Pipe turning in a pool of lamplight, mud flinging off the joint in a thin fan.<\/p>\n
Pine forest beyond the derrick legs, and under the decking about two miles of rock.<\/p>\n
The operator announced what came out of that hole on the first of September, 2026, and sixteen days later announced something else<\/strong>.<\/p>\n One announcement was about speed. The other was about money.<\/p>\n Neither was about power, because none has been made here.<\/p>\n Which raises the question underneath all of it. What is down there<\/strong> that is worth this?<\/p>\n Ordinary geothermal is a steam business. You find hot water, you flash it, you spin a turbine.<\/p>\n Push past about 705 degrees Fahrenheit and water stops being either liquid or steam. It crosses its critical point and becomes a single dense phase that flows like a gas and carries heat like a liquid.<\/p>\n That matters because a turbine is paid in energy per pound of fluid, not in gallons. Supercritical water arrives carrying far more of it<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The operator puts the arithmetic plainly. A well at 750 degrees delivers up to ten times the power of a conventional well at 390.<\/p>\n Ten times the power from one hole is the whole argument, because the hole is what costs money. Fewer wells, less water, a smaller pad.<\/p>\n Which is why everything here points at one number<\/strong>, and that number is temperature.<\/p>\n Newberry is a broad shield volcano southeast of Bend, with a caldera holding two lakes and an obsidian flow that is roughly 1,300 years old.<\/p>\n It is not an exotic pick. The federal survey has long documented hot springs in the caldera and high temperatures in earlier exploration holes, so the heat here is measured rather than inferred<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The first well went down in 2025 and reached a bottomhole temperature of 629 degrees, which the company holds as the record for an engineered system.<\/p>\n The second well, drilled this year, is the one in the headlines. It is heading for a planned total depth of 15,500 feet.<\/p>\n Where it expects to find rock above 750 degrees.<\/p>\n That is the target, and it has not been reached<\/strong>.<\/p>\n The drilling figures are specific, and they come from the operator rather than from an outside auditor.<\/p>\n The well passed 10,350 feet in 15 drilling days, which the company puts at roughly 80 percent less time than its first well needed for the same depth.<\/p>\n One bit cut 3,578 feet of that without coming out of the hole, and it only came out because the casing point arrived. Instantaneous penetration ran above 350 feet an hour, with sustained rates above 130 across long intervals.<\/p>\n No downhole motor failed. No directional tool failed.<\/p>\n That last part is the real claim<\/strong>, because trips to surface are where the days go, and steering electronics are what heat kills first.<\/p>\n Drilling days also means days cutting rock<\/strong>, not calendar days including casing and repairs.<\/p>\n On the seventeenth of September the company closed an oversubscribed round of 135 million dollars.<\/p>\n Two oil majors put venture money in alongside the funds that backed the earlier rounds, in the way that a drilling record<\/a> or a tank test<\/a> hardens into a finished product<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Here is what that money has not bought yet. The system has circulated fluid through engineered rock and has generated no electricity, and the funding announcement<\/a> puts the power demonstration in 2027.<\/p>\n The resource figure needs the same care. More than 10 gigawatts at Newberry is a number the company is seeking independent certification for, which means it is a target and not a certified reserve.<\/p>\n Costs are quoted at 4,500 to 4,950 dollars per kilowatt early on, with a path to 3,200, and the trade report<\/a> carries the drilling detail behind it.<\/p>\n Every one of those is a forward number<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Fast drilling is a real result and it is the right thing to be excited about.<\/p>\n It is also the easiest part of this to measure. A bit either makes hole or it does not, and the log settles it the same day.<\/p>\n What no log settles is whether rock that hot will keep a fracture network open and keep producing for years, which is the question that has ended other enhanced geothermal projects.<\/p>\n Newberry had an unusual head start, because decades of exploration had already sampled the gradient. Drop the same method into unmapped rock and the gain may not repeat.<\/p>\n So the honest summary is narrow and still worth having.<\/p>\n Somebody made a very hot hole very quickly, and whether it becomes a working geothermal system<\/strong> is a 2027 question<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Pipe turning in a pool of lamplight, mud flinging off the joint in a thin fan. Pine forest beyond the derrick legs, and under the decking about two miles of rock. The operator announced what came out of that hole on the first of September, 2026, and sixteen days later announced something else. One announcement was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":44228,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"oregon volcano reached","rank_math_title":"A hole on an Oregon volcano reached 629 degrees and became the hottest engineered geothermal system on record, but it drew 135 million dollars before producing a single watt of electricity","rank_math_description":"A new drill bit technique cut geothermal well drilling time by 80 percent near Oregon's Newberry Volcano, reaching 10,350 feet in just 15 days.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44225"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44601,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44225\/revisions\/44601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why 705 degrees changes what water is<\/h2>\n
2 wells on a shield volcano in central Oregon<\/h2>\n
10,350 feet in 15 days and 1 bit<\/h2>\n
135 million dollars and 0 watts<\/h2>\n
What the drilling log cannot tell you<\/h2>\n