In this EnergyGigs webinar, CEO Jason Assir is joined by Emily Smejkal, a Fellow and Policy Lead at the Cascade Institute and VP of Geothermal Canada, to discuss the exciting developments in Ultra-Deep Geothermal technology. Emily shares her personal journey transitioning from oil and gas to geothermal, shedding light on the potential of next-gen geothermal power and how it’s revolutionizing the energy sector. The conversation covers cutting-edge geothermal technologies, job opportunities in the field, and why now is the perfect time to explore careers in this growing industry.
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Transcript:
Jason Assir
Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. My name is Jason Assir. I'm with EnergyG igs. Welcome to this month's webinar on Alter Deep Geothermal, and like to welcome our guest speaker, Emily e. Emily is a fellow and policy lead at the Cascade Institute, where she is sort of the lead on ultra deep geothermal policy and also a fellow on energy systems, part of the energy systems team. She's also vice president of Geothermal Canada. And so we're very honored and excited to have you on our webinar today. Emily, before we get into sort of the presentation and learn a little bit more about your background, briefly, just at a high level, let me tell you, tell everyone a little bit about energy gigs if you don't know who we are. So we are an energy focused platform that connects energy companies to just in time energy talent. Whether it's an engineer, business consultant, or even like a change management consultant, you can find resources and talent on our platform. So welcome, and Emily, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Emily Smejkal
Thanks so much for having me, Jason. I'm very excited to be here and share some of my journey and learnings with energy gigs of. So I think this is really relevant because I've been through a couple of career transitions over the last little while. So I do come from oil and gas. I was based in Calgary, up in Alberta, the Texas of Canada. It's oil and gas central, and I worked there for ten years as an oil and gas geologist. When I had my third child, I actually took a leave from work for four years. And when I was looking at re entering the workforce, I thought that, well, I'm already transitioning back. I might as well see if I can pursue something that I am passionate about. And being a geologist and having a deep love of rocks, that led me to geothermal. So I started working in the geothermal industry as a part time contract consultant for hire about four years ago, and I was doing that for three and a half years, and then I just started working full time with Cascade Institute about six months ago. So that's a little bit about my, my journey, and we can talk more about in the questions about the obstacles and challenges and stuff that involved all of that, those transitions.
Jason Assir
Fantastic, Emily. And, yeah, and everyone. So Emily's gonna do a deep dive into the geothermal side of work and ultra deep geothermal. Please do ask questions in the channel and the chat. We will take those questions halfway through the webinar. Once we get through the main part of the presentation, but, yeah, especially how you moved from oil and gas to geothermal. I'm sure there are a lot of people on the call that will really want to dig into that and understand that a little bit more. So I'll turn it over to you, though.
Emily Smejkal
No, absolutely. And like I said, I'm happy to answer the questions as best I can on any of those topics, so. But first, I kind of want to explain what ultra deep geothermal is. So ultra deep geothermal Cascade Institute is categorizing it as drilling a well that is deeper than 5. Look, I even put imperial in here for your american friends. So 3 miles temperatures would have to be greater than about 150 degrees c or I hundred fahrenheit. And ultra deep geothermal uses these next generation geothermal technologies to create an artificial reservoir or sink of hot fluid in the subsurface at that extreme depth. And the exciting part about this is when you look at this little diagram, conventional geothermal is tied really closely to where we know there's hot water in this, the subsurface. So if you think of California, if you think of Nevada, if you think of Utah, they all have sort of surface expressions of hot springs, they all have faults. We know there's hot water down there already. The exciting part about the next generation geothermal is it takes away that location risk. You don't need to have hot water in the basement. We can make it there ourselves. And you see this technology really taking off in the United States right now. And it's a really exciting time to be in this industry because it is sort of just starting to accelerate. That train is just pulling away from the station, starting down the tracks. So it's a great time to get involved. So I'm just going to give you like quick, brief overview. Geothermal can be used for heat, and there's amazing potential and lots of places that use it to heat their homes and cool their homes. But what the ultra deep geothermal focuses on is geothermal for power. So this is just an example of a geothermal power, what a geothermal power plant would look like. You have an injection well that's injecting cold water. You have a production well that is produced in the hot water that's been heated up by your rocks. You can see all those little lines are the man made fractures that we've put in there that are allowing for the transfer of that cold water through the hot rock and letting it heat up. We then pull that hot water up to the surface where it passes through a heat exchanger, and usually the water basically, then just goes right back down the hole. Once it's given its heat to the fluid in the heat exchanger, it goes right back down the hole. The fluid in the heat exchanger, it's kind of like antifreeze. So it actually flashes like