Pershing County, Nevada 40.4°N 118.2°W
205 °C at 3,900 metres, in Cretaceous granodiorite that has been that temperature since long before anyone thought to measure it. Advect drills a closed loop into that rock and circulates water through a sealed pipe. Nothing enters the formation. Nothing comes out of it. The rock gives up 47 megawatts of heat per well pair, every hour, for as long as we keep the pumps running.
Project record
Annual matching lets a buyer count a July afternoon of surplus solar against a February night on coal. Hourly matching does not. When a data centre commits to carbon free energy on an hourly basis, the question stops being how many megawatt hours were bought and becomes whether there was a carbon free electron available in hour 3,412 of the year.
Solar with four hours of storage reaches roughly 71% hourly matching in northern Nevada before the cost of the last few points goes vertical. Wind does better in winter and worse in August. A closed loop geothermal plant does not have a resource profile. It has an availability figure.
| Delivering 609 GWh a year | Advect closed loop | Solar plus 4 h storage | Gas combined cycle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity factor | 94% | 27% | 58% |
| Nameplate required | 74 MW | 258 MW plus 120 MWh | 120 MW |
| Land, acres | 43 | 1,548 | 18 |
| Hourly CFE match | 96% | 71% | 0% |
| Scope 2 market based, t CO2e | 0 | 0 | 212,000 |
| Delivered price, USD/MWh | 78 | 52 plus firming | 61 plus carbon |
| Output in hour 3,412 | 74 MW | 0 MW | 120 MW |
Solar capacity factor from the NREL PVWatts long run average for Lovelock, Nevada at a 1.3 DC to AC ratio. Land figures include setbacks and the substation. Hour 3,412 is 04:00 on 22 May.
The working fluid is water in a sealed loop of steel casing cemented across its full length. There is no fracturing, no injection into the reservoir and no produced fluid to handle at surface. Conventional flash geothermal vents non-condensable gases, mostly CO2 and hydrogen sulphide, at 20 to 100 kg per MWh. A closed loop vents nothing because there is nothing to vent.
Rock is a poor conductor, about 2.8 W/m·K for granodiorite, which is exactly why a closed loop needs long laterals rather than deep ones. Our coupled thermo-hydraulic model sets lateral spacing at 240 m so that the cooled halo around one lateral does not reach its neighbour inside the 30 year design life. Modelled production temperature falls from 186 °C to 179 °C over that period, a decline of 0.13% a year.
Closed loop geothermal has been arithmetically obvious for forty years and commercially impossible for thirty nine of them, because drilling 7,400 metres through hard crystalline rock cost more than the heat was worth. What changed is the directional drilling stack built for shale. We took it, cooled it and pointed it downward.
Thermal power is mass flow times specific heat times temperature rise: 95 × 4.19 × 118 = 46,970 kW. Everything downstream of that number is an engineering choice, and every one of those choices is in the technical package we send under NDA.
Every well we drill is cheaper than the one before it, and the reason is boring: bit selection, hole cleaning and fewer trips. The learning curve is the entire investment case, so we publish it. Days are spud to rig release. Non-productive time is counted the way a drilling contractor counts it, and it includes the two days we lost on PC-3 to a failed mud cooler.
| Well | Spud | TVD m | MD m | Days | NPT d | ROP m/hr | Cost USD m |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PC-1 | 2024-03-11 | 3,860 | 7,180 | 68 | 13.5 | 4.1 | 14.2 |
| PC-2 | 2024-06-14 | 3,905 | 7,340 | 54 | 8.0 | 5.6 | 11.6 |
| PC-3 | 2024-09-27 | 3,900 | 7,410 | 43 | 5.5 | 7.2 | 9.4 |
| PC-4 | 2025-01-22 | 3,912 | 7,390 | 36 | 3.5 | 8.9 | 8.1 |
| PC-5 | 2025-05-11 | 3,898 | 7,420 | 30 | 2.5 | 10.4 | 7.0 |
| PC-6 | 2025-09-08 | 3,901 | 7,455 | 26 | 1.5 | 11.6 | 6.3 |
| PC-7 | 2026-02-17 | 3,903 | 7,460 | 24 | 1.0 | 12.4 | 5.8 |
Rate of penetration is measured on bottom in the granodiorite section only, from 3,120 m to total depth including the lateral. The upper 3,120 m of basin fill and volcanics runs three to eight times faster and would flatter the number.
