About a year ago we mentioned that Google was investing in an enhanced geothermal energy company called AltaRock Energy. In fact, both Google and the U.S. Department of Energy made significant investments in AltaRock’s plan to drill deep into dry but hot caverns in Northern California in a bid to, “…create an EGS reservoir that will drill below the permeable zone, stimulate in the contained zone with infrastructure in place, and increase power production.” In short, they wanted to drill several thousand feet deep, fill the hole with water then use the resulting steam to power a turbine that would create electricity. And while the beginning of the project was announced with great fanfare the end didn’t get nearly as much attention from Google or the DOE.

On September 2nd of this year the New York Times published a story titled, Energy Company Calls Halt to Drilling Project. The main reason the project was halted was due to the fact that AltaRock was unable to drill a sufficient hole, only going down about 800 feet from their starting point of 3,200 feet. In order to move forward the NY Times story states that the drilling needed to reach 12,000 feet. Concerns about the project were already inflated at the time of the shutdown due to the fact that a similar effort in Switzerland had been blamed for an earthquake.

At the time of the original announcement we had our doubts about the viability of the project.

EGS may be indeed be a viable clean energy generation technology. It is also a very a risky and expensive technology that yields its share of negative environmental impacts.

Unfortunately it appears that our instincts were correct. There’s no such thing as a free lunch in power generation. If you want to extract power from the earth the earth makes you pay a heavy price. In this case the price seems to have been too high for AltaRock, their investors and the State of California. AltaRock Energy indicated in their official press release that they continue to seek out other enhanced geothermal projects.

We are continuing with the development of our EGS technology and are currently evaluating a number of alternative well locations, at the Geysers and elsewhere for demonstrating this technology.