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this is Project red in Nevada where Google and startup furo energy have been using fracking to harness the Earth's inner heat since last November 28th why did Google build a geothermal power plant and why is one of the largest and greenest companies in the world using one of the most controversial Technologies from the oil industry what on Earth is going on whatever happened to don't be evil I promise you it's not what you think for once groundbreaking
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and gamechanging aren't clickbait let's fig this out together I'm Ricky and this is Two Bit da Vinci this episode is brought to you by eight sleep chapter 1 the first geothermal power plant larderello Italy 1904 Prince Pio jori Conti was sweating profusely as he watched the steam rise from the bore hole he had spent months drilling into the volcanic soil of Tuscany with
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an obsessive idea on his mind he had built a rudimentary turbine and connected it to this B hole everything was ready Pierro invited some of his friends and supporters to what witnessed the experiment as well as some journalists and Skeptics who had come to mock him he was nervous to be sure but confident he turned the valve and released a steam into the turbine at first nothing happened his heart stopped for a moment then he heard it first a slight hissing sound followed by
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a woring noise as the turbines began to spin he looked at the meter and saw the needle move and was instantly filled with a surge of excitement and relief he ran to the other end of the room where a row of five light bulbs were waiting he flipped the switch and watched as they all lit up casting a warm glow over the astonished faces of his guess he heard a gas followed by loud Applause
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he had done it he had created the world's first geothermal power plant pio's experiment wasn't so much a power plant as it was a proof of concept he demonstrated that it was possible to convert geothermal energy into electricity others would take the torch and develop this technology into what it is today however fast forward 100 years and despite multiple studies showing the geothermal could easily power the entire world thousands of times over it's obvious we're nowhere
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near that dream yet but that is about to change enter alphabet AKA Google Google is one of the most well-recognized brands on Earth anyone who has ever searched for anything online is almost guaranteed to have used the term let me Google that for you so when I heard that Google had built and begun operating a geothermal power plant I had questions like how on Earth is that possibly core
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to their business model I began researching and reading what the news and Google were saying and it turns out a lot I knew Google had always been a strong proponent of corporate climate action but what I found was pretty damn impressive in 2007 Google became the first major company to achieve carbon neutrality 3 years later Google announced its goal to use 100% renewable energy for its Global operation and started signing long-term power purchase agreements or PPA to purchase
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clean energy from wind and solar projects by 2012 they had already invested $1 billion in renewable energy projects with a total capacity of over 2 GW and in 2017 Google achieved its 100% renewable energy goal matching its annual electricity consumption with clean energy purchases from more than 50 projects but they didn't stop there in 2018 Google announced its ambition to operate
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on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030 this confused me at first I mean what do they mean ambition to eventually operate a 24/7 carbon- free energy system by 2030 weren't they already carbon neutral back in 2007 something like wasn't adding up so I dug a little bit deeper and I found that what they meant was that by 2030 every Google facility Data Center and office campus will be directly powered
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by Clean Energy 100% of the time but this poses a problem because the sun isn't always shining or the wind always blowing the way Google setup is working right now is that much of Google energy is still produced by Cold fire plants especially when wind and solar aren't producing enough to cover the load check out this map of Google's data centers World Wide each little circle is like a 24-hour clock where the green Parts represent the hours of the day when data centers run on or
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match their energy use with carbon free renewable energy you notice how there's still a lot of gray circles well that's what Google wants to change by 2030 there are two ways of accomplishing this by combining solar and wind with battery storage or by finding an alternative clean stable reliable and carbon free source of energy to cover the load when wind and solar aren't enough he is one of the most fundamental forms of energy and reminds me of one of my favorite products that I
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use every single night and I sponsored this week eight sleep and this the Pod cover it has a water cooling system built in with dual zones I can set my temperature independently for my wife from 55 all the way to 110° F the reason your bed feels cold in the winter is because it's absorbing your body heat faster than it would like after a few hours the bed warms up but then you're too warm and your metabolic body heat has nowhere to go that's when you start tossing and turning trying
