California has a stated goal of making its energy production carbon neutral by 2045 — but in order to accomplish that goal, it will need to ramp up both its clean energy production and its clean energy storage capacity.
Now, efforts to turn an oil field into a geological thermal energy storage facility could be a big step in the right direction, YaleEnvironment360 reported.
Kern County has long relied on its oil fields for jobs. Now, with dirty, polluting energy sources like oil going out of fashion, the county is looking to turn toward clean energy production and storage instead.
Aiding in those efforts are the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and a private investment group, which are attempting to retrofit depleted oil wells so that they can store solar energy in super-heated groundwater. The project, called GeoTES, is being referred to as "the world's first attempt to store solar energy in a natural geologic reservoir," according to YaleEnvironment360.
Unlike more common battery storage solutions, which use lithium-ion batteries that rely on rare metals mined at great environmental cost, GeoTES would take a much more sustainable approach, using the same geothermal principles used in heat pumps to store enough solar energy to power hundreds of thousands of homes.
"We are looking to find the battery, not build it," said Guangdong Zhu, the senior researcher overseeing the project.
Similar projects attempting to use former oil wells as geothermal energy storage are also underway elsewhere — such as in the Illinois Basin. Other former dirty energy facilities that are being transformed into clean energy projects include several coal plants that have been converted into clean energy storage.
Projects like these show that powering our homes and businesses with clean energy is viable. Also, the rise of these new, less polluting energy sources does not have to come with the loss of jobs for those formerly employed in dirty energy. All of these projects use the expertise of former oil and coal workers and create more jobs as they scale up.
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