SASKATOON -- What could be a renewable energy breakthrough has emerged from the depths of the Saskatchewan landscape. Deep Earth Energy President and CEO Kirsten Marcia spoke with CTV News at Noon host Jeff Rogstad about the company’s promising foray into geothermal power. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before we talk about the big news, let's talk a little bit about an overview. For people who haven't heard about Deep Earth, what exactly are you doing?

There is a very, very deep, hot aquifer in Williston Basin - so below our potash resources, below our oil and gas resources. Three and a half kilometres down there's this big, hot pancake. We're talking 120C to 130C, hot enough that we can produce that geothermal brine, bring it to the surface, harvest the heat out of it and generate power.

So not only have you had to dig a deep well that went all the way down to that particular site and I believe that was a bit of a world phenomenon, but you've also done something else that's unique in terms of horizontal drilling. So tell us what you've done.

When we started drilling this project in late 2018, we drilled about four wells, just vertical wells, making sure that we understood the resource. And it became very clear that instead of focusing on a piece on it, let's say, 100 metres if we drill horizontally into that formation, each one of our wells could have a couple of kilometres of payzone.

So you drill down into it three and a half kilometres. Then you drill laterally for two kilometres. Really what we’ve done is just crack the code on being able to produce the volumes that we need in order to have an economic project.

Now when we talk about harvesting that, is this hot energy source completely renewable? Do we pump the brine back down? What happens during the actual process?

Basically, we're mining the centre of the earth. There’s no risk we’re going to take too much heat out. Our Sun will probably explode before we deplete our geothermal resources here on Earth. We're going to harvest this heat, we're going to move it at very, very high volumes. We're going to harvest the heat to produce power and we're going to sell that onto the south power grid.

What happens to the superheated brine?

Right. So once we've taken that heat out of the brine we put that right back into the ground for reheating. Now, it's important that we space the injection wells a good distance apart so that we're not seeing a cool down in our production zone. But it's going back in the same formation so it's really a real key. When we inject it back in, it has to percolate nice and slowly into the sandstone formation so it can pick up the heat again so we can take it to the surface and reproduce it.

When do you expect to actually start putting power into the Saskatchewan grid?

We need to complete our final feasibility, engineering and resource modelling this spring. But once that’s completed it moves very, very quickly. So we're aiming for early 2023 to have Canada's first geothermal electrons onto the grid.

That is amazing. Not getting too much on the business side of this, but in terms of a workable financial model, this is a sustainable way to harvest the heat of the earth?

Geothermal, to build it, is more expensive than to build wind or solar. But because it produces power almost 100 per cent of the time, the revenue on geothermal is much more attractive than wind or solar. So it's expensive to build, but once you get past that the revenue stream offsets that.