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to find a new cooler spot in the bed but the a pod cover is actively circulating water to transfer your body heat out of the bed via the Pod out into your room and with an autopilot subscription it'll track your local weather your bedtime conditions and your sleeping patterns to adjust the temperature throughout the night making sure you toss and turn less and get more deep sleep I used to crank the AC to cool off our upstairs bedroom in the summer or blur the heat in the winter but
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this bed actually saves me money on my electric bills sensors in the Pod cover help track things like heart rate to monitor how well you sleep and it's taught me that eating too late or that last glass of wine really hurt my sleep this is sleep science to another level and it's why I've loved my pod cover for almost 2 years now check out this amazing sleep tech for yourself and get all the details use my special code and save on the Pod cover by 8 sleep links in the description
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huge thanks to eight sleep and you for supporting the show chapter three fvo energy this is Timothy laimer Tim has an uncommon relationship with energy when he was a kid growing up in a small town in Texas the town held a vote to discuss whether or not to allow the construction of a large Coal Fired power plant after was approved by the majority he witnessed both the positive economic growth and the negative environmental impacts of energy production on his community
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he once said that you could hear the turbines humming from 5 miles away Tim became interested in finding a better way to power the world and became a drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry there he mastered the tech Technologies and innovations that drove the shell Revolution a controversial technique called fracking but working in this field all the negative side effects eventually took a toll on Tim he quit his job as a drilling engineer and enrolled at
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Stanford for an MBA in energy resource Engineering in another part of the country a guy named Jack Norbeck was graduating as a geotechnical engineer Jack got a job at the geysers in Northern California the world's largest geothermal field there he helped Pioneer a new approach to extracting geothermal energy through fracking although they prefer the term mixed hydraulic stimulation of course they do nobody wants to be painted with that brush he later enrolled as a PhD
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student at Stanford and met Tim Timmy and Jackie hit it off right away they shared a common vision for using geothermal energy to address climate change together they had the perfect skill set for the job Tim was an expert at fracking and drilling Wells while Jack was an expert on geothermal energy in 2018 they joined forces and co-founded fero energy a company that designs lowcost enhanced geothermal systems fvo energy attracted investment and support from organizations like
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Stanford cyron Road program and even Big Oil they also caught the attention of Michael Terrell head of Google's Global energy Market strategy and 24/7 carbon-free energy initiatives Tim and Jack pitched their ideas of a new Advanced enhanced geothermal power plant to Terrell and he was hooked a few weeks later Google signed the world's first Cooperative agreement with fvo energy and invested $1 million to develop a NextGen geothermal power plant in Nevada codenamed project
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red we've made a video about geothermal energy about a year ago and we've even made another video on why China is drilling the world's deepest hole where we talked about how geothermal energy works and why going deeper is usually better for energy production if you haven't watched those we'll put links to those down below but the tldr version is that a geothermal power plant either extracts hot pressurized Steam from an underground reservoir to drive a turbine or it injects cold
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water through the injection well to absorb heat energy underground then extracts the hot water through a production well to generate electricity so basically a heat pump fos power plant is one of the second type and this is where things get interesting for the system to work the injection and production Wells must be connected somehow you need water to be able to flow from one well into the other so either the two Wells form a closed system or you need the hot rock to be permeable
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if it's not then you need to break it apart one popular way of doing this is by injecting large amounts of high pressurized water and sand to hydraulically fracture the rock this is why it's called fracking geothermal systems that use fracking to enhance water flow between the two Wells are called enhanced geothermal systems if the word fracking sounds familiar it's because it is fracking is a technique used in the oil and gas industry to extract fossil fuels from Shell
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formations the development of shell fracking propelled the US to become the world's largest producer an exporter of oil and gas something climate activists aren't particularly thrilled about but more oil and carbon emissions are the least of our problems we'll get back to why fracking is so dangerous in a moment first let's look at Google's geothermal plant although geothermal plants have been around for almost 120 years there have been very few significant changes
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in how these plants work so what's so special about this one I read somewhere that project red was America's first enhanced geothermal system to come online which seemed odd so I did a quick Google search I Googled it and found dozens of ESG plants dating back to the 1970s so that's not it the next thing I thought is how deep are the wells perhaps they go deeper than previous ESG projects
