Building a ‘digital twin’ 10,000 meters underground: PNNL, Nvidia and Fervo team up on Geothermal AI
The idea is very simple: productive energy from heat trapped beneath the earth’s crust. It is clean, renewable and has a lot of energy. The challenge is how to map what lies beneath – and tap it effectively.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is partnering with chip maker Nvidia and Fervo Energy, a leading geothermal company, to create a publicly available digital twin that will create physical models of thermal reservoirs to improve electricity generation.
Geothermal energy is generated by drilling wells that push cold water up to 10,000 feet underground – for comparison, Seattle’s Point Needle is 605 feet long. Water flows through a network of underground fractures, which can be expanded and connected by high-pressure injections. Expanding those fractures allows the water to reach higher temperatures before returning to the surface, where it produces steam that spins the turbines. Underground rock at that depth can reach 555 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Plant operators must answer questions like ‘How many monitoring wells do we need to program? How do we design those wells? How much water should we put in?'” Maruti Mudunuru, an Earth scientist at PNNL and the project’s principal investigator, said in a statement.
Current models are too slow to provide meaningful information and guide operators repairing wells, reservoirs or pipelines in real time. That delay, added Mdunuru, “could lead to less implementation.”
PNNL researchers will train AI models; Nvidia will provide technical expertise and data center infrastructure for the virtual twin; and Fervo provides proprietary data from its geothermal sites in Nevada and Utah.
Geothermal is seen as a promising and growing source of clean energy that is attracting investors and energy-hungry technology companies. Earlier this month, Endurance Energy, a Seattle-based startup looking to extract energy from under the sea, announced a $54 million funding round.
Fervo launched its commercial pilot for Nevada, Project Red, in 2023, providing 3 megawatts to the grid that serves some of Google’s data centers. The company is now building its Cape Station facility in Beaver County, Utah, which is expected to start delivering electricity to the grid later this year and will eventually generate 500 megawatts – enough to power a small town.
Fervo’s design captures the steam in a closed-loop system that returns it underground. The company raised $2.17 billion in its public offering last month, according to PitchBook.
The AI models produced by the project will be included in Nvidia’s Omniverse libraries. The final product – named the Enhance Geothermal System Twin, or EGS Twin – should be completed by 2029. Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy.