goes to steam at a pretty low temperature. They're actually using CO2 for this in some places because CO2 has such a low flash temperature. I think it's 30 degrees celsius. And sorry, my metric to imperial in my head doesn't work. So when it goes. So basically what it does is we pass it through the heat exchanger, we heat up that working fluid, that antifreeze, that CO2 that turns to steam and turns a turbine. So very similar to what like most electricity generation at the end of it is we're just using hot water from the ground to create that heat as opposed to natural gas or burning coal at surface. The technology is really similar. This type of power plant is typically called an organic Rankine cycle power plant. So that's what this picture here is of. The cool thing about geothermal for electricity is that it is base load. So it's on twenty four seven a day, hours a day, 365 days a year. Doesn't matter what the outside temperature is, doesn't matter if the wind is blowing, doesn't matter if the sun shining its base load power. So this would be comparable to nuclear or hydro. And seeing as this has a smaller footprint than a hydrodam, and maybe some of the fewer back end risks than a nuclear plant, this is a really applicable technology. So the other piece for geothermal, and we're just starting to see this technology developing, is that it's also dispatchable. So in the last little bit, there's been a bunch of announcements from major data developers such as Microsoft, Google and Meta, and they have all invested into geothermal power to power some of their AI data centers. So we've got them having this huge baseload of power that they're going to be using to power these data centers. But we also have the option, as we've seen with some of the stuff meta is working on with sage geo systems, that we actually have the ability to ramp that power up or down based on need. Like I said, that technology is fitting into that next generation. And I don't mean next generation like it'll be working when my kids are grown. I mean next generation as it's the next iteration. This would be like if the original geothermal was like the iPhone one. This would be like the iPhone XDev. So it's on its way. It's here, we're developing it. So I'm going to focus on the United States because Canada doesn't have the as pretty maps as you guys do in the states. So this is from a study done out of Stanford University. And I really like it because this is what makes me excited about next generation geothermal. This is the cost of electricity based on geothermal power plants using EGS. So one of those next gen technologies on the left, we see what that cost of electricity is right now with the current drilling technology and drilling rates that we have. So you can see there's some great potential on the western half of the United States. There's a little bit down in Texas. This is what people are chasing now. And if you look at the announcements that are coming out for geothermal developments, they're pretty much all in these places. What gets me really excited is the fact that when you look at the map on the right, that's what EGS, or next gen geothermal potential looks like if you advance your drilling rates. And what is amazing is that two weeks ago, Fervo Energy announced that they met these advanced drill rates. So this isn't a future thing. This isn't like ten years. This is, like, happening now. So if more companies can duplicate what fervor has proven to do and match these advanced drilling rates, you can see how much of the continental United States is potentially unlocked for this enhanced geothermal system's electricity. So this is why I'm excited. This is why I say that train is starting to pull out of the station. It's a great time to get involved. So the QR code in the bottom right corner on this links to some work that the Cascade Institute did mapping the geothermal roadmap for Canada. But there's. And there's much more details in there. But, like, the key highlights for, besides that drilling piece I just showed. So we do need to reduce drilling time. It's already happening, but there's also a ton of stuff that's going to have to happen once we get down to these high temperatures and deep depths and high pressures. We need tools that can operate at these conditions. So right now, most oil and gas tools are capable of operating up to around 220 c degrees celsius. So what we do is if we're going to drill over that, we pump cold water or cold fluid down the wellbore as we're drilling to keep the tools cool so we can keep going. So if we can advance, make our sensors so they don't melt, and the solder doesn't dissolve at 220 degrees c. Also get better at cooling the wellbore down. There's some options for being able to gather better data deeper and being able to access deeper, hotter rocks. So there's also improved well completion technologies. So there's those two types of next gen geothermal systems. There's that egs, or enhanced geothermal system that uses fracturing to create the reservoir. And then there's a closed loop option, or an ags, advanced geothermal systems that basically creates a giant subsurface radiator. So the more we do this, the better we're going to get at it. This is an emerging field. Again, it's really exciting, and a lot of engineering and geoscience is packed into trying to unlock how to create an artificial human made reservoir at 3 miles into the base, into the rock. So the final one is to improve heat extraction methods. So the more efficient we can get at pulling heat out of these rocks, the more efficient our power plants will be and the cheaper it'll be to run them. So there's a lot of work going on with chemistry, materials well design around improving those heat extraction methods. So those are some of the, like, key advances that are starting to happen. And I feel like there's going to be a lot of work, both research and commercial based, in these areas over the next few years.
