Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Logo
Menu
  • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Organizational Charts
    • Virtual Tours
    • EESA Strategic Vision
  • Our People
    • A-Z People
    • Alumni Network
    • Area Offices
    • Committees
    • Directors
    • IDEA Working Group
    • Paul A. Witherspoon
    • Postdocs & Early Careers
    • Search by Expertise
  • Careers & Opportunities
    • Careers
    • Intern Pilot w/CSUEB
    • Mentorship Program
    • Recognition & Funding Opps
    • EESA Mini Grants
    • S&E Metrics for Performance and Promotion
    • Student Opportunities
    • Supervisor EnRichment (SupER) Program
    • Promotion Metrics (Scientific)
  • Research
    • Area-Wide Program Domain
      • Earth AI & Data
    • Our Divisions
    • Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division
      • Environmental & Biological Systems Science
        • Programs
        • Environmental Remediation & Water Resources
        • Ecosystems Biology Program
        • Bioenergy
      • Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
        • Atmospheric System Research
        • Terrestrial Ecosystem Science
      • Climate & Atmosphere Processes
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
        • Atmospheric System Research
      • Earth Systems & Society
        • Programs
        • Climate Modeling
    • Energy Geosciences Division
      • Discovery Geosciences
        • Programs
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Geophysics
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Geochemistry
        • Basic Energy Sciences (BES) Isotope
      • Energy Resources and Carbon Management
        • Programs
        • Carbon Removal & Mineralization Program
        • Carbon Storage Program
        • Geothermal Systems
        • Hydrocarbon Science
        • Nuclear Energy & Waste
      • Resilient Energy, Water & Infrastructure
        • Programs
        • Water-Energy
        • Critical Infrastructure
        • Environmental Resilience
        • Grid-Scale Subsurface Energy Storage
        • National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI)
    • Projects
    • Research at a Glance
    • Publication Lists
    • Centers and Resources
    • Technologies & National User Programs
  • Departments
    • Climate Sciences
    • Ecology
    • Geochemistry
    • Geophysics
    • Hydrogeology
    • Operations
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
    • Earth & Environment Newsletter
  • Intranet
  • Safety
    • EESA Safety
  • FoW
  • Search

  • all
  • people
  • events
  • posts
  • pages
  • projects
  • publications

Berkeley Lab Scientists Go Deep Underground to Study Rock Fractures in Geothermal Environments4 min read

by Christina Procopiou on March 5, 2018

Energy Geosciences Division Energy Resources Program Area Energy Resources Program Domain GC-Sustainable Earth Geothermal Systems

Research scientists from Berkeley and Sandia National Labs and the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology led a group of DOE leaders on a tour of SURF, an underground observatory for studying geothermal energy extraction strategies. 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 EESA Staff Scientist Tim Kneafsey helped escort leadership from the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 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 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.

Geothermal energy requires hot rock, fluids, and permeability — or the ability for fluids to flow through rock. In enhanced geothermal systems, heat acquired from water circulating in rock fractures deep in the subsurface is extracted and converted to electricity. Enhanced geothermal systems rely on creating permeability, adding supplemental fluids, or both, according to Kneafsey, who says, “Enhanced geothermal systems enable access to far more geothermal energy than there would be otherwise.”

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.

At SURF, the visiting DOE leadership toured the facility and laboratories and learned about the work underway there through presentations about SURF and the EGS Collab Project. Kneafsey and his co-principal investigator Doug Blankenship of Sandia National Laboratories and Professor Bill Roggenthen of South Dakota School of Mines and Technology described part of what it takes to add permeability to rock a mile or more underground.

Currently in year one of a three-year project, the study team is tasked with improving modeling tools by providing data from carefully stimulating, monitoring, and characterizing flow paths through subsurface rock to support the development of improved strategies for extracting heat from the Earth’s subsurface. Their work to date has focused on designing and building the field test site at SURF and instrumenting test beds there with tools needed to monitor and characterize their hydraulic fracturing and flow experiments. They needed a facility adequate in size and structure to conduct experiments that involve injecting small amounts of water into the rock at very high pressures until the rock fractures.

“We have been operating from a tunnel to drill eight boreholes into the rock. Each is about 60 meters long. From here, we will be injecting fluid into one of the holes and stimulating — or breaking — the rock,” says Kneafsey. The other holes will be used for monitoring or producing the injected water.

The boreholes for monitoring will include instruments to quantify microseismic activity, electrical resistivity tomography, temperature, and strain — or how pieces of rock move in response to stimulation. Using a tool developed at Berkeley Lab called SIMFIP (Step-Rate Injection Method for Fracture In-Situ Properties), they can examine what happens to the openings of fractures created by stimulation when pressure is applied.

“The tool monitors how two adjacent pieces of rock move in relation to one another. When you stimulate rock, you have to create or open a fracture,” says Kneafsey. “In an ideal world, you would like to shear the rock pieces relative to one another without creating too large a gap between them. The goal is to create just the right amount of space through which water can flow.”

Berkeley Lab scientists working to explore energy technologies underground understand that the Earth’s subsurface will remain part of the country’s energy strategy for decades to come. They are hopeful that by helping identify ways to enhance the permeability of rock via tunnels and caverns, they can ultimately help transform access to clean energy.

News & Events

EESA Scientists Investigate How Tropical Soil Microbes Might Respond to Future Droughts2 min read

March 14, 2023

As the most biologically diverse terrestrial ecosystems on Earth, tropical rainforests are just as critical to sustaining environmental and human systems as they are beautiful. Their unique climate with high temperatures, humidity, and precipitation promotes high primary productivity, which offsets high respiration, resulting in these ecosystems being one of the largest carbon sinks on Earth,…

Doubling Protected Lands for Biodiversity Could Require Tradeoffs With Other Land Uses, Study Finds4 min read

March 3, 2023

This article first appeared on lbl.gov. Scientists show how 30% protected land targets may not safeguard biodiversity hotspots and may negatively affect other sectors – and how data and analysis can support effective conservation and land use planning Although more than half the world’s countries have committed to protecting at least 30% of land and oceans…

Six Berkeley Lab Scientists Named AAAS Fellows6 min read

This article first appeared at lbl.gov Six researchers have been elected into the 2022 class of the American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has announced their 2022 Fellows, including six scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). This lifetime honor, which follows…

Kenichi Soga named to National Academy of Engineers1 min read

February 23, 2023

Faculty scientist Kenichi Soga was named to the National Academy of Engineering (NA), one of the highest honors that can be achieved as an American engineer. Soga is the Donald H. McLaughlin Chair in Mineral Engineering and a Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and has conducted groundbreaking research from infrastructure sensing to…

  • Our People
    • Area Offices
    • Committees
    • Directors
    • Organizational Charts
    • Postdocs
    • Staff Only
    • Search by Expertise
  • Departments
    • Climate Sciences
    • Ecology
    • Geochemistry
    • Geophysics
    • Hydrogeology
  • Research
    • Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division
    • Energy Geosciences Division
    • Program Domains
      • Programs
    • Projects
  • Contact
    • 510 486 6455
    • eesawebmaster@lbl.gov
    • Our Identity

Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo DOE Earth and Environmental Sciences Area Logo UC

A U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratory Managed by the University of California

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory · Earth and Environmental Sciences Area · Privacy & Security Notice