Scientists worldwide are constantly looking for new ways to develop clean energy technology and harness the world around us into a relatively cheap, seemingly infinite power supply. But what if the Earth itself — perhaps the ultimate energy source, second to the sun — could be used as a battery?
This is the basic premise of geothermal engineering, and it is the premise and hypothesis that a new startup, Dig Energy, is attempting to realize. Recently, the company announced that it had secured $5 million in venture funding to pilot its own patented geothermal drilling technology.
"Dig holds potential to finally make geothermal heat pumps — by far the most efficient way to heat and cool buildings — cost-effective to install," said Johanna Wolfson, co-founder and general partner at Azolla Ventures and an investor in Dig, per Interesting Engineering.
Dig's new invention is a purpose-built geothermal drill that swaps traditional carbide bits for high-pressure fluid drilling. By itself, this substitution is expected to drop costs on rigs by up to 80% compared to the current industry standard, and if it works as well as Dig hopes, it could make geothermal heat pumps much more accessible to homes and businesses alike.
"In the United States, geothermal has been 1% of building installations for decades," Dig co-founder and CEO Dulcie Madden recently said, per TechCrunch. "It's really just because the upfront cost is so, so, so expensive."
Of course, Dig is far from the only company innovating in geothermal. Scientists have seen its inherent value for decades, and with energy technology improving by leaps and bounds in recent decades, larger-scale research projects have proliferated, leading to increasing potential breakthroughs. Geothermal has been a success for utility-scale electricity generation, and even the United States Army has been testing out its viability in potentially powering military bases.
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Ultimately, what matters most is that thanks to all of these varied investments in pushing geothermal technology forward, it has become a legitimately viable option in our hopes for a clean energy-dominated future. There is a vision in which pollution is curbed, where we can rely on solar, wind, geothermal, and countless other forms of energy, and human and animal health is vastly improved as a result.
"The heat beneath our feet is abundant, reliable, and always on," Madden said, per Interesting Engineering. "... By making geothermal heating and cooling simple, scalable, and cost competitive with less efficient approaches such as delivered fuels and air source heat pumps, we can deliver true energy independence to buildings everywhere."
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