Eavor is excited to welcome Stephan Hannke of OMV to our Board of Directors. Stephan Hannke is a Senior Advisor with OMV, a global oil, gas and chemicals group with headquarters in Vienna, Austria. Stephan works in the Low Carbon Business area of the Energy division, and together with his team, they are leading business growth in geothermal closed-loop technology (EAVOR) in selected European countries. His goal is to support the decarbonization of cities and industry, through identifying, enabling and delivering clean heat production using EAVOR geothermal closed-loop technology.

GA Drilling mentioned Eavor as one of Canada’s leading Advanced Geothermal Systems (AGS) in a LinkedIn article. The article dives into the methods and schematics of how AGS closed loop systems works, which is the technology that Eavor uses. The process begins by drilling vertical wells several thousand feet into the ground. The wells are then deviated horizontally into multilaterals. A working fluid is then introduced into the injection well, where the liquid can then absorb heat from the rock via conduction. This hot liquid then rises up the outlet well to the facility. The hot liquid is then passed through a heat exchanger, transferred to a secondary fluid, which is then vaporized to spin a turbine and generate electricity. Alternatively, the produced heat from the system can be used for heating applications.

The newly launched TRANSGEO project aims to investigate abandoned oil and gas wells in central Europe and how they can be utilized for extracting geothermal energy. The project was co-funded by the European Commission and the Interreg Central Europe Programme. With a budget of €2.61 million (80 percent funded by the European Regional Development Fund), the project has partners in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia. The coordinator for this project is Hannes Hofmann, the head of the Helmholtz Young Investigators Group “Advanced Reservoir Engineering Concepts (ARES)” at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.

Eavor has been featured in INNOVATE™ Alberta, with Eavor-Loop™ being showcased as ground-breaking technology that is set to revolutionize the clean energy industry. The piece articulates that geothermal energy is at “a moment of reckoning,” and that Eavor is at the forefront of this transition because it harnesses energy from the largest clean energy resource we have: the Earth itself. In other words, Eavor extracts heat directly from hot rock, which is heated continuously by the Earth’s core. The Eavor-Loop™, conceived by co-founder Paul Cairns and helmed by CEO John Redfern, overcomes traditional geothermal constraints through its innovative closed-loop system. As indicated by Eavor Chief Technology Officer Matt Toews, such a configuration would “not only eliminate the parasitic pump load but would, in fact, pump itself due to the thermosiphon effect.”

Eavor’s closed-loop systems have recently been featured in a BloombergNEF article about the exponential momentum that geothermal energy is gaining worldwide. According to the article, utility-scale commercial projects are increasingly adopting next-generation geothermal technologies, and countries around the globe are embracing this renewable energy source to achieve their net-zero targets. BloombergNEF stated that the allure of next-generation geothermal energy lies in its ability to tap into previously untapped resources. By leveraging advanced technologies, these projects can harness geothermal energy in areas where traditional methods were not viable.

In a recent article published by Spectra, editor and journalist Ewan Thompson describes how Eavor is unlocking vast potential for geothermal energy in Bavaria. The article highlighted how Geretsried will soon be able to harness heat from deep within the earth to provide its population with reliable baseload energy. A closed-loop system will be able to achieve this because it bypasses the need to search for hot underground aquifers, which costs millions of dollars without the guarantee of discovery. Rather than investing time and money into locating an aquifer, all an Eavor-Loop™ needs is access to hot rock, which is anywhere on the planet. Drilling approximately 4.5 kilometres deep, Eavor will network 260 kilometres of wellbore into a closed-loop system that will act as a reverse radiator, extracting heat from bedrock and circulating it up to the power plant.