Geothermal startup said Thursday that he had struck gold in Nevada — metaphorically speaking. Zanskar, which uses artificial intelligence to find hidden geothermal resources deep underground, says it has identified a fresh, commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The discovery, the company says, is the first of its kind in the industry in decades.
The discovery is the culmination of many years of research into finding these resources and indicates growing hopes for geothermal energy.
“I think when we started this company, the most common message we heard was that geothermal energy is dead – it’s a history of bones, a graveyard of many failures,” says Carl Hoiland, co-founder of Zanskar. “To get to the point where, with these new tools and new capabilities, you can systematically find these sites and systematically mock them, we just think this is the first full-blown sign that the tide has turned.”
In theory, geothermal energy is one of the simplest methods of producing renewable energy. Underground reservoirs of scorching water, heated by the Earth’s core, produce steam that can then be used to power turbines on the surface, without the need for excessive extraction or complicated fuel conversion. Geothermal resources are especially available in areas where tectonic plates meet and the Earth’s crust is thinner, causing: western United States an excellent candidate for power plants. The world’s largest developed geothermal field in California was built on the site of scorching springs that humans have used for thousands of years. the first power plant was built there early 1920s.
But a massive part of the geothermal puzzle is finding these resources. It is scarce to find surface scorching springs or vents leading to a productive site for a power plant. Most geothermal systems that are scorching enough to generate electricity are located deep underground and have no evidence at the surface. These are called hidden or blind systems, and pinpointing their location is surprisingly hard. As a result, many geothermal power plants are built on systems that were found accidentally during drilling for agricultural wells, minerals, or oil and gas exploration.
“It’s a bit of a needle and a haystack problem,” says Joel Edwards, Zanskar’s other co-founder. “A very small percentage of the land you will see will be associated with a geothermal system.”
In the 1970s, during the oil crisis, the federal government decided to try to escalate geothermal energy production in the US. As part of this effort, they mapped the network in Nevada to try to methodically drill for blind systems.