08.26.16
Source: Guardian Web
In a field in Central Texas, Aaron Mandell and his crew are
running pumping equipment to bring a former oil and gas well
back to life. But they’re not trying to extract black gold.
Instead, they are developing a way to turn abandoned oil and gas
wells into vaults for storing electricity.
The concept behind Mandell’s startup, Quidnet Energy, sounds
simple: pumping water deep into the earth to fill up the cracks
in-between rocks that previously held fossil fuels. When the
pressurized water is released, it acts like a spring as it races
through a turbine-generator above ground, powering it to produce
electricity.
Mandell, co-founder and CEO of Quidnet, is part of a growing
number of entrepreneurs in an emerging market to use batteries
or other technologies to bank electricity when prices and demand
are low, and discharge it when they are high. The US market
installed
221 megawatts of energy storage projects in 2015, up from
the 65 megawatts added in 2014, according to GTM Research. The
market research firm expects the annual installation to exceed 1
gigawatt in 2019.
The energy storage market is growing fast primarily because of
the
increasing amount of solar and wind energy being produced
across the country, from rooftop solar panels to acres of wind
turbines. Storing solar and wind energy for later use
circumvents a big disadvantage of these two types of low-carbon
energy: they can’t always produce electricity whenever needed
because demand fluctuates, reaching a peak in the early evening
when people return home and turn on appliances or during hot
summer months.
1/3 Modern day Edison “light bulb” test, but now powered by a
grid storage battery…
pic.twitter.com/OV3DV1bZRl – Aaron Mandell (@AaronMandell)
February 6, 2016
Utilities in states with more renewable energy are starting to
pay for energy storage services or build their own. Just last
week, AES Energy Storage said it will build
two giant lithium-ion battery systems for San Diego Gas and
Electric in California, which is the biggest solar energy state
in the country.
“Our goal is to allow renewables like solar and wind to
penetrate the power market at much larger percentages than we
have today,” Mandell said.
Quidnet recently lined up a new round of venture capital,
bringing the total amount they have raised to just over $1m. The
company previously snagged a seed funding of $500,000 from Clean
Energy Venture Group.
2/3 generator is driven by a hydro-turbine w/high pressure H20
from repeatedly “relaxing” a 2K ft deep rock fracture
pic.twitter.com/on5U60eH48
– Aaron Mandell (@AaronMandell)
February 6, 2016
Quidnet’s other investors include Will and Jada Smith Foundation
and the Sorenson Impact Foundation, both of which invested
through Prime, a nonprofit advising foundations that want to put
money into technology, which isn’t a familiar territory for
philanthropic organizations.
Quidnet’s investors are betting on what they believe will be a
cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries, which have
dominated the energy storage projects in recent years, said
Daniel Goldman, co-founder and managing director at Clean Energy
Venture Group, the Quidnet investor.
“We view Quidnet as solving one of the most important challenges
– enabling renewable resources such as wind and solar to
penetrate the market while accomplishing an important goal of
maintaining grid stability,” Goldman said.
3/3 Decades of O&G technology being applied to the carbon-free
energy grid in the form of underground pumped hydro.
pic.twitter.com/j40Qadj29C
– Aaron Mandell (@AaronMandell)
February 6, 2016
Quidnet plans to build and operate energy storage projects for
power plant owners, utilities and industrial companies. The
company’s technology is similar to a widely used and
cheaper energy storage setup that pumps water from a dam to
an upstream reservoir when electricity prices are low. During
peak times when electricity is more expensive, the water is
drained back down to run through a turbine to generate power.
Instead of an above-ground reservoir, Quidnet stores water
underground. The company launched a pilot project this past year
in Erath County, Texas, to demonstrate the concept. Mandell and
his co-founder Howard Schmidt, an engineer with oil company
Saudi Aramco, used an abandoned natural gas well, which runs
2,800 feet deep, into a reservoir that could hold 50k gallons of
water. The project showed that after pumping water into the well
for 12 hours, their technology could generate six hours of
electricity.
Quidnet’s idea is so unusual that it still needs to overcome
some technical challenges to make it feasible for a well-run,
large scale energy storage operation. “In theory, this idea can
be helpful,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and
environmental engineering at Stanford University and director of
its atmosphere and energy program. “The technology should work
so long as the reservoir does not leak and so long as the
outflow can be controlled and is fast enough.”
Choosing well-sealed underground reservoirs to prevent the
pressurized water from leaking is one of Quidnet’s biggest
concerns. Mandell said the pilot project recorded far lower
water losses than anticipated: 1% of the water per week instead
of per day.
“We were impressed with the team and ‘pumped hydro’ concept
using geologic reservoirs,” said Goldman.
Next, Quidnet plans to run another pilot project, this time at
an old geothermal well in northern Nevada. The well is 14 inches
in diameter, larger than a typical oil and gas well, making it
possible to inject a higher volume of water – and generating
more power faster – at any time. The reservoir can hold up to
85k barrels of water, and produce 10 hours of electricity
following a 14-hour charge.
The new pilot project will store electricity from a
geothermal power
plant in Nevada run by AltaRock Energy, where Mandell is
also CEO. The power plant sells electricity to NV Energy, the
largest utility in Nevada.
Nevada is a good place to be for energy storage service
companies. Nevada, along with other Western states like Oregon
and Idaho, recently joined the
California
Independent System Operator (Caiso), which manages the
wholesale electricity market in the state. As part of the deal,
the member states will receive excess solar energy from
California, which they can store and use to provide
round-the-clock clean electricity, said Mandell.
Ultimately, Quidnet hopes to build its own wells in locations
with a high demand for energy storage. Each of its projects will
operate up to 20 wells, with each well measuring between
1000-5000 feet deep and capable of storing 35 megawatt hours of
energy. The company is also working on software to automating a
storage project’s operation so that a project owner can run it
remotely.
The cost of building each well varies by depth, said Mandell,
and Quidnet aims to build a project at $50 per kilowatt-hour of
energy, a cost that will include the well, turbine generator,
planning and securing permits. What’s not included is the cost
of drilling exploratory wells to identify the proper underground
geology for storing water.
“Fortunately, the oil, gas and geothermal industries have
already done this exploration work for us – there are hundreds
of thousands of wells drilled all over the country that we’ll
use to tell us exactly where to install storage,” he said.
© 2016 Energy Central
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