I have talked about where the precursors for fibers and resins to make composites will need to come from as we morph the composites industry into a sustainable and circular business model. But we have not talked about the other elephant in the room – the process energy for making carbon fiber, making the resins, and cooking the parts to cure the resins. This energy right now, especially in the manufacture of carbon fiber, comes primarily from oil and gas. And, since the temperatures of the pyrolysis ovens to make carbon fiber are so high, there is a lot of process heat needed which currently emits large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Fervo Site in Utah
The short answer is that this energy will eventually need to come from renewables, which to date have largely been confined to windFervo Site in Utah, solar, and hydroelectric power. That’s why I was a bit surprised and quite pleased to read a recent article in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/26/climate/meta-facebook-geothermal-fracking-energy.html). The picture above tells quite a bit of the story, but the NY Times article is primarily about the interest and investments being made in a couple of geothermal energy startups by none other than Meta and Google. Apparently these tech giants have come to the realization that they will need enormous amounts of electricity to power the cloud servers that run their platforms.
The article is about this new group of companies, and it highlights a couple of them. These startups are using the new hydraulic fracturing technology developed by the oil industry (yes – fracking) to drill very deep into the earth’s crust and hydraulically fracturing the hot rock down there. Once they have done the fracturing, they pump water down into the fractures under fairly high pressure, let the hot rock heat the water, and bring it back to the surface where it flashes into steam and runs steam turbines.
One startup, Fervo Energy (Co-Founder Tim Latimer to the right), has gotten its funding from the Department of Energy and has already demonstrated a 5 megawatt generation station in Nevada. Google has signed an agreement with Fervo to buy electricity for their use in powering the Google cloud servers. Fervo is now in the midst of building a 400 megawatt plant in Utah that is intended to sell power to electric utilities in Southern California along with selling power to Google. Interestingly enough, Fervo has apparently demonstrated a 70% reduction in the time it takes to drill a well deep enough to make it useful for generating electricity. And, since it is time on the drilling rig that is the major cost of drilling these deep wells, that bodes very well for the affordability of generating electricity using this improved fracking technology.
Another startup, Sage Geosystems, is using the same technology and has already drilled a test well in Texas and fractured the rock deep in the crust to demonstrate their drilling technology. Sage’s current agreement is with the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. They plan to develop a 150 megawatt generation capacity using a geothermal source of hydraulically fractured rock thousands of feet below the surface. Meta has an agreement with Sage to buy the electricity that Sage will produce with their new deep geothermal energy technology.
All of this energy is also useful as base load electricity, much unlike wind and solar which depend either on the wind blowing or the sun shining. The rocks thousands of feet under the surface are going to stay hot as long as earth’s core is still molten iron. This hot iron core of course is what keeps the mantle rocks hot enough that they can easily boil water.
The fact that this is base load electricity means that it will be quite useful to the composites industry, as well as the public at large. Making carbon fiber in quantity requires a significant amount of process energy to be delivered to the fiber manufacturing plant on a 24 hour, 7 day a week basis. Base load geothermal seems like it is a very good answer to this perennial problem and may allow us to completely eliminate petroleum and coal for base load electricity. In addition, now that it has been demonstrated to be economically viable in locations where it was not previously thought to be viable means that we may eventually be able to site a geothermal generation plant very close to where the electricity will be used.
And just think for a minute where this technology came from. It was developed by the oil and gas industry to go after the oil locked up on oil shales fairly deep in the earth’s crust, as well as natural gas pockets that were locked up in rock formations hundreds to thousands of feet deep. The petroleum industry invented what we call fracking several years ago, and interestingly enough, the people that have started these geothermal startups come from the oil and gas business and so have experience in drilling and fracturing rock.
The major hurdle to the general development of deep crust geothermal energy is the fact that the Federal funding for renewable energy still is largely going to hydrogen and nuclear energy. And, as we all know, it takes a long time for this big ship we call the Federal Government to come around to a new way of doing anything. On top of that are the corporate lobbyists in these industries that are in bed with the politicians that vote to spend money on things like this. So, while this is a very promising technology that could solve a lot of our energy supply problems, the industry itself will need to become politically adept in the coming years to get the funding needed to build out this new energy capacity.
I am, however, quite hopeful that this too shall come to pass. It will certainly help the composites industry become a sustainable, circular industry, and it will also help us get away from using petroleum as our base energy source.
That’s about it for this week. I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. As usual I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – as well as on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives.
I also wanted to let everyone know that I have finished the first draft of my second book. This one is about what I have been writing in these newsletters for the last 6 months or so – sustainability of composites and a path to the future that does not include using fossil fuels for either the raw materials or the process energy to make composites. Stay tuned to this space and I will let everyone know about my progress as I try to find a publisher. Hopefully that will not take too long, and there is the possibility that McFarland will pick this one up as well. I sent them a message last Friday, so fingers crossed.
Finally, I still need to plug my first book, so here’s the plug. The book pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available last August, and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon, except that I charge $8 shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here’s a picture of the book.
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