Jason Assir
Emily, one, just clarifying question, the advances in drilling time, was that fervo's numbers and data from their Utah site, one of the. Someone. Is that right?
Emily Smejkal
Yeah. I can't. I'm like, I think it's Cape. I can't remember the name, but, yes, they just put out. I think their last well only took them 21 days compared to the 70 it had taken for the first one.
Jason Assir
Wow.
Emily Smejkal
So it's been. It's been a really impressive progress that they have shown and they've built off of the expertise that was developed at the forge site in Utah. They're. They sit right next to each other, their neighbors, so. Oh, Cape is the Utah site. I just saw the comment in the audience. Thank you.
Jason Assir
Great.
Emily Smejkal
Red is the Nevada one, then. All right, so, jason, I think this was the part where I was figuring we could open up to more of a dialogue. So I've been working in geothermal for four years, and I found that a lot of my skills from oil and gas transferred. I still had a big learning curve, and I'm still at the front end of that learning curve. And there's people who are experts in this field that have been doing geothermal for 30 plus years. But I did find that there was some skill transfer, so I tried to capture some, and this is specific to my experience, but I tried to capture some of the experience I had from oil and gas that I'm still using now.
Jason Assir
And so these are skills that you were using in your job, in your last job in oil and gas. When you think about your first sort of like, submission to a job or, you know, the very first project that you sort of applied for, like, how did you, like, how did you put, summarize your experience and map it to geothermal? And was it, if you remember, what that first experience was like?
Emily Smejkal
So when I first started working in geothermal, I actually started working as a research assistant and sort of, I'll call myself executive assistant as well, to help out one of the sort of startup level developers here in Canada as a consultant. You wear many hats. And I think what I thought was so funny is I look back on my career, and I had done enhanced oil recovery water floods. I had done dewatering wet coalbed methane. I had done geochemistry for surface facilities. I had done wellbore integrity for oil sands, steam developments. And when I looked at it, I was like, huh? I've actually been pushing water through rocks my entire career. So I found that so many of the skills that I had from managing this water when I used to work, it was the unwanted byproduct. But when I transitioned over to geothermal, I'd already been dealing with water. Not in the volumes geothermal deals with water, but I'd been dealing with water and how it moved through rocks my entire career. So it was a bit of a mind shift to transition to viewing water as the prize as opposed to the byproduct. But I did find that that was one of the biggest sort of aha. Moments that, okay, maybe I have more skill set in geothermal than I thought I initially did.
Jason Assir
It also sounds like you also took on some work that was maybe not really what you really wanted to do, but you were just getting your foot in the door a little bit, too. Being somewhat of an executive assistant, like you said, that's cool, too. Everyone does that. They want to go straight to the role that they want.
Emily Smejkal
And I think for me, it made sense because I still had young children that were at home, and we were trying to save some money on childcare. So it worked out that I could be a stay at home parent during the day, and I could work in the evenings and off hours when I had the other parent there. So it worked out really well for me to actually, like, start sort of slow and easy and ease my way into the system. And, yeah, it was a little humbling to go back to being an executive assistant, but I think in my mind, I knew that I was going to have a steep learning curve. So this was a way that I could learn and mentor under somebody and basically absorb as much as I could and then transfer slowly into the job that I actually wanted, which was back to be working as a geologist, but in geothermal.
