Innovative Approach: Geo2Watts Sees Abandoned Oil Wells as Future Energy Assets
Authors: Wright Blake 
Published: August 2024

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Companies would not normally view abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells as assets. Historically, this nonproductive and potentially hazardous infrastructure has been labeled a liability without a uniform set of regulations to address its future—and many times without an identifiable owner to hold responsible for it.

California-based Geo2Watts sees these wells differently. The company wants to repurpose these old producers into thermal energy storage systems capable of electricity generation using two chief ingredients: solar power and sand.

The team is led by co-founder and CEO Phil Cruver, who had previously worked in aquaculture and wind energy generation. Bill Bartling is a co-founder and director of regulatory affairs. He has worked in the tech and oil space, including a stint at Chevron. Ken Murray is co-founder and director of engineering and innovation. He has had a multidimensional career in engineering, research, development, management, and law.

The technology, which the company dubbed the borehole battery, would require new legislation and some permitting, but the company remains bullish on its prospects.

In this Q&A Cruver, Bartling, and Murray share their insights on the technology and their vision for the future.

JPT:

Can you walk us through the technology that allows Geo2Watts to utilize idle and orphaned oil wells for grid installations for thermal storage and electricity production?

Geo2Watts:

This technology is being developed to transform idle oil well assets into long-duration, on-demand, dispatchable zero-emissions electricity generation to be deployed during low-generation/high-demand energy cycles inherent to renewable generation systems.

For oil well conversions we must first distinguish the differences among the wells targeted for our venture: An abandoned oil well has been permanently taken out of production. The well is permanently sealed, plugged, and buried per state, local, and/or federal regulations to prevent the release of oil, gas, or other substances into subsurface water reservoirs and the environment.

An orphaned oil well is one that has not been plugged and sealed and where the last known well operator is no longer in business, deceased, or cannot be located.

Our company is interested in idle wells which in California are defined as a well that has not been used for production, injection, or subsurface data collection for 2 years or more and has not yet been properly plugged and abandoned. Other states and federal definitions for idle wells include wells producing less than 15 BOED. The concept of repurposing, while concurrently plugging these idle and low-producing wells for generating clean electricity, offers the owners a strategic and lucrative opportunity in preparing for their “end of life.”

After the producing zones of the idle oil well are plugged and the remaining casing is demonstrated to be mechanically and structurally sound, it is filled with a thermal storage/harvesting substance such as phase-change materials along with a novel and proprietary heat exchanger to add and extract heat from the converted well. This effectively converts the well into a thermal energy storage (TES) system.