Eden Awarded $3.8M from DOE’s ARPA-E for Geothermal Stimulation Technology
Eden GeoPower Inc. (Eden) has been selected to receive $3.79 million in federal funding from the US Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E). This funding will be directed towards their “Electro-Hydraulic Fracturing of Enhanced Geothermal Systems” project. In addition to this funding, the company will receive support from world-class researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Eden was founded with the intention of developing scalable, sustainable extraction of Earth’s geothermal heat and natural resources. To meet these goals, the company is developing a first-of-its-kind Electrical Reservoir Stimulation technology which offers a safer, more effective, and more efficient method of recovering these natural resources. Once developed and implemented, this has implications for a carbon-free future.
Their Electro-Hydraulic Fracturing of Enhanced Geothermal Systems aims to make a novel electromagnetic reservoir stimulation technology. This stimulation will increase the subsurface permeability in Enhanced Geothermal Systems, allowing fracturing and natural resource extraction with reduced environmental impacts. Traditional hydraulic fracturing techniques create extreme pressure and temperature conditions within the fractured hole and limit the stimulation of geothermal reservoirs.
“We are developing a radically different approach to reservoir stimulation, which utilizes high-voltage electricity as the main mechanism to increase reservoir permeability. This technology complements recent innovations in geothermal reservoir drilling, since drilled wells will need to be successfully stimulated to achieve maximum net power output per well,” described Eden Co-founder and CEO Paris Smalls.
Since its founding in 2009, ARPA-E has provided $2.93 billion in R&D funding, and ARPA-E projects have attracted more than $7.6 billion in private sector follow-on funding to commercialize clean energy technologies and create sustainable clean energy jobs. In 2019, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) received funding under the ARPA-E awards for the development of a revolutionary high-rate drilling system using electric pulses to drill high-temperature geothermal wells.
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