Jason Assir
So we, I mean, one of the things that we, we find with just in terms of the projects on our platform and for people that are looking for on ramps to get into new spaces like Geothermal is the project, even if it's like a two week project or even if it's just like, you know, just a fixed fee, like, analyze some data, you know, that project could be your gateway into, you know, a full career. Right. Because then the recruiter who looks at your resume or the recruiter that looks at your background can see that you've done something, and you automatically pass that initial sniff. Sniff test, if you will. You want to call it that.
Emily Smejkal
Well, where I am now working in policy is kind of along those same lines. I took a contract to help with the geothermal regulations for Northwest Territories in Canada, and it was a little six month contract who basically write up a draft of what deep geothermal regulations based off their oil and gas would look like. And it kind of snowballed from there because it was this, like, one little part time contract that I took, and then the next province over said, hey, we saw you did this. Like, can you help us out? And now it's to the point where I've been involved with four of Canada's 13 jurisdictions with their, their policy development. So it's. I became an accidental expert through this one job that I took.
Jason Assir
That's awesome. Well, for the guests on the webinar, please do ask any questions you might have, and then we'll keep going through.
Emily Smejkal
It so I can share this. And this is not a comprehensive list, but this is based on what I've sort of seen and I think is coming.
Jason Assir
Oh, wow. Cool.
Emily Smejkal
That's a great question. I'm super curious about it. The millimeter wave drilling that quaize is doing is fascinating. They're using microwaves to essentially melt, pulverize, destroy the rocks so that they can essentially pass directly through them. I think based on the current horizontal drilling technology. There should be a synergy there. But I understand that quas has, is at bench testing stage. I think maybe they're starting to pilot in the field. I'm not sure how much of that data is currently public, but, yeah, their advances, and they've had a ton of support from the Department of Energy in the United States to continue this work because it's a really cool, really cool area. But I could see their system being able to be mounted on the front of, being able to be mounted on a mud motor that we currently use for horizontal drilling.
Jason Assir
And that. That's like a millimeter wave system, is that right? Like, or.
Emily Smejkal
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Millimeter microwave.
Jason Assir
Yes. Yeah, I forgot the other part. The other part was important. Yeah, yes.
Emily Smejkal
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Assir
Very cool.
Emily Smejkal
Mm hmm. So, yeah, so this was just a list of, like, some potential jobs that I see coming up in the geothermal industry. And there's maybe not the experience base within the geothermal industry now, like in Canada, for example, most of our igneous and metamorphic geologists don't work in oil and gas. Most of them work internationally, or most of them work on the volcanoes on the west coast. But as we drill deeper, we're going to need to understand that type of rock a lot more. So I think there is going to be a need for people with that expertise area. Same on the engineering side. The volume of engineering that's going to have to go into the drilling design, completion, all phases of operation. Power production for these projects is immense. So I think there's going to be a huge, and you can see it already with the job postings that are coming up with the us geothermal developers, that there's going to be a need for people with this skill set. Wouldn't it be best to bring heat to surface without water? Yes, it would. I really like CO2 as a working fluid because it has such a low flash point. There's some real regulatory barriers around using anything except non potable water for a working fluid. I do think that if we could use something other than water, it would be ideal. And it eliminates that heat exchanger I showed on the power diagram as well. If you can bring something that already flashing to the surface, you could just essentially bolt a turbine on the top. Your efficiencies change as you do that. So there's like, there's some science and stuff that's going to have to go in on the back to figure out what's the most efficient for each location. But, yeah, I do think that the using something other than the water as a working fluid is a great idea, and it's research that's happening now. And I'm curious to see, as the closed loop side of advanced of next gen geothermal starts going, they're probably going to be the ones that are using sort of those more exotic working fluids, those non water based ones.
Jason Assir
Emily, is that like an ever? Is that kind of what they're going down? And that's a canadian company, too, right?
