Down on the south end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, oil rigs have plumbed the earth like flocks of blackened drinking birds for more than a century.
Down on the south end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, oil rigs have plumbed the earth like flocks of blackened drinking birds for more than a century. Now, they’re fast becoming vestiges of a bygone era. Kern County still produces nearly three-quarters of the state’s oil and gas, but California’s push to decarbonize its energy grid is putting these rigs and the people who operate them out of work. Their disappearance might come as a death knell to the communities that have long depended on bringing energy up to the surface; but now, those same oilfields could offer new life by sending energy back underground.
Ample sunlight and tens of thousands of abandoned oil wells and experienced oilfield workers have made Kern County the focus of a new battery-storage technology. The plan is to retrofit depleted oil wells to store concentrated solar energy in super-heated groundwater for long periods of time, then use that heat to drive turbines when energy demand rises. If it works as planned, the project — which is being run by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and a private investment group and has been dubbed GeoTES, for geological thermal energy storage — has the potential to overcome some of the renewable energy transition’s greatest hurdles.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: simon94 via Pixabay
