Henry Wismayer in Noema:
On a tawny hillside in central Tuscany, in a compound just 20 miles west of Siena’s medieval piazzas, Francesco Cannata was drilling for energy. Looming behind him was a red and white derrick, 80 feet tall, surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery. For three months, Cannata and his team had been at work sinking a diamond drill bit through the carbonates and dolomites of the Tuscan continental crust.
Once they reached a point around a mile deep, they planned to augment the borehole with lengths of metal casing. By February, they’d stopper its narrow surface aperture with a configuration of valves connected to an insulated pipe, the latest strand in a spaghetti of carbonized steel tubes that snaked for miles through forests and over hill passes toward a turbine hall at Valle Secolo.
To my eye, the whole operation looked like a drilling rig for oil or gas. Across the horizon, flanking the junction points where the pipes converged, I could see voluminous chimneys, structures that seemed emblematic of our toxic industrial age. Yet the gas spilling from their gaping mouths was a mostly harmless vapor. Cannata and his team weren’t drilling for hydrocarbons. They were drilling for steam. “You can use the same tools,” said Cannata, who’d started his career in the oil and gas industry in India and Peru before switching to geothermal at Enel, Italy’s largest energy company. “But the process, and the result, is totally different.”
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