How to Bring a Geothermal Well Back from the Dead

Geothermal company Zanskar bought a power plant in New Mexico in 2024 that appears to be failing. The shallow wells were heating up quickly, and the building had trouble generating energy as a result.

Now, after drilling a new well and running electricity for a year, Zanskar says it has changed dramatically. The Lightning Dock facility, according to the company’s statistics shared with WIRED, has become one of the best air-conditioning facilities in the US, providing enough heat to run electricity without problems.

Last year’s findings at the Lightning Dock site “change the way people think about these kinds of systems that we thought we understood before,” says Zanskar co-founder Joel Edwards.

It’s the latest news of the gospel for the underserved geothermal industrywhich is experiencing a resurgence of investment. Drilling technology and artificial intelligence – along with a bit of luck – played a huge role. And while not all traditional wells will have the same conditions as Zanskar did at Lightning Dock, the company says its success is a wake-up call that old well sites need to be re-examined.

Natural geothermal energy relies on boiling hot water in the earth to generate electricity by pumping it to the surface and spinning turbines. In theory, it’s the best way to generate renewable energy: People have always used steam from hot springs. a thousand years. But geographic constraints — power plants must be located on land reserves, which are abundant in the western US — and the complexity and cost involved in finding new wells mean that geothermal energy is produced. less than 1 percent electricity mix in the US.

Courtesy of Zanskar

Another problem for the industry is that many wells begin to slowly decline in production. But the loss at Lightning Dock was much higher, losing 10 times more heat each year than the average well, Zanskar says. When the company bought the site, the temperature in the original wells, which were 2,500 feet deep, was to cool from 50 degrees Fahrenheit to 250 degrees Fahrenheit by 2024. The 15-megawatt power plant, which supplies electricity to the largest utility in New Mexico, was designed to operate at 30 degrees F.

Although the most common wells go below 3,000 to 5,000 feet, drilling deeper wells can tap into hot water reservoirs for energy use. But building hard rock underground makes drilling difficult—and expensive. Whether or not to dig deeper is “an economic issue,” says Roland Horne, director of Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy. The cost, Horne says, is not the same: “If you drill twice as deep, the cost quadruples.”

To help make better bets on drilling, Zanskar uses artificial intelligence to identify what are known as hidden machines, that is, areas that have a strong thermal energy but are not fully aware of their potential on the surface. The company used the technology last year find in Nevadaand it is said that this simulation also helped to determine the best place to drill at the Lightning Dock site. It combined these models with drilling technology refined by the oil and gas industry, enabling it to drill wells 35 percent faster at what Zanskar says is a “competitive price.” (The company didn’t provide specifics.) The new 8,000-foot well has been in operation for a year, with the same high temperature as before the reduction.