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At first glance, the drilling site about an hour south of Munich might seem like a traditional oil operation. Two towering rigs, reminiscent of those seen in Canada’s oil industry, soaring over the Bavarian countryside.
They have a different goal though: extracting heat, not fossil fuels.“This is pioneering work,” said Fabricio Cesario, Plant Manager for Eavor Deutschland.“It’s the first of its kind.”
The system, called the Eavor-Loop, uses water circulated deep underground, where it is heated to around 120 C before being returned to the surface.The project is expected to generate approximately 64 megawatts of heat and 8.2 megawatts of electrical power once complete. Eavor says that’ll be enough energy to heat and power approximately 20,000 homes in Geretsried, a town with a wider history in geothermal power. “There was an attempt to have a thermal water project here around 10 years ago, which was not successful,” said Cesario “But they have [left] a lot of data that we use on our model to design this Eavor-Loop.”The project aligns with the country’s broader renewable energy strategy, which the German government moved to fast-track last month by introducing legislative changes that aim to remove barriers to geothermal energy development and the expansion of heat pumps and heat storage systems.A Canadian ConnectionThe innovative technology behind this plant was first developed over 7,000 kilometers away, on the abandoned well sites of Alberta.“We asked ourselves, what else can we do with all these brownfield sites? Why not geothermal?” explained John Redfern, the president and CEO of Eavor.The idea that spawned from those questions works a lot like a giant radiator.Two vertical wellbores are drilled about 4.5 kilometers underground and then connected horizontally, creating a circuit, or “loop,” which circulates fluid using subsurface heat.Experts say the technology bypasses some of the key challenges faced by conventional geothermal projects. “They have developed a system where they do not disturb the subsurface,” said Chima Ezekiel, an assistant professor with the department of earth, energy, and environment at the University of Calgary’s faculty of science.
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“This has had lots of advantages… there is no water contamination, there [are] no scaling issues.”
The company said it was able to do this by incorporating methods common in Canada’s oilsands industry.“It was invented because we had a desperate need to do something with all these resources and this great oil service sector, all these sites,” says Redfern.“It’s one of these sort of interesting ironies that… what we think is going to be the ultimate green technology, comes as a side benefit from research and development that have been done in the oilsands for years.”Waiting for ResultsAlthough Eavor’s achievements have been staggering, the company still knows it has one major hurdle to cross: proving its technology can work at a commercial level.“This plant is the key to open up the market for us,” Cesario said. “There are many other projects in the pipeline, watching and waiting [to see] what is going on here and to start their project as well.”
Critics have pointed to the fact the technology remains untested, beyond Eavor’s pilot project near Rocky Mountain House, located in western Alberta’s foothills.Costs are also a big concern, with the Geretsried project already racking up more than €350 million in investments.“That cost, does it compensate with the amount of energy that they are going to generate?” asks Ezekiel. “We’re looking into doing a combined effect study to see if these worries [from] the skeptics… [are] actually valid.” A Sustainable FutureThe Geretsried project is more than just a technological achievement — it represents a collaborative effort between the German government, the European Union, and Canadian innovators.“This would definitely help to make geothermal energy extraction utilization boom and scale up in the world, which is what we need,” says Ezekiel.If successful, this initiative could pave the way for widespread adoption of geothermal energy, providing a clean and sustainable alternative to fossil fuels.As the first project of its kind, the Geretsried plant is poised to strike a so-called “green gold gusher,” showcasing the potential of geothermal energy to drive not just Germany’s, but the wider global energy revolution.
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