Texas romance comes to life at the drilling site in the Kammerforst, thirty kilometers north of Karlsruhe and on the doorstep of the small town of Graben-Neudorf.
A 38 meter high derrick, a muddy site road, drill bits with artificial diamonds, hundreds of casings painted red and green to line the borehole are all stored at the site.
In the forest, workers, mining engineers and geologists are drilling three kilometers deep into the ground.
In just three years, a deep geothermal power plant is to produce electricity and heat for the district heating network.
The heat could be enough for around 15,000 households.
Timo Frasch
Political correspondent in Munich.
Follow I follow
Ruediger Soldt
Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.
Follow I follow
For a long time, deep geothermal energy was overshadowed by wind, sun, biogas and hydrogen – the other renewable energy sources.
The impending gas emergency and the sluggish expansion of wind energy have now drawn more attention to the hot springs in the ground.
The share of electricity produced with geothermal energy in Germany is currently less than one percent: 350 gigawatt hours per year.
If “Deutsche Erdwärme”, a company from Karlsruhe that was only founded in 2015, and most politicians have their way, there could be up to fifty geothermal power plants in the Upper Rhine Graben between Frankfurt and Basel in the next twenty years.
About twenty locations are currently being drilled or constructed.
The advantage of deep geothermal energy compared to surface geothermal energy is:
The hot thermal water in the Upper Rhine Graben could have a total potential of more than 100 terawatt hours per year.
The conditions for "hydrothermal geothermal energy", i.e. the generation of energy from hot water, are only as good as in the Upper Rhine Graben in the Bavarian Molasse Basin.
According to a calculation by the Fraunhofer Institute, 300 terawatt hours of heat could be obtained from geothermal heat in Germany per year, which would be a quarter of the total heat requirement in Germany and a significant contribution to decarbonization and the reduction of CO2 emissions.
If the geothermal potential on the Upper Rhine were fully exploited with fifty systems, around 16,000 gigawatts of heat could be fed into the grid every year.
At 150 degrees you can easily generate electricity
Compared to a nuclear power plant, however, the performance of geothermal plants is rather low: an average nuclear power plant produces 8000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, a modern geothermal plant like the one planned near Graben-Neudorf could feed 320 gigawatt hours into the district heating network and 48 gigawatt hours into the electricity network.
From the point of view of the Fraunhofer researchers, the political support for geothermal energy is still too low: the economic risks are still too great, Germany is "geothermally underexplored".
There is still a lot to explore.
If you take into account, the researchers' report says, that up to a hundred deep drillings are necessary to mobilize one gigawatt of thermal power, then federal funding must be increased to at least 60 billion euros.