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| Pictured from left to right: Jaret Heise, Doug Blankenship, Albert Eiffes, Mike Headley, David Vardiman, Bill Roggenthen, Tim Unruh, Tim Kneafsey, Sue Hamm, and Lauren Boyd. |
In February Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) Staff Scientist Tim Kneafsey helped escort leadership from the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) on a journey 4,850 feet below the ground. They toured Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an old South Dakota gold mine turned testing ground for studying how the process of extracting heat from rocks deep in the Earth’s subsurface can be enhanced to open up access to clean energy.
The United States derives 80 percent of its energy from the Earth’s subsurface. With $9 million in DOE funding each year over three years, Berkeley National Lab leads a collaboration of seven other national labs and six universities exploring the potential to improve enhanced geothermal systems technologies. The Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Collab Project team hopes to help remove barriers that stand in the way of commercializing enhanced geothermal systems.
Field experiments conducted at SURF by the collaboration are focused on improving the understanding and modeling of rock fractures in these geothermal environments. With better information about how rocks behave in the Earth’s subsurface, EGS technologies stand a better chance of fulfilling their potential to provide enough energy to power 100 million American homes.