The power block is a two stage organic Rankine cycle running isobutane, air cooled because there is no water in Pershing County to spare. Air cooling costs us output on the hottest afternoons of the year: net capacity falls from 74 MW at 15 °C ambient to 66 MW at 38 °C. That derate is in the PPA, priced, and it is why the contracted capacity factor is 94% and not 97%.
Parasitic load is 6.4 MW at design point, split between 2.9 MW of downhole circulation pumping and 3.5 MW of condenser fans. Gross output is 80.4 MW. We publish net because net is what arrives.
An hourly carbon free claim is only as good as the granular certificate behind it. We issue EnergyTag conformant granular certificates against five minute SCADA rolled to hourly settlement, published at T plus two hours, with the certificate minted at T plus one day once the meter data is validated against the NV Energy revenue meter.
If your sustainability reporting needs to survive an assurance engagement, the certificate identifiers below are the artefact your auditor will ask for.
/v1/generationNet MWh by hour, with GC identifiers/v1/plant/statusLive net MW, ambient, availability/v1/certificatesIssued, transferred, retired/v1/certificates/retireRetire against a reporting entity/v1/outagesPlanned and forced, with cause codesgeneration.settledcertificate.issuedcertificate.retiredoutage.declaredcurl -G https://api.advect.energy/v1/generation \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ADVECT_TOKEN" \
--data-urlencode "from=2026-07-26T00:00:00Z" \
--data-urlencode "to=2026-07-26T04:00:00Z" \
--data-urlencode "resolution=hourly"{
"facility": "advect-pershing-1",
"timezone": "UTC",
"hours": [
{ "start": "2026-07-26T00:00:00Z", "net_mwh": 73.4,
"ambient_c": 19.1, "gc_id": "ETG-US-NV-2026072600-0734",
"status": "SETTLED" },
{ "start": "2026-07-26T01:00:00Z", "net_mwh": 73.8,
"ambient_c": 17.6, "gc_id": "ETG-US-NV-2026072601-0738",
"status": "SETTLED" },
{ "start": "2026-07-26T02:00:00Z", "net_mwh": 74.1,
"ambient_c": 16.2, "gc_id": "ETG-US-NV-2026072602-0741",
"status": "SETTLED" },
{ "start": "2026-07-26T03:00:00Z", "net_mwh": 74.0,
"ambient_c": 15.8, "gc_id": "ETG-US-NV-2026072603-0740",
"status": "SETTLED" }
],
"cfe_score_rolling_8760h": 0.961
}USD 78per MWh, 15 years
USD 84per MWh, 15 years
Structuredby negotiation
The comparison that matters is not price per megawatt hour, it is price per carbon free hour actually delivered to the meter. At 78 dollars and 96% matching we are more expensive per megawatt hour than firmed solar and cheaper per matched hour. We will run that model against your load shape on the first call.
Because nothing enters or leaves the formation, the project is not an injection well under the Safe Drinking Water Act and needs no Underground Injection Control permit. That single fact is worth more to the schedule than any drilling improvement we have made. The rest of the consenting stack is ordinary Nevada federal land practice.
Advect was founded in 2023 by three people who had spent their careers making shale wells cheaper and wanted to point the same tools at something that does not deplete. We raised a 140 million dollar Series B in November 2025 and closed a 310 million dollar project debt facility in April 2026. First power is scheduled for Q3 2027.
Reservoir engineer. Twelve years in the Permian on unconventional completions, then four years modelling heat extraction from crystalline basement. Doctorate in petroleum engineering.
Two hundred and forty horizontal wells. Ran the directional program for an Anadarko basin operator, then two years in high temperature geothermal working out what breaks first.
Wrote the coupled thermo-hydraulic model that sets our lateral spacing. Fifteen years in subsurface thermal modelling, including six at a national laboratory.
Structured 2.1 GW of corporate power purchase agreements, including three of the first hourly matched deals signed in the United States. Handles the certificate architecture.
Not the hours we can. Anyone can produce that slide. Give us 8,760 rows of hourly demand and we will return the residual, the cost to close it and the assumptions behind both, inside five working days.
Reno, Nevada Operations at Pershing County pad A