Mazama Energy has reported that its pilot enhanced geothermal project in Newberry, Oregon has reached a “bottomhole” temperature of 629° F, which it says is a world record high temperature.
The higher temperature “marks a critical step” toward delivering round-the-clock energy “at terawatt scale, targeting less than 5¢/kWh,” the company said in a statement.
Mazama Energy CEO Sriram Vasantharajan said “Our team’s accomplishments expand the frontiers of geothermal power into significantly hotter and more heterogeneous rock regimes than ever before.”
The company plans to develop a 15 MW commercial pilot project next year and then scale to a 200 MW project at the Newberry site.
Mazama said it will develop the projects using its proprietary high-temperature materials and cooling solutions.
As illustrated in the Mazama Energy image at right, enhanced geothermal projects typically use a hydraulic fracturing technique developed for oil and gas production to fracture the hot layer of rock below the earth’s surface. An injection well delivers water to the fractured rock, where the water is heated, and a production well delivers heated water to the surface to generate electricity.
To fracture the rocks, Mazama used a patented rock stimulation process that it said builds on conventional hydraulic fracturing, enabling “complex fracture creation and improved connectivity.”
“Harnessing super-hot rock resources will allow Mazama to extract 10x more power density, use 75% less water and drill 80% fewer wells than current approaches,” the company said in a statement.
Competition
Geothermal developer Fervo Energy, which announced its first full-scale commercial pilot project in 2023, is now developing 20 GW of projects and has secured power purchase agreements for 660 MW of those projects, the company reported in June.
A journal article by three researchers and three enhanced geothermal industry participants published in January projected that enhanced geothermal projects could reach hundreds of megawatts in size and could be deployed at “many more places” than conventional geothermal technology, as technological advances lead to near-term cost competitiveness.
Mazama Energy was incubated by Khosla Ventures and backed by Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier.
The Newberry geothermal reservoir is one of the largest such reservoirs in the U.S., the company said. The Newberry pilot project was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy.
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