and warming the water inside pipes. The fluid then expands and rises to the surface, where it can be distributed for industrial and districting heating use or run through an ORC (organic Rankine cycle) generator to create electricity. Eavor drilled a successful test project near Rocky Mountain House in Alberta, but the big news is the first commercial project in Germany.
“In Germany, the price of electricity, if it comes from a geothermal source, is supported by a 251 euros per megawatt hour feed-in tariff by the German government,” says Cairns. “Compare that to Alberta where the price will bump around between 35 and 90 Canadian dollars.”
Thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 and the resulting energy crisis when Europe lost 40 per cent of its natural gas, Germany is desperate to build electricity generation. So is the EU, which recently awarded Eavor a 91.6 million euros grant from the European Innovation Fund. Last week the company signed a “cooperation agreement” with Sonoma Clean Power to develop up to 200 megawatt equivalent of power and heat in the California counties of Sonoma and Mendocino.
The company is on a roll, in part because Eavor-Loops can be installed anywhere at any scale. With ORC generators installed, they can provide the clean, dispatchable electricity prized in today’s rapidly changing power grids. Throw in heat for industrial processes or building space heating and the technology’s value proposition is impressive.