Enhanced geothermal company Fervo has drilled another well.
This one is 19,448 feet deep, the company announced Thursday, and includes a 7,500-foot span laterally across the sub-surface. The well — called Sawtooth 7, part of Phase II of its flagship Cape Station project in Milford, Utah — took 21 days to drill, the company said. That matches the time required to drill the wells in Phase I, though the new one is nearly 35% deeper than those, on average, with a 50% greater lateral extension.
The greater depth and distance means greater energy potential from the well, while faster drilling times mean much lower costs. Tim Latimer, Fervo’s co-founder and chief executive, compared the timeline to that of the company’s 2022 Project Red well in Nevada, which achieved a depth of 11,220 feet in 70 days.
“Today, we are drilling deeper, hotter wells that will produce multiples more [megawatts] per well than our Project Red pilot, and we are doing it in a fraction of the time,” Latimer wrote.
Fervo says that its drilling rates at the Cape Station site have improved by 143% since it broke ground there in 2023.
The company says it’s now on track to get project costs down to $5,500 per kilowatt, working toward a goal of $3,000 per kilowatt over the long term. In its IPO filing, Fervo said costs at Cape Station were around $7,000 per kilowatt, indicating significant improvements in drilling efficiency in a relatively short period of time.
The news should be welcome to Fervo and its investors. Shortly after going public in May, the company announced that one of its Utah wells blew out. The company said at the time that there were no injuries, nor was there any environmental damage or “material impact to either cost or schedule of the project” at Cape Station.
Fervo raised almost $2 billion in its IPO, which it said will go to fund further progress on the flagship installation. Shares were trading at around $26 on Thursday afternoon, just shy of their $27 IPO price and up over 13% on the day.