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and no no that's not it either project rag goes down about 7700 ft or 1.46 Mi while the deepest ESG B hole to date goes down 3.2 Mi more than twice as deep another key aspect of commercial geothermal Wells is temperature temperature drives the maximum possible efficiency of a geothermal power plant project red reaches a maximum operating temperature of 376 de F which
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is pretty high however it's not the highest the reganis geothermal power plant in Iceland reaches a scorching 550° F how about power output is it the largest ESG power plant in terms of power no not by long shot project red is just a commercial Scale Pilot plant with an output of 3.5 megawatt that would only be enough to power about 2,900 average US homes now take a look at this graph
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the world's largest geothermal power plant is the geysers in the US which outputs 900 megawatt of electricity out of its 22 power plants for an average of roughly 40 megaw each that's 10 times more power out of each of these power plants and by the way it's also satisfying for me to see lardell up there as the second largest geothermal power plant in the world Pierro jori must be so proud so what is it then after digging a little bit deeper I found two things
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that make this power plant truly groundbreaking the key difference between project red and every other ESG plant in the world is that the wells aren't completely vertical they go down 7,700 ft then they do a 90° turn and extend horizontally for another 3250 ft as you can see here this is standard practice in the oil industry but it had never been done before on a geothermal power plant
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and the implications are profound most ESG experts thought it was impossible to drill horizontally into hot rock to make horizontal Wells and even if someone did manage it it would be even harder to seal or plug the B hole tight enough to perforate pressurize and Fracture the rock around the B hole with water and sand something called completion in the fracking industry and
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even if someone magically Harry pottered the whole thing and was able to fracture The Rock Around The Impossible horizontal well the previous cementing of the well would have clogged up all the natural fractures in the Rock so the fracking operation wouldn't work at all well fero and Google run ahead and did it anyway and they proved everyone wrong they published the result in a pre-print article I'll leave a link in the description the results show over twice the water flow rate
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out of the fractured horizontal Wells than the previous record holder this is important because more water flowing through the wells means you can extract more energy from the ground faster which means more power I can't begin to tell you how gamechanging this is do you remember when we made a video about the residential geothermal heat pumps and how you could choose between drilling a deep vertical hole which is too expensive or opting for a much shallower but longer horizontal
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configuration that's exactly what's going on here only at a much larger scale this is one of those rare times when the words gamechanging isn't clickbait it's actually the real deal there are dozens of multi-million dollar companies out there that specialize in fracking and horizontal well drilling but before fvo nobody had ever been brave enough to try to make this work for geothermal today thanks to Google and fvo we know it actually works fvo just took the
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risk and the guesswork out of the equation now these companies can confidently dedicate their industry knowhow and capital to make the dream of large scale geothermal power a reality the second key difference of fero's design is adding sensors everywhere to monitor the Well's performance in terms of temperature pressure flow rate Etc I'm not entirely sure how or why it works but they claim this this allows them to carefully control the plant's output power in real time now this
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is something nobody had ever really seen before and it's an entirely different ball game let me explain why electricity grids are super complex every time you switch on a light bulb a power plant somewhere has to produce that little bit of extra energy to make it shine grids rely on gas powered peer plants for this precise control because you can adjust the power output with a dial and it'll respond pretty quickly geothermal power plants have only ever been used for base
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load because they traditionally produce constant power but fero's design lets us use geothermal to follow the load and dispatch only the energy that's necessary when it's necessary making it not only truly carbon free but an alternative to gas peer power plants and remember Google is looking for a way to power its data centers with 100% carbon- free energy 24 hours a day
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this is exactly what the doctor ordered and it's why they invested that $10 million into it this animation shows the load of a typical Google data center since these run 24/7 and there's always someone somewhere Googling something the power consumption is pretty flat when you add intermittent Renewables like wind and solar you get times when you produce too much and that the power goes to waste if not stored and others when you produce too little to meet demand so you need
