Canada's western provinces sit above vast geothermal resources that have powered oil drilling for a century — and now those same formations are being tapped for clean electricity.
Alberta and British Columbia are oil and gas country. The drilling expertise, the infrastructure, the geological knowledge, and the engineering workforce that built Canada's petroleum industry over a century are concentrated in these two provinces. What is less widely known is that the same geological formations that contain oil and gas also contain enormous quantities of geothermal heat — and the oil industry's own data and infrastructure make accessing that heat dramatically cheaper than starting from scratch.
The Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, which underlies much of Alberta, contains hot saline aquifers at depths accessible with existing drilling technology. Temperatures at 3 to 5 kilometers depth range from 100°C to over 200°C — sufficient for direct electricity generation using binary cycle geothermal technology. Abandoned oil and gas wells — of which there are hundreds of thousands in Alberta alone — can in many cases be repurposed as geothermal production wells, eliminating the single largest cost in geothermal development.
Epoch Energy and Eavor Technologies are leading Canada's geothermal frontier. Eavor's closed-loop geothermal system — a fundamentally different approach that circulates fluid through a sealed underground radiator rather than an open hydrothermal system — has attracted investment from BP, Chevron, and major European utilities. Its first commercial project is operating in Germany, with Canadian projects in development.
Canada spent a century drilling for fossil energy. The same holes may heat the next century cleanly.
Source: Canada Energy Regulator & Eavor Technologies, 2024
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