Minister Nick Teslo arrived in his e-limo and stepped out. Walking briskly up the steps beside another assistant he moved smiling along the line shaking hands with the other fellows first. When Albert looked he recognized now those two older guys. They both went through that steam operator retraining program the Minister wanted to profile. One’s name was Hank. The Minister gave Albert a big nod and a wink as he grasped his hand firmly before stepping up to the podium and clearing his throat.
He began his speech on the carbon bubble. He went over the touchy idea that local oil and gas reserves though maybe proven were actually stranded assets never to be burned. That had been such a hard sell around here Albert knew. Yet, Minister Teslo emphasized, the booming geothermal potential had been proven local too and could replace coal as a primary energy source. Geothermal wells drilled with local rigs would supply the energy of tomorrow. Clean energy—better in many ways. Right here, right now he waved back at the power plant for the media to notice. Evident before their eyes today his department had successfully replaced coal burning for citizens’ electricity needs.
Albert gazed out at the brown leaves blowing across the parking lot. Dad had always said politicians wanted their photo ops on beautiful weather days. This sure was one nice day for a bike ride.
The Minister went on about how his department was actively promoting a program of transition to geothermal energy based on oil and gas drilling technology. He rattled off the annual rig stats, those active and those scheduled to spud in for proposed geothermal wells. His office would maintain a controversial price on carbon as an economic incentive to this newer technology. Twenty-first century energy technology phasing out coal by strategically replacing the steam source for generating electricity was good policy. He put in some good words on wind and solar too.
Albert glanced down at his jPad as he stood half listening. Kali had a tweet burst going.
That rig Albert worked on last summer had come off a seven month foothills gas well. With little more modification than switching drill bits, the deep-hole rig had spudded in on a geothermal lease. The drilling engineer said the geothermal hole was a special twinning lease right next to a producing gas well. The drilling location was selected based on the existing well’s temperature log and distance from the coal burning plant’s steam turbine. The design trade off was piping distance versus subsurface temperature. You twinned a well based on bottom hole heat and the cool thing was you got a heat measure from your well’s twin. That drilling engineer projected hitting the target heat zone at 6500 meters. Although that well wasn’t completed until Albert was back in class, the next summer he helped design the piping to tie the well into surface facilities.
The basics of geothermal shown in diagrams hung on that office wall poster. He passed the thing every day. Geothermal energy was scalable, for a village or a large city or a jurisdictional power grid. The Minister could say that in his speech. You ideally produced water at 120 degrees or higher, the hotter and the more water the better. But there were plants running on lower temperature water. Maybe too technical for a politician. As long as they listen to their advisors Dad said and he knew it too. That Minister who came to the hospital had taken on the permitting process, outdated and convoluted. You couldn’t even get a geothermal lease back then let alone a special twinning permit.