The basic methods of generating clean electricity from heat deep beneath the earth’s surface have been around for decades—the first-ever geothermal plant was built in Italy in 1904. Geothermal power is reliable, uses only a small land footprint, and produces a constant stream of power, akin to a base load natural gas or nuclear power plant
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00:00 [Music]
00:17 There's the new geothermal, not your grandma's geothermal.
00:21 So this is enhanced geothermal systems.
00:24 And what EGS does is it will take advantage of places where the hot rock is closer to the surface,
00:31 but that hot rock doesn't have to have fluid in it.
00:34 [Music]
00:48 The way it works is instead of just dropping down a well and collecting the steam that comes up,
00:54 you drop down a well and then you force in fluid and it makes the rock fracture or crack.
01:03 And then the fluid is forced through and then there's another well where the fluid comes up.
01:08 And it's been heated in the rock that it's passed through and then it comes up as steam.
01:13 So you're basically taking advantage of hot rock, but you don't have to have it with fluid in it.
01:17 You put the fluid in yourself.
01:19 [Music]
01:27 Oil and gas, they've done very well in the last few years, right?
01:31 They've had some crazy profits. They have big capital that they can use.
01:36 Secondly, the enhanced geothermal systems, it involves drilling, fracturing rock,
01:42 and doing stuff in the subsurface, you know, under the ground. And they are the masters.
01:47 I mean, they know that better than anyone else, oil and gas.
01:51 [Music]
02:00 Geothermal is constant. It's on all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
02:06 It doesn't care about the weather. It's what's called a clean source of baseload power.
02:11 And it can fill in the gaps on the grid that we now have to fill with fossil fuel.
02:16 [Music]