Emily Smejkal
Yeah, yeah, they're based. They're based here in Alberta, and they're a bunch of people like myself, who have backgrounds in oil and gas, are very good at drilling horizontal, long reach directional wells, and they decided they were going to try for geothermal. So their technology. Their technology is really cool. And. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. So as we see there, they're currently drilling a large development in Germany, and I'm going to be watching very closely to see as they finish because I think it'll be interesting to see what they're able to accomplish with their sort of subsurface radiator that they've got set up there.
Jason Assir
That's awesome. Well, I think. Please do. If anyone has any more questions, please do ask them. We are using a different tool, technology in this webinar than we have in the past. So it's, we're seeing these questions in real time, which is kind of fun. But I guess. Emily, one question I had is, Ron, Ignis, in metamorphic rock, expertise, is that when you think about ultra deep geothermal, is that, do you see something like where that expert would come and would be involved? The further you. The deeper you go in drilling, is that when their expertise would come to.
Emily Smejkal
Bear for that expansion of egs, where we've sort of, like, unlocked that eastern half of the United States, that's where that expertise is going to come in. But there is. There is work there now, I would say currently in Canada, we call it the basement. You drill through all your soft sedimentary rock, and eventually you hit the basement, which is your hard, igneous and metamorphic rock. And typically in oil and gas, when we hit the basement, we stop drilling because it's always been assumed there's no porosity and no oil and gas down there. But with geothermal, that's the objective. That's what we're trying to get, is to these hard, tight, deep, hot rocks, which kind of leads into the question that I see in the q and a. So I don't know. I don't know how to actually. Yes, this one, this is so cool. So the seismic risk associated with injection wells. There is a ton of research being done on this. Seismic risk is something that's kind of intrinsic to both oil and gas and also geothermal. There's been some induced seismicity events in Europe that have, from geothermal that have been publicly felt, and there's been public backlash because of this. So I think this is going to be a sensitive area moving forward. In Canada, when we're doing drilling now, we're actually required to evaluate the seismic risk within a 3 km. So 1 mile perimeter around our drilling location. And if there's any associated risk, we're required to drill a seismic monitoring well so that we can tell if we've actually triggered an event or if we're about to trigger an event. So. And I had that in the. I think I have that in my next slide, actually, because it was. Oh, no, I don't. But that there's a lot of. Going to be a lot of work, and there is a lot of work on that geophysics side, not just on the site characterization for geothermal and finding the resource, but on this sort of production and injection end, where there is a risk of seismic activity with injection. You have a geophysicist on staff who can monitor that risk. And I should say right now, with the developments in EGS, because we're looking so deep, the order of magnitude by the time any seismic activity hits the surface is very minimal. Think of a garbage truck driving past your house. That's kind of the level that we can expect to have at the surface. There's always going to be an associated risk, and it is going to be really important to monitor and understand that as we develop these projects. So that's where that geophysics skill set is going to come in really handy. Are rocks the insulator and not a heat transfer medium? Yeah, rocks aren't good at transferring heat. They're really slow. So in traditional geothermal, we use fluid, because fluid transfers heat really, really well. Like there's a reason, like if you put your hand in a boiling pot of water or on your granite countertop, like, it's gonna. It's gonna heat up differently. So I think when we're looking at these egs and like, these next gen geothermal systems, there is gonna be a risk of if these reservoirs aren't properly managed and they aren't properly developed and they aren't properly engineered, that I think there is going to be a risk that we have reservoir getting colder faster than it would otherwise. So I think that's. I tried to capture that piece in these jobs lists and skill sets because I do think that having that reservoir engineering, that geochemistry, that thermodynamics piece, is going to be really important in making sure that these geothermal reservoirs stay hot as long as possible. There's a big piece of reservoir management here, so there's definitely going to be, need to be a skill set. And yes, rocks aren't very good at transferring heat, and we can cool them off really fast if we're not careful how we operate these wells.
Jason Assir
That's interesting. I mean, you can almost see that there would be a burgeoning field of different expertise for these specific types of wells that are happening. We went to, I guess it was Fervo's technology showcase during climate week here in Houston, Texas, and they had mentioned that, like, they didn't see much heat loss, at least so far, which they were obviously pretty happy about.
