A faded-red wellhead emerged in the middle of a pockmarked parking lot, its metal bolts and pipes illuminated only by the headlights of Wayne Bezner Kerr’s electric car. He stepped out of the vehicle into the dark, frigid evening to open the fence enclosing the equipment, which is just down the road from Cornell University’s snow-speckled campus in upstate New York.
We were there, shivering outside in mid-November, to talk about heat.
Bezner Kerr is the program manager of Cornell’s Earth Source Heat, an ambitious project to directly warm the sprawling campus with geothermal energy pulled from deep underground. The wellhead was the tip of the iceberg – the visible part of a nearly 10,000-foot-long borehole that slices vertically through layers of rock to reach sufficiently toasty temperatures. Cornell is using data from the site to develop a system that will replace the school’s fossil-gas-based heating network, potentially by 2035.
“We can’t decarbonize without solving the heat problem,” Bezner Kerr repeated like a refrain during my visit to Ithaca.
The Ivy League university is trying to accomplish something that’s never been done in an area with rocky geology like upstate New York’s. Most existing geothermal projects are built near the boundaries of major tectonic plates, where the Earth’s warmth wells up toward the surface. Iceland, for example, is filled with naturally heated reservoirs that circulate by pipe to keep virtually every home in the country cozy. And in Kenya and New Zealand, geothermal aquifers supply the heat used in industrial processes, including for pasteurizing milk and making toilet paper.
Bezner Kerr and I, however, stood atop a multilayered cake of mudstone, limestone, sandstone, and other rocks – seemingly everything but water. To access the heat radiating beneath our feet, his team will need to create artificial reservoirs more than 2 miles into the earth.
America’s geothermal industry has made significant strides in recent years to generate clean energy in less obvious locations, and it’s done so by adapting tools and techniques from oil and gas drilling. One leading startup, Fervo Energy, is developing “enhanced geothermal systems” in Utah and Nevada to produce clean electricity around the clock. The approach involves fracking impermeable rocks, then pumping them full of water so that the rocks heat the liquid, which eventually produces steam to drive electric turbines.
Earth Source Heat plans to use similar methods to drill a handful of super-deep wells and create fractures near or within the crystalline basement rock, where temperatures are consistently around 180 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter the weather above. The project is also unique in that, among next-generation systems, it’s focused only on heating buildings – not supplying electricity – for the nearly 30,000 students and faculty. That’s because heat represents the biggest source of Cornell’s energy use, and its largest obstacle to reducing planet-warming emissions.
On the chilliest days, the campus can use up to 104 megawatts of thermal energy, which is more than triple its peak use of electrical energy during the year.
Such a ratio poses a big conundrum for not only large institutions like Cornell but also any cold-climate cities that burn fossil fuels to keep warm, as well as manufacturing plants that require lots of steam and hot water for steps as varied as fermenting beer, making oat milk, and sterilizing equipment.
Right now, one of the most immediate ways to cut emissions from thermal energy use is to replace gas-fired boilers and the like with heat pumps and other electrified technologies. But that can substantially increase a city’s or factory’s electricity use. In an ideal world, all the new power demand would be satisfied by renewable energy projects and served by a modern and efficient grid, helping limit the costs and logistical headaches of ditching fossil fuels.
In reality, though, the U.S. electricity system is straining to keep up with the emergence of data centers, new factories, and electrified buildings and vehicles. Utilities are pushing plans to build new gas-fired power plants and proposing higher electricity rates to cover the costs. New York, for its part, is failing to meet its own goals for installing gigawatts of new renewables and energy storage projects by 2030, in part because of barriers to permitting projects in the state. New York’s independent grid operator recently warned of “profound reliability challenges” in coming years as rapidly growing demand threatens to outpace supply.
Geothermal heating could provide a way to curb thermal-energy emissions without burdening the electric system even more, said Drew Nelson, vice president of programs, policy, and strategy with Project InnerSpace, a nonprofit that advocates for geothermal energy use.
“Electrification is great, but that’s a whole lot of new electrons that need to be brought onto the grid, and a whole lot of new transmission and distribution upgrades that need to be made,” Nelson said by phone. “For applications like industrial heat, or building heating and cooling, geothermal almost becomes a ‘Swiss Army knife,’ in that it can help reduce demand.” Using geothermal energy directly is also far more efficient than converting it to electricity, since a lot of energy gets lost in the process of generating electrons.
Still, deep, direct-use geothermal systems like the one Cornell is developing are relatively novel, and many manufacturers and city planners are either unfamiliar with the solution or unwilling to be early adopters.
Sarah Carson, the director of Cornell’s Campus Sustainability Office, explained that Earth Source Heat is intended to reduce technology risks and costs for other major heat users that might benefit from geothermal, including the region’s dairy producers and breweries. We spoke inside her office, which is attached to the 30-megawatt gas-fired cogeneration plant that currently provides both electricity and heating for the campus.
“We’re working really hard to build a ‘living lab’ approach into the ethos of how we approach things,” she said. “Can we not only take care of our own carbon footprint but also help develop and demonstrate solutions that could scale out?”
