We need a bold transformation today. The energy industry is at a moment of reckoning, as global demand continues to increase. The largest clean energy resource we have remains largely untapped: the Earth itself. The core of the Earth burns over 6,000°C, and that heat continuously radiates outwards. Earth can act as a colossal battery that is able to provide more clean power than we could ever hope to use.
We can access this colossal battery through geothermal technologies. Eavor is dedicated to creating a clean, reliable, and affordable energy future. Through advanced drilling and expertise developed in the oil and gas industry, Eavor has created a self-contained system that circulates a proprietary fluid through a precision well system that runs kilometers deep. Eavor validated their Advanced Geothermal Systems (AGS) technology with their Eavor Loop demonstration project in Alberta, Canada, where it mitigated many of the concerns that shadowed the industry through previous geothermal processes.
The idea came from the company’s co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer (CBDO) Paul Cairns. In 2017, Paul spoke with John Redfern, Eavor CEO, about how suspended oil wells could be re-used for profit.
“Luckily for us, my co-founder wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t a scientist, he was a finance guy, but a creative one, and so unencumbered by geoengineering knowledge. He said, ‘why doesn’t low-enthalpy geothermal energy work?’ And I said, ‘because of the parasitic pump load that uses about 50-80% of the power produced, so little energy is produced.’
“He says, ‘well, to get around that, why don’t we just drill down two wells and connect them horizontally [below ground] and we’ll connect them on the surface and make this big loop — wouldn’t that flow better?’
“And I thought it was the dumbest idea I’d ever heard in my life… incredibly inefficient [and] capital intensive.”
— John Redfern, Eavor
But engineers such as Matt Toews, who is now the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), pointed out that such a configuration would not only eliminate the parasitic pump load but would in fact pump itself due to the thermosiphon effect. This is because cold water is denser than warm water, so the cold essentially pushes the warm water towards the surface.
“And that got us excited. This is something where we can actually make a difference… This is the Holy Grail of power.”
— John Redfern, Eavor
An Eavor-Loop™ can be placed almost anywhere in the world, at any scale. With low-footprint installations, you can produce as much energy as you need with zero emissions and perfect dispatchability. When the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, Eavor-Loop™ can dispatch its energy as needed to fill the power gap or provide baseload energy 24/7 when other clean energy sources aren’t available.
“The shale gas development in North America has proven that large horizontal drilling campaigns can reduce drilling costs by 70 to 80% when scaled up. This makes Eavor-Loops™ a highly economic baseload source of energy.”
— Michael Holmes, Eavor
The closed-loop is the key difference between Eavor-Loop™ and all traditional industrial-scale geothermal systems. Eavor-Loop™ is a buried-pipe system, which acts as a radiator or heat exchanger. It consists of connecting two vertical wells several kilometers deep with many horizontal multilateral wellbores several kilometers long. As these wellbores are sealed, a benign, environmentally friendly working fluid is added to the closed loop as a circulating fluid. This working fluid is contained within the system and isolated from the earth in the Eavor-Loop™. The wellbores act as pipes, not wells producing fluid from the earth. Unlike heat pumps (or “geo-exchange”), which convert electricity to heat using very shallow wells, Eavor-Loop generates industrial-scale electricity or produces enough heat for the equivalent of 16,000 homes with a single installation.
“The collection of the heat from the surface is highly predictable with subsurface data and thermodynamic modeling. With the control of the flow rate in the Loops, we can control the heat offtake from the subsurface. So operating the loops within our design parameters gives the Loops a lifetime of 100 years. We did prove this in our Eavor-Lite demonstration project that is running since 2019, where the output matches the original thermodynamic model.”
— Jeanine Vany, Eavor