Emily Smejkal
And I think there's a part of it where if you're trying to run an organic rankine cycle power plant, you would design it to maybe run off of 150 celsius degree water. Perhaps your reservoir is significantly hotter than that. And as you cool it, it does stabilize at one point. So typically with rocks, you'll see the temperature drop significantly when you start pushing water through them and pulling the heat out of the rock, but it does stabilize, and then once it's stabilized at a temperature, it does maintain that long term.
Jason Assir
That's great. So these are some of the leading firms, companies in the space right now, I guess, that are doing enhanced geothermal and. Sorry, what was the other part?
Emily Smejkal
These are ultra deep. Yeah, I threw in a couple, like, random, like a couple extras just because I thought they were interesting, so. Okay. Hey, Robbie.
Jason Assir
And you're working in her mind.
Emily Smejkal
Cool. Oh, yeah. And I think, and this is a, this is a great example of why there needs to be that science piece tied to these developments. And we see the same thing here in Canada. We have, we have an active volcano just north of the border, just inland from Vancouver. It's in the Garibaldi belt, same, same system as Mount St. Helens. And we see that we have really hot temperatures at really shallow depths, and we would also have likely a very high earthquake risk. So the risk assessment piece on the front end of these projects is going to be really, really critical to developing them safely.
Jason Assir
That's fantastic. Well, I know we're kind of at time, but if we have maybe anyone has any more questions, a couple more questions, we can take them here. And then, Emily, can we also provide your contact information in case people wanted to follow up with anything that you presented?
Emily Smejkal
Oh, absolutely. Yes. I'm open and happy to connect.
Jason Assir
Okay. No, very good. Well, I guess in terms of what are you looking forward to most? Like, thinking about sort of the next year in ultra deep geothermal.
Emily Smejkal
Okay. So in the US, I'm more than a little jealous of what the inflation Reduction act has done for green energy investment. So I'm really looking forward to seeing what Sage and Fervo and forge are going to be able to accomplish with these large investments of capital that they've seen recently in their projects. I'm really looking forward to seeing them starting to get, like, Fervo's got their bits in the ground. Sage is super close. I'm looking forward to seeing that, like, actual power being generated from a next generation geothermal system get electrons on the grid. In Canada, we're a little bit further behind. So I'm looking forward in the next year to getting the word out about geothermal to our country. So I think we're going to be working really hard in Canada to emulate some of the success that the United States has had in getting that geothermal conversation going at the federal level.
Jason Assir
That's great. I had read, I think that there was maybe a canadian version of the IRA that was being worked on.
Emily Smejkal
Yeah, we have an investment tax credit, and we are currently working on trying to get geothermal drilling included in that tax credit, but it does include all of our surface installations already. So it should be voted and passed in with our budget that's coming out shortly. So we should. We will have something similar. So. And I'm. I'm very excited that we're going to hopefully be able to see some private investment in Canada because of that.
Jason Assir
That's. That's awesome. Yeah. That helps de risk these projects tremendously. Well, if anyone else has any questions, we do have one last question, so. Okay, not a weird question. I will have to leave that to you, Emily. I am not sure.
Emily Smejkal
Yeah, no, there are other engine types besides ranking. There's Kalena that uses ammonia. There is direct flash plants where you're just using the steam that's being produced to gent pull the turbine. This is what the geysers in the United States and California uses. Their dry flash plant. There is direct heat input instead of using a working fluid. Like I said, my personal favorite is CO2, but there's some tricky things around producing CO2. Back up your production. Well, got to keep it contained. Don't want that getting in the atmosphere. Don't need any more of that out there.
Jason Assir
So interesting. No, that's neat. Well, Emily, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for being a guest on this month's webinar. We are recording this webinar, so if you all want to watch it later on, you can. We will also be sending out show notes to all attendees and also include your contact information. So if anyone wants to get in contact with you, Emily, they can. But without further ado, thank you again, Emily. Thank you to our attendees and guests for joining this month's webinar. And, yeah, we'd love to have you back again to speak on geothermal.
Emily Smejkal
More than happy. Thanks so much for having me, Jason.
Jason Assir
All right, bye.
