The US is betting that new ways of extracting geothermal energy from the Earth could help put it on the path to better energy security.

Eight innovative geothermal projects in five states will receive up to $11.3 million from the US Department of Energy (DOE) in hopes of advancing the energy technology and making its costs competitive with other forms of electricity. Innovations in the technology could help speed the country toward President Barack Obama’s goal of getting 80 percent of its electricity energy from clean sources by 2035.

The funds going out now are for phase one feasibility studies of the various technologies. Projects selected for the second phase will then go on to test the viability of their technologies in real-world environments.

Funding is going to the following projects:

• GeoTek Energy (Midland, Texas): Up to $2.85 million for the gravity head energy system project, which will study the technical feasibility of a new generation of gravity-driven downhole pumps.
• Gtherm (Westport, Connecticut): Up to $200,000 for the single-well engineered geothermal systems project, aimed at investigating the technical feasibility, heat extraction potential, and cost impact of a single-well geothermal system.
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley, California): Up to $4.99 million for a project to explore geothermal energy coupled with carbon capture and storage (CCS). The effort aims to develop new ways to produce electricity from superheated and pressurized carbon dioxide in deep geothermal formations.
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, California): Up to $874,000 for a project to improve energy recovery and mitigate the risk of integrating geothermal energy production with carbon capture and storage.
• Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, Louisiana): Up to $997,000 for a zero-mass withdrawal, engineered convection and wellbore energy conversion project studying technologies that circulate reservoir fluids to increase heat extraction.
• Physical Optics Corporation (Torrance, California): Up to $200,000 for a heat extraction from geothermal systems project studying an innovative wellbore condenser technology. This technology converts hot vapor into cooler liquids at high efficiencies, which could help generate greater geothermal power.
• Terralog Technologies USA (Monrovia, California): Up to $541,000 for a project to investigate advanced horizontal well recirculation systems for geothermal energy recovery. The goal is to develop advanced geothermal well designs that optimize combinations of vertical and horizontal wells.
• University of Utah (Salt Lake City, Utah): Up to $671,000 to assess the electric generating capacity, economics and environmental impacts of developing deep sedimentary and crystalline reservoirs throughout the entire US.

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