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a peer power plant to cover these little gray gaps shown here with a traditional geothermal you add a constant base load that offsets a part of the power demand when wind and solar aren't working but you can still get these annoying little gaps here and there and more wind and solar energy can go to waste if you don't store it but with fero's new load following geothermal you can get the best of both worlds you can precisely tune the power plant to cover the load when wind and solar don't
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work and throttle it down when they Peak so you can use just the available wind and solar without wasting it just brilliant chapter five things aren't what they seem okay so Google's geothermal power PL is awesome but now it's time to address the elephant in the room which is fracking now I did my best to put my biases aside for a minute and look at this objectively but for me even if everything works perfectly if this technology is going to poison my kids or cause more harm to the
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environment than the carbon emissions it avoids then it's a noo so I started researching why so many people winse at the mere mention of the word fracking here's a gist of what I found when used in the oil industry fracking uses a series of toxic chemicals to help dissolve minerals kill bacteria reduce friction and enhance the flow of oil and gas from the fractured Rock these chemicals produce toxic Wastewater they can cause toxic air pollution killed wildlife and cause a
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slew of health problems like childhood leukemia cardiac problems asthma birth defects headaches and even cancer in fact they are so dangerous that the safest way to dispose of contaminated water is to re-inject it into a depleted Reservoir underground and just leave it there but this has two major drawbacks we risk polluting groundwater and this extra water can make the terrain unstable
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and cause increased seismic activ ity in the area or even earthquakes oh the irony you're telling me that Google one of the most greenest companies is using fracking one of the oil industry's most controversial and despised Technologies to pursue climate action goals it kind of boggles the mind a little bit and I kind of feel like I'm missing something so I read a little bit more about how
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exactly the fracking process for esgs work and how it's different from the process in oil and gas one thing stood out to me right away in geothermal we don't need to kill bacteria or extract oils from The Rock so the fracking fluids used in esgs don't contain any of the toxic chemicals that we were just talking about this means two things no chance of air ground or water pollution and no need to dispose of the fracking fluid by burying it underground so the main drawbacks of fracking
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for oil don't apply to geothermal that said there is a small caveat worth mentioning remember that graph I showed you a minute ago with the flow rate take a closer look at it notice anything peculiar let me give you a hint the well-labeled fvo 34 a22 is the injection well and the one label fvo 3422 is the production well notice how the power for the injection well is taller than the
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other that means that more water is going into the ground through the injection well than is coming out through the production well put two and two together and you conclude that part of the injected water stays under the ground but why the problem is that when you fracture the rock you can't control where exactly the fractures are going to go and some of those cracks May simply lead away from the production well remember in engineering there's always always a trade-off and
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in this case the trade-off is that you need a constant supply of water to replenish the reservoir and keep the plant running judging from this graph it's about 2 L per second of water or almost 17 million gallons per year so yes even though they prefer calling it stimul for marketing reasons Google's doing the fren but it doesn't mean that it's a bad thing necessarily and it doesn't make ESG is any less clean as a source of carbon- free energy but for me it's
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kind of interesting to see what a constant influx of water underground can do to you know stability for the top soil we shall see this whole thing reminds me of a story Israel our headwriter once told me about a 4minute mile before the 1950s it was thought that it was humanly impossible to run a mile and under 4 minutes for decades this held true no one could do it because no one thought it
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was even possible that is until Roger banister broke the barrier on May 6th 1954 with a time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds those few tents of a second broke the spell and changed the game all of a sudden Runners everywhere were breaking the 4minute mile Mark today's record is 3 minutes 43 seconds and is held by two-time Olympic medalist hikam elguero I believe Google's geothermal power
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plant plant will have the same effect no one thought it was possible to build such a system and make it work but now we know you can do it and we know how it works so it's only a matter of time until others follow infero and Google's footsteps and make widespread geothermal for base Peak power more of a reality and maybe they'll figure out even more clever ways of minimizing Water waste or improving efficiency or anything else that's how this goes everything was
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impossible until it wasn't and like we mentioned sign off the comments below write to us read your comments hit the like button subscribe and follow so you don't miss our future videos and until next week check out this video next I'm R Da Vinci we'll catch you guys next week
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