A geothermal startup Thursday said it had struck gold in Nevada — figuratively speaking. Zanskar, which uses AI to find geothermal resources hidden deep underground, says it has identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The invention, the company claims, is the first of its kind to be made by the industry in decades.
The culmination of years of research into how to find these resources and the growing promise of geothermal energy.
“When we started this company, I think the most common message we heard was that geothermal was dead—it was a history of bones, a graveyard of many failures,” said Carl Hoiland, co-founder of Zanskar. “To get to the point where, thanks to these new tools and these new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically mock them — we just think this is the first full-scale signal that’s become tidal.”
In theory, geothermal energy is one of the simplest methods of generating renewable energy. Underground reservoirs of warm water, heated by the Earth’s core, generate steam that can then be used to power surface turbines, requiring no additional excavation or complex conversion of the fuel. Geothermal resources are particularly accessible in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth’s crust thins, Western US An excellent candidate for a power plant. The world’s largest developed geothermal field, in California, has been built on the site of hot springs that have been used by humans for thousands of years; The first power plant was built there In the early 1920s.
A startup says it has found a hidden
But a big part of the geothermal puzzle is actually finding these resources. It is a rare hot spring or surface vent that leads to a productive site for a power plant. Most geothermal systems that are hot enough to generate electricity are deep underground, and there is no evidence of them on the surface. These are known as hidden or blind systems – and pinpointing where they are is surprisingly challenging. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built on systems that were found accidentally while drilling for agricultural wells, mineral, or oil and gas exploration.
“It’s a needle-and-haystack problem,” said Joel Edwards, Zanskar’s other co-founder. “A very small percentage of the land you look at will have a geothermal system associated with it.”
In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to try to increase the US output of geothermal energy. As part of that effort, they mapped a grid in Nevada to try to systematically drill